The Dizziness of Insignificance
Melancholy is a dark, ambiguous, and deceptively delightful state of mind. It’s a blissful bite of dark chocolate, neither sweet nor bitter. A oneiric lapse into somber sorrows and woeful rumination. It’s a peculiar, comforting sensation, carrying you out into a swallowing sea of desolation. Existing within a spectrum of depression and masochistic pleasure, melancholia has served as both a clinical diagnosis and a source of artistic inspiration for works such as Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, Radiohead’s poignant track “Let Down,” and the eponymous movie Melancholia, among others.
But where lies the root of melancholy’s unusual allure for doleful artists and sulking misfits? And why does it serve as a source of bottomless reflection and occasional creative brilliance rather than leading to self-destruction, as depression often drives its victims to the brink?
In his intoxicating debut novel Reinhardt’s Garden, Mark Haber examines melancholia, treating it with the level of reverence and philosophical inquiry it deserves. Set in 1907 and narrated by a devout scribe, the story follows a melancholic prophet named Jacov in his quixotic pursuit of Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, a man who he believes has deciphered the essence of melancholy. Engulfed in the perilous, tribe-infested Argentinian jungle, Haber’s psychotic leader’s search party consists of an ailing scribe, a bodyguard named Ulrich, and a one-legged prostitute named Sonya. Written in a single, unbroken paragraph, the narrative traverses geological and chronological landscapes, digressing into philosophical musings on dust, Jacov’s resentment for opposing academic figures, and even accounts from the group’s brief stint at Leo Tolstoy’s estate Yasnaya Polyana. Setting aside the Bernhardian style and delirious plot, the novel remains conceptually rooted in an exposition on melancholy.
Early in the novel, Jacov preaches to us that melancholy is the “realization of one’s own insignificance,” or in other words, our acknowledgement of our own eternal meaninglessness is what casts us into the brooding abyss. This becomes bolstered by Jacov’s obsession with Tolstoy’s unsettling novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which depicts a terminally ill man terrorized by the imminent arrival of his death and the unfairness of existence.
“Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?” — The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
For Jacov, melancholy is not merely a byproduct of nihilism, the recognition of one’s fleeting, purposeless existence. Instead, it is a pathway out of the yawning, cavernous pit where desolation swells, leading toward a blissful, natural state of acceptance. In one of his cocaine-powered sermons, Jacov declares melancholy to be man’s natural state:
“Every single one of us is melancholic, we’re inherently constructed this way, but we spend our lives busy in the act of denial, trying to deflect our most natural state, yet, if left alone long enough, melancholy surfaces; it’s always there, inexhaustible, unconquerable.”
Within this framework, melancholy isn’t a depressive rejection of life, but an acceptance—a turning inward toward absolute awareness. It opens the possibility of absorbing divinity, of recognizing one’s place within eternity, whether as dust or as an ephemeral, finite fragment of the infinite. This identification with a limitless, omniscient whole grants the melancholic a transcendent quality. Smallness, insignificance, and temporality become liberating rather than limiting. Melancholy becomes a key to freedom. Unshackled from the weight of material constraints and the dread of death, melancholic souls can reach the artistic heights previously mentioned.
Søren Kierkegaard once famously wrote that “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” and in a similar vein, one could call melancholy the dizziness of insignificance. Death is an ever-approaching witness to our lives. It is the house that always wins. A knife inching closer to the surface of our viscera with every waking moment. A looming shadow, promising swift departure at an unpredictable hour. It is simply inescapable. Yet the acceptance of death, like that found at the end of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, can calm our disquiet. Melancholy becomes a quiet surrender, a soft resignation to life’s inevitable finale.
Naturally, this melancholic acceptance doesn’t follow a snap decision. Haber describes an individual’s relationship with, or acceptance of, death as existing in gradations:
“All of us, I cautioned, are dancing with death, whether we know it or not; some souls are simply more attuned to death’s ginger steps, death’s faint inching across the courtyard of our lives. And some souls, he groaned, perform the lead in a play nobody is watching.”
It’s essential to note that a melancholic resignation to death does not entail suicide. Jacov vehemently decries the hopeless, suicidal protagonist featured in The Sorrows of Young Werther. In Goethe’s epistolary novel of unrequited love, melancholy serves as a tool of self-inflicted suffering. Werther becomes fatefully committed to a woman he can never possess, thus consigning himself to an eternal state of anguish that could only be ended by death. In this framework, melancholy becomes a corrupting emotional state, clouding one’s awareness of a greater, transcendent perspective. In contrast, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ivan’s terror reveals rather than shrouds the realities of existence. Unlike Werther, his ego dissipates, and he perceives his life from a broader, illuminating perspective. Werther acts in rejection or rebellion against his existence, while Ivan mindfully accepts his. These distinctions illuminate Haber’s enigmatic figurehead’s position toward each fictional story.
However, Haber’s story is not entirely devoted to the virtue of melancholy. After a murderous tribal attack, shrouded in fog, the lone-surviving scribe finally locates the mysterious author they have been pursuing across the world—only to find him a demented, hollow shell of a man. Having pledged to carry out his master’s designs and propagate his ideas, the narrator ironically predicts that the 20th century will be an age of human flourishing, peace, and prosperity—a painfully naive and false prediction.
Despite the anxiety-inducing terrors of morbid contemplation, there can be comfort found in staring down dark corridors. Melancholy presents us with a sober wake-up call, an existential slap in the face. It presents us with truths that we can choose to reject in fear or accept in bliss, or as Haber puts it, “not until one has traveled the dark and menacing paths of pathos, the bramble-infested corridors of anguish, does one learn that happiness and melancholy are two words for the same thing.”
