Americans are addicted to happiness. When we’re not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy.  More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we’re supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let’s embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people.

"This slender, powerful salvo offers a sure-to-be controversial alternative to the recent cottage industry of high-brow happiness books. Wilson, chair of Wake Forest University's English Department, claims that Americans today are too interested in being happy. (He points to the widespread use of antidepressants as exhibit A.) It is inauthentic and shallow, charges Wilson, to relentlessly seek happiness in a world full of tragedy. While he does not want to 'romanticize clinical depression,' Wilson argues forcefully that 'melancholia' is a necessary ingredient of any culture that wishes to be innovative or inventive. In particular, we need melancholy if we want to make true, beautiful art. Though others have written on the possible connections between creativity and melancholy, Wilson's meditations about artists ranging from Melville to John Lennon are stirring. Wilson calls for Americans to recognize and embrace melancholia, and he praises as bold radicals those who already live with the truth of melancholy. Wilson's somewhat affected writing style is at times distracting: his prose is quirky, and he tends toward alliteration ('To be a patriot is to be peppy' 'a person seeking slick comfort in this mysteriously mottled world'). Still, beneath the rococo wordsmithing lies provocative cultural analysis." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"If only we'd listened to John Locke. In his 'Second Treatise of Government,' he declared that human beings were entitled only to 'life, liberty and' — get ready — 'estate.' As in property. Leave it to Mr. Jefferson of Virginia to change that last item in the trinity to 'pursuit of happiness.' What he neglected to tell us was that, 230 years later, we would still be pursuing it.

... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Make even a passing scan of today's best-seller lists, and you'll find a veritable happiness racket: titles urging us to start 'Living Well' and 'Become a Better You' and master 'The Secret' and (my personal favorite) be 'Happy for No Reason.' Between all the Tony Robbinses and Rick Warrens and Deepak Chopras of the world, happiness is perhaps our last growth industry, and it even has a volunteer sales force. 'Smile!' a stranger recently exhorted me on the street. 'It can't be that bad.' To which my only response was: 'How do you know?'

Maybe it's all paying off, though. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly 85 percent of us believe ourselves to be happy or very happy. All power, then, to Eric G. Wilson for writing a book with the refreshing title 'Against Happiness.' Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, is seriously bummed by the cultural landscape. 'Everywhere I see advertisements offering even more happiness, happiness on land or by sea, in a car or under the stars. ... It seems truly, perhaps more than ever before, an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.' This 'overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness,' he writes, produces only blandness, conformity, 'a dystopia of flaccid grins' fueled by Lexapro and Paxil.

Melancholia, by contrast, is 'the profane ground out of which springs the sacred.' To prove his point, Wilson takes us on a private survey course, retreading the lonely paths of Beethoven and Coleridge and Rothko and even Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. In each case, he finds the same equation of melancholy and creation. 'Our sadness,' suggests Wilson, 'is not aberrant or unseemly or weakness but instead a call to interior depths, to cauldrons out of which will bubble new solutions, crimson and sweet and unforgettable.'

As you may have guessed, Wilson's idea of melancholia is thoroughly Romantic and more than a little romantic. He's the kind of guy who likes to wander through solitary landscapes, thinking sad and beautiful thoughts. Unfortunately, once he's refracted his thoughts through the prism of his prose, they sound pretty goofy: 'What is existence if not an enduring polarity, an endless dance of limping dogs and lilting crocuses, starlings that are spangled and frustrated worms?'

Even laughter, I'm afraid, eventually falters beneath the weight of Wilson's inflated sentences. 'I'm trying to imagine poems more beautiful than the quiet cruising of devious sharks and symphonies more sonorous than those songs of the aloof birds of summer. I'm attempting to concoct a cosmos out of chaos.' He's also attempting to repeat every consonant he hears. The hard 'c' is a particular favorite — 'the crepuscular continuum between clarity and clarity' — but there's also 'mulling over moons' and 'solipsistic silos' and 'bizarre breathings' and 'grimaced grin.' If you weren't depressed before you started reading, a sentence like 'Invisible potencies would actualize in the palpable' might just do the trick.

Even these stylistic horrors wouldn't matter so much if there weren't, lying beneath them, an unseemly preening. Sadness, in Wilson's eyes, isn't just good philosophy, it's good living. Not for him the gated suburb. 'We melancholy souls,' he writes, 'love the beautiful ruins of aged buildings. We love the intricate architectural designs, the carvings and the mosaics and the rough stones. We love high ceilings and crown moldings. We love worn-down hardwood floors. We love the smell of rusting radiators. We love rickety windows that rattle in the wind. We also adore those ancient and lovely woodlands where we can walk alone and hear geese honking over the horizon.' I see nothing here to distinguish melancholics from Martha Stewart.

What really exercises Wilson's glum aesthetic, though, is the prospect that antidepressants will one day 'destroy dejection completely.' Yeah, yeah, we've heard it all before: The pharmaceutical industry is turning us into blissed-out zombies. But have the folks behind this argument ever met the zombies in question? In my experience, people on antidepressants don't walk around in a cloud of Disney birds; they have simply hoisted themselves from a prone to a sitting position. And they are wise enough to know that no drug could possibly 'eradicate depression forever.' It's hard-wired into life, largely by virtue of death's inevitability.

Wilson at least has the good grace to quote Ecclesiastes, that skeptic in biblical clothing, whose thoughts on the subject are still unimprovable after 2,250 years. 'Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. ... All go to one place. All are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.'

Louis Bayard is a novelist and a book reviewer for the online magazine Salon."

Reviewed by Louis Bayard, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture; that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation; and that it is the force underlying original insights. He reveals that its time to throw off the shackles of positivity and relish the blues that make us human.

Eric G. Wilson is Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of five books on the relationship between literature and psychology.