Michael Bywater Quotes

Melancholy

(1) An excess of black bile, anatomized by Robert Burton, embraced by the swooning Romantics as evidence of their fine sensibilities, now fallen into disrepair, renamed as depression, wrongly attributed to a deficiency of serotonin and cured by infantilizing, self-indulgent 'therapy' and overpriced, addictive drugs pushed on harassed, gullible doctors by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies which suppress their terrible side-effects in order to pursue their profits.

(2) A crippling disease of unknown aetiology which throughout human history has devoured hope, destroyed lives and, after a period of living death, sometimes relaxed its grip just long enough for the sufferer to summon the energy for a merciful suicide; now, at last, frequently curable by a combination of therapy and antidepressants.

Risk assessment is the new religion, the Big Babies'equivalent of the apotropaic ritual, the haruspices, the chicken entrails and the goat on the altar. Where our ancestors looked up at the stars, and spoke with the gods, and went off upon the great and dangerous adventures which would return them to their communities as adults, we, adorned not with swords and quivers but with all the tentative apparatus of our intelligence and our carefulness, look upwards and see, not gods, but improperly secured overhead lighting, untrimmed branches, loose cables, inadequately fastened false ceiling partitions; and we decide not, after all, to go. It is, after all, too dangerous.

One of the rules of history is that people do not write about what is too obvious to mention. And so the information, having never been recorded, is now lost for ever.

America, the Idea of: We yearned for its beer and jazz, its smoke-filled nightclubs, its Edward Hopper bars, the melancholy of rainy Manhattan Gershwin nights ... the America we yearned for has gone. Did it ever exist?