Eric G. Wilson

Wilson depicts the drive toward constant happiness as a kind of misguided fundamentalist ideal. The melancholic is an individual who looks unflinchingly at the the world, having lived richly enough to know that the response to life is a choice between a beautiful and rich uncertainty and a shallow and simplistic clarity. Happy people do not create great works of art. For that, we are indebted to uncertainty, to despair, and depression, To experience all of these things is to experience life versus only pretending at life. Well-written, sublimely thought out. . . but not for the practical minded or those who would reduce experience to abstraction.… (meer)