On Melancholia and Being Jollied Along

September is my favourite month. Summer, even in London, was torrid. Not continually and not so hot as might prevent people from venturing outside, but enough to bring to mind pictures of tropical beaches and to feel like Summer. Summer needs to have made itself felt for September to be properly celebrated and relished.

It happened yesterday when I went for a stroll in Victoria Park. It was a lovely day. Not a day of splendid sumptuous mid-Summer, with throngs of happy people crammed in pubs or sprawled in patches of shade with board games, blankets and beers, but a day of quiet, sober loveliness, with overcast skies yet still clear clement weather and a gentle breeze. It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was balmy and placid and then, for a brief moment, I felt it. Beneath the bright sunshine, mixed in with the light puff of air, barely audible dissonance in the swift flow of harmony, a faint, noiseless, yet unmistakably distinct - winter chill.

Summer is over.

The name for what one feels before this change of season is not despair, nor apprehension, nor regret, but an emotion too often banished from everyday use and polite conversation: melancholy.

My Oxford Dictionary of English defines melancholy as a feeling of "pensive sadness" and sadness, even the pensive sort, seems to terrify people. The social norm is, at least outwardly, a state of more or less permanent excitement. Alain de Botton puts it best when he observes that people are relentlessly and without variation trying to jolly us along. A limited amount of amused frustration might on occasion, and only intermittently, be tolerated - so long as it's funny. But if anyone ever commits the social faux pas of admitting to any other kind of emotion, he is immediately met, depending on the audience, with either sternness, pity or concern.

This is a little crazy. It signals that we live in a society fundamentally unable to tolerate its own full range of emotions. And here is the thing: melancholy is glorious.

This is why September is my favourite month. Melancholy at this time seeps into the air and is to be breathed in and seen settling everywhere. It is the quiet comedown after the intense joy of Summer, when we wake up to the memory of winter to come. It is the sadness of letting go and the quiet joy of acceptance - because seasons pass and we too are one year closer to passing ourselves. September is the month to celebrate the dignity of Impermanence.

Yet this doesn't happen. People seem fixated, a bit manically, on the hope that science and technology are gleefully employed in bringing about the end of history and that immortality is just around the corner. Yay.

This may well be a noble pursuit and maybe the species will flourish and immortality is possible. But in our own lives, meaning the set of people currently alive, we do rather need to make a bit more room for melancholy. Because, and this is true, we will die. Let that sink in for a moment.

Before you cringe and hastily move along to more polite sentiments, take a solitary walk. Celebrate September a little. Allow a drop of pensive sadness to insert an inch of perspective into your daily grind. You might discover that melancholy, if quiet and understated, is in fact rather nice. It is tuna sashimi to the chocolate fudge brownie ice-cream of everyday life. Autumn is melancholic and life is pretty miserable most of the time. One may manage to enjoy both of them, nevertheless.