Against Happiness

Love and Death

2011-12-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest blog post for Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/morbid-curiosities/201111/why-we-love-dead-things. It discusses why death is always at the heart of great romance.

If at First You Don't Succeed, Try a Little Bit, Then Quit

2011-11-17T04:02:00.001-08:00

Here's my latest post for Psychology Today, on the virtues of quitting: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/morbid-curiosities/201111/if-first-you-dont-succeed-try-little-bit-then-quit.

Pscyhology Today Post on the Penn State Scandal

2011-11-13T16:43:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest Psychology Today blog post:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201111/the-paterno-scandal/anatomy-scandal

Blogging for Psychology Today

2011-11-08T09:24:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked to blog on Psychology Today's website. The name of the blog is "Morbid Curiosities: Why Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck." It explores many of the issues I raise in my forthcoming book, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away (http://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Loves-Good-Train-Wreck/dp/0374150338/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320774103&sr=8-1).

Here's a link to my first post, on the morality of the morbid: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/morbid-curiosities/201111/the-moral-the-morbid

Mutants and Mystics

2011-11-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

When I was ten or eleven, I fell in love with Batman comics—as well as with (I’m not afraid to say it) the campy Batman television series starring Adam West. But then I became consumed with collecting football cards, a passion that a few years later gave way to yet other obsessions—Tolkein, the Beatles, the Dune series.

So, by the time I got to college, I was far removed from superheroes. However, when I needed a symbol to explain one of my sophomoric realizations, I instinctively invoked the world of capes and spandex.

In a philosophy class, I was required to read Nietzsche, who thought that all of our systems of knowledge and belief are but fictions that we mistakenly take for truth. The proper philosopher, Nietzsche claimed, realizes that we live by these fictions and refuses to submit to those artifices he finds oppressive. He in fact creates new fictions—more expansive, flexible, wondrous, and beautiful ones that open fresh, more imaginative possibilities for being.

Nietzsche’s ideal philosopher, whom he calls the Over-man, or Super-man, is an artist: someone who understands that he can conform to pre-existing fictions, and so relinquish his agency; or that he can fashion his own scripts and thus exist in a universe of his own making.

For a boy brought up in a rather conservative Southern Christian community, this idea was blissfully liberating. It allowed me to undermine the collective wisdom of my elders—so much artifice—and forge my own more imaginative myth.

Drunk on my rather immature rebellion, I vowed to fashion an impossible myth of total freedom—a myth that would self-destruct the minute I made it, and so require a new myth in its place, which in turn would also destroy itself, and so on. The goal was not to imprison myself in any prior language system, no matter how varied and fertile and ecstatic. I wanted to live ironically, undercutting my claims the minute I made them. I wanted to be: Meta-man, as I tried cleverly to put it, always beyond my own being.

After reading Jeffrey Kripal’s brilliant new book, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, I now understand that my somewhat silly conceit was actually profound in ways that I did not then understand. Maybe it was even a rather weak paranormal experience—a pre-cognition of an insight that would later affect me deeply, transform me.

(I’m recording my thoughts on Kripal’s book as a member of a roundtable discussion of the volume at the Patheos Book Club (http://www.patheos.com/Book-Club/Jeffrey-J-Kripal-Mutants-and-Mystics), where you can read an excerpt, an author interview and engage in further discussion on the book.)

In Mutants and Mystics, Professor Kripal explores how comic book heroes have symbolized a variety of paranormal experiences, such as precognition, telekinesis, and UFO abductions. One way superheroes and their authors have figured these weird occurrences is by showing that the “world . . . works remarkably like a text or a story. Through the uncanny practices of writing, reading, and artistic production, these individuals come to realize that we are all figments of our own imagination, that we are caught in a story (or stories) that we did not write and that we may not even like.”

When we understand that paranormal events are real—and Kripal marshals overwhelming evidence to demonstrate that they are—we realize that these happenings are “participatory, that is, paranormal events behave very much like texts: they appear for us and rely on our active engagement or ‘reading’ to appear at all and achieve meaning.” “In some fundamental way that we do not yet understand,” Kripal continues, “they are us, projected into the objective world of events and things, usually through some story, symbol, or sign. Realization is the insight that we are caught in such a story. Realization is the insight that we are being written.”

Alvin Schwartz, a writer of early Superman and Batman comics, had such a realization. After several paranormal experiences, Schwartz came to understand Superman as an archetype of our “sense of nonlocality that is always present in the back of our minds—the capacity to be everywhere instantly.”

We are all exponents of a World Soul, eddies of a vast ocean, but most of the time we believe that we are self-contained, autonomous egos. In his ability to transcend space and time, basically to be everywhere and “every-when” at once, Superman reminds us of our distributed natures, of the fact that there is no difference between self and cosmos. We are all infinite, all the time.

But we can’t sustain this ego-shattering formlessness for long, this annihilation of particularity. To live in the everyday world—to have a spouse, children, a job—we need to return to the comparatively secure confines of space and time. Enter Clark Kent, the necessary polarity to Superman—the left brain to his right, the profane to his sacred.

Schwartz concluded that the human imagination bridges these poles. The imagination is the “phone booth consciousness,” where super-consciousness, beyond language, is translated into comprehensible words. Imagination is thus the faculty by which the World Soul expresses itself to the individual souls it animates. It, the imagination, creates the narratives—scientific, religious, cultural—that we take to be real. It makes the cosmic book in which we are all characters.

To realize this is to grasp that we are written, but not necessarily in the way that Nietzsche meant. Yes, as Nietzsche believes, we are all imprisoned by the language systems into which we have been born. However, these language systems—so Schwartz and Kripal would have us believe—aren’t simply fictions hiding an inaccessible physical reality, indifferent to human striving. They, these linguistic constructs, are inflections of an ungraspable metaphysical reality that all humans, if they are to realize their full potential, should aspire to know.

As long as we simply accept the symbol systems that we inherit from birth, we are written, and nothing more: actors performing a script not of our own making. But when we become aware of the play, we can re-write the script—author our stories in which we are the super-heroes. We can become Meta-man, or women, in earnest, endlessly playing with new worlds just beyond the boundary of the old.

As I suggest in my own book, My Business Is To Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing, this is living ironically, if we see irony not as deflationary sarcasm but as a mode of transcendence, the ability to create and destroy at once, affirm and deny, write and erase.

Mutants and Mystics brims with such invigorating, inspiring insights. It is more than scholarship—though it is that, in the best sense, replete with fascinating information and rigorous analysis. It is a handbook for living, a soul guide, a powerful call to what is super in all of us.

Blake and creativity on North Carolina Public Radio's "The State of Things"

2011-05-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

I had a wonderful conversation with Frank Statio today on the sublime William Blake: http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/sot_0524segBC.mp3/view.

The Death of William Blake

2011-05-12T05:43:00.000-07:00

Only hours from his death on the evening of August 12, 1827, William Blake, though exhausted from his long struggle against an illness of the liver, could not stop creating. He had spent most of his sixty-nine years making exuberant art, in image as well as word, and his demanding muse would not let him rest. Inspiration yet burned within, in spite of the closing darkness. Blake refused to put down the tools of his craft.

A few days before becoming bedridden, he had spent his last shilling on a pencil. He required it for his final work, a series of illustrations from The Divine Comedy. Even though he knew that he wouldn't complete his drawings of Dante's paradise—he was feeble and feverish, with a chronically upset stomach and yellowing skin—he continued to compose. He was bent on inventing until he could move no more.

This last desperate devotion was to a calling that had probably killed him. His lifelong engraving practice had exposed him to noxious coppery fumes damaging to his immune system. Lethal as well as enlivening, his muse, in exchange for genius, had exacted his breath. Blake was art's martyr.

And so, committed to the last of the flame consuming his, his joy outweighing the pain, he continued, as he lay on his deathbed, to sketch, driven to convert, for one final spell, his quick thoughts into lively lines. But his brain soon slowed, beginning its descent into the inevitable dimness, and his competent hand faltered. Now, he believed, was the hour. He would have to leave his configurations of heaven undone. He set his instruments aside, his now-dull pencil and his paper riddled with shades.

Faint, he turned toward those attending him, among whom was his wife Catherine, his faithful partner for forty-five years. He saw her crying. Maybe what happened next was a final surge of affection, or perhaps a desperate hope to make the moment stay. Whatever the reason, Blake's haze cleared. His mind revived. He recovered his pencil and paper, reports say, and exclaimed to her, "Stay, Kate! Keep just as you are—I will draw your portrait—for you have ever been an angel to me." This picture he did complete, though it is now lost.

Now finished and feeling the fatigue return, he again laid down his implements, now for good. He silently said farewell to his earthly exertions—all those pictures and poems, forged in visionary fury—and relaxed, ready for his flesh's demise. As his consciousness gently waned, he sang hymns of his own design, about the eternal bliss to which his spirit would soon rise. He expired at six o'clock, his lyrics still trilling in his head. Catherine remained calm. Perhaps she believed that her life would change but little; she had once said of her husband, "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise."

This is an excerpt from my new book, My Business Is To Create: Blake's Infinite Writing, published by University of Iowa Press: http://www.amazon.com/My-Business-Create-Infinite-Writing/dp/1587299909/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305203801&sr=8-1

Boredom, Contemplation, Creativity

2011-05-12T05:09:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article on the potential profundity of boredom: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/09/the_joy_of_boredom/

Blake on creativity

2011-05-09T08:06:00.001-07:00

Here's a thoughtful review in swans.com of my new book on creativity and William Blake: http://www.swans.com/library/art17/cmarow186.html.

Another Early Review of My Business Is To Create

2011-04-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a detailed and generous review of my new book on creativity, as seen through the eyes of William Blake: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/wilson-my-business-is-to-create/.

Creativity, via William Blake

2011-04-10T05:08:00.001-07:00

My new book on creativity--what it is, and how to get it (at least through the eyes of William Blake--was just released. It's called My Business Is To Create: Blake's Infinite Writing, published by University of Iowa Press. Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin has this to say about the book: “A risky and exhilarating adventure in reading Blake as a spiritual guide. Writers and artists and maybe ecologists will find treasures here." Here's more information:
http://www.amazon.com/My-Business-Create-Infinite-Writing/dp/1587299909/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302437346&sr=8-1

Early reviews of my new writing handbook based on the the life and work of William Blake

2011-03-01T02:04:00.001-08:00

In about a month, the University of Iowa Press will publish my latest book, called My Business Is To Create: Blake's Infinite Writing. The book is part of the press's Muse Series, which features handbooks for writers of all kinds and levels. Each handbook is based on the life and work of a great writer. Mine, as the title makes clear, focuses on William Blake, and it will be useful not only to writers but to painters and musicians, too.

Here's more information: http://www.amazon.com/My-Business-Create-Infinite-Writing/dp/1587299909/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298974106&sr=1-1.

And here's an early review: http://necessaryfiction.com/reviews/MyBusinessistoCreatebyEricGWilson.

And another: http://the-book-garden.blogspot.com/2011/01/review-my-business-is-to-create-eric-g.html.

More Musings on Winter and Melancholia

2010-12-22T09:56:00.001-08:00

This morning I had a good talk with Joy Cardin on Wisconsin Public Radio. We talked about the sorrow that often comes with Christmas and the power of It's a Wonderful Life, the greatest holiday film: http://wpr.org/ideas/programnotes.cfm.

Have a Blue Christmas

2010-12-20T11:35:00.001-08:00

I was recently interviewed by Julie Rose on Charlotte's NPR affiliate, WFAE 90.7. We talk about how melancholy the holidays can be--and how that may not be such a bad thing: http://www.wfae.org/wfae/1_87_316.cfm?action=display&id=6754.

The Spiritual Value of Failure

2010-12-01T11:50:00.001-08:00

Here's an article of mine just published on beliefnet.com. It appears in Jana Riess's blog called "Flunking Sainthood: On the Fun of Spiritual Failure," and it explores how the deepest darkness sometimes gets us closest to the light: http://blog.beliefnet.com/flunkingsainthood/2010/12/saved-by-depression-guest-blogger-eric-wilson-on-how-darkness-saved-his-soul.html.

A Review of The Mercy of Eternity in The Raleigh News and Observer

2010-11-22T01:34:00.001-08:00

Here's a review of my new memoir, The Mercy of Eternity, in The Raleigh News and Observer: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/11/21/813377_nc-professor-maps-his-journey.html. The article also ran in The Charlotte Observer.

Interview on Gnosticism and Depression

2010-11-15T01:42:00.001-08:00

I was honored this past weekend to be interviewed by Miguel Conner, host of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. We discussed my new book, The Mercy of Eternity, in several interesting contexts, including how its embrace of negative theology relates to the Gnostic tradition: http://www.aeonbytegnosticradio.com/.

Review of The Mercy of Eternity

2010-11-15T01:38:00.000-08:00

Here's a review of my new book in The Minneapolis Star Tribune: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/107765358.html.

Gnosticism and cinema

2010-10-18T05:38:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from my book Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film was just published in the Voegelin View: http://www.voegelinview.com/.

Article on Bipolar Disroder, Academia, and Redemption, from Chronicle Review

2010-09-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

Here's my article from the October 1 issue of The Chronicle Review. It's adapted from my book, just released: The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace (Northwestern University Press).

Mania and Redemption
Mania, Academe, and Redemption

By Eric G. Wilson

Close to midnight, about a year after the birth of my child, I found myself, once again, shocked awake. My wife and daughter were sleeping in the bedroom upstairs. I was lying alone on the floor of my study, and I quickened for what was coming: the electric desperation to heave myself upright, flick on the lights, fire up my computer, and convert my brain's rising mercurial spirits into words, luminous and sharp—typing, click-click-click, until my wrists cramp and the sun climbs and I don't hear my family rise and my head feels feverish and I stare at the sentences I've made and try to shut my eyes but can't.

I craved this consuming surge, even though it would ruin my morning class on Coleridge, the departmental meeting I had to chair, and my afternoon child-care session. I had to have this productive rush, or I would lie there in the colorless air and become the emptiness, devoid of care for anything.

There was either more—more writing, more promotions, more honors—or nothing. There was the push of Faust—strive higher—or the negation of Godot: Why bother?

Such was my unreasonable rift during the worst of my disease: that laceration that psychiatrists call bipolar disorder. Since college, that mental illness had prodded me into a vicious, futile, exhausting battle between monomaniacal mania and solitary despair. Not surprisingly, the conflict had severely damaged my life, alienating me from my wife, goading me toward alcoholism, and tempting me with suicide. But my condition, miserable though it was, also offered what I erroneously thought was a major boon: early and continuing academic success.

When the depression dominated, I descended into extreme apathy. The leaves of springtime elms, brisk bluish flies, my toddler's first triumphant stumbles—all of these were ciphers, ennui's clutter. But when the mania kicked in—and it did, frequently, in my rapid-cycling variation—my whole heart howled: The world was not vapid then but monumentally significant, a profound drama of struggle and reward.

The mania pushed me into increasingly ambitious goals. I welcomed the price I paid in loneliness, delirium, and constant fatigue for straight A's, fellowships, a publishable dissertation, and a tenure-track job at a prestigious university, followed by well-reviewed monographs and articles in distinguished journals, early tenure, a quick promotion to full professor, and then a fast advance to an endowed professorship.

My storming of academe began, innocently enough, when, at 18, manic for success in sports as well as academics (and not yet diagnosed), I applied to and was accepted at the United States Military Academy. I was at West Point only hours before I concluded, in a rare moment of clarity, that the military was not for me. The academy required new cadets to remain at least 30 days, so I had to endure basic training before I could leave. For me, the strain of training was exacerbated by the depression into which I soon fell. Disheartened, confused, and unable to sleep, one night I retrieved the only book I had brought with me, hoping that reading would calm me. All I knew about the volume was that it had a picture of Bill Murray on the cover. My mom had bought me the book as a going-away present, assuming that it was about my favorite actor.

As I made out the pages, barely, by the moon and the light on my digital watch, I realized that the book wasn't devoted to Murray at all. It was The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham, the novel on which the actor's latest film had been based. The story enthralled me. Its protagonist, Larry Darrell, was a young American who suffered trauma in World War I and returned home feeling unhinged. He read philosophy voraciously, rejected a high-paying job in a brokerage firm, broke his engagement with a gorgeous socialite, and embarked on a quest for enlightenment.

The character catalyzed an identity that had lain dormant in me, one that could reject societal conventions to sound the mysteries of the soul. By the time I finished the book, I was no longer uncertain about my resignation from West Point. I was keen on a higher calling—the hunt for healing knowledge. My path was clear: I would study literature and philosophy and become a professor. I had it all figured out.

I held to my plan, but failed to mirror Maugham's sage protagonist. Hounded by my mania, I perversely torqued books into vocational tasks. Writing was not an organic process for me. Once I became an assistant professor—that happened in 1997—I felt I had to subdue texts, corral them into interpretations that I could discipline into legitimate scholarship.

I awoke each morning at 5 and wrote until 8, even when I was depressed. After a six-mile run and breakfast, I went to the campus, where I divided my time between teaching and research. I usually returned home around 7. My goal was to complete one book manuscript per year that would then be published by an eminent scholarly press. I also hoped to turn sections of these books into articles—at least three a year—that would gain acceptance in reputable journals.

I almost reached those unreasonable goals. By the time I had been a professor for eight years, I had published six monographs and 21 articles. The work, by scholarly standards, was commendable, leading to awards, invitations to lecture, and a prominent fellowship.

Obviously, I was obsessed with work because it repelled the worthlessness I frequently felt. But my intensive labor also defended me against overwhelming sadness—about my sundered life, my suffering marriage, my loneliness. The grinding exertion, mechanical in its monotony, kept my focus away from my unruly and potentially debilitating emotions and furthermore gave me the illusion of total control. No feeling, I believed, could derail my engine.

If vulnerability is what makes us human, inspiring hunger for love and the ability to empathize, then I, in refusing to acknowledge my insecurities, was monstrous, a machine with a moribund soul, a man with cogs for organs.

In 2002, when my heart was almost congealed, my daughter was born. I did not rejoice. With my work habits threatened by the duties of parenting, I doubled my labors, thus impoverishing my fatherhood and further blighting my marriage. I wanted to die. When my daughter learned to smile, I began to grin at her, hoping she would respond in kind. My jaws were sore for days. Once I caught my grin in a mirror—I looked deranged.

After much resistance, I joined a therapy group, and it was there that I was finally called out, broken, and exposed. A woman in my group told me that my self-absorption was murdering my daughter. "It's men like you who ruin the world," she said. "You're a piece of shit."

I had been slapped awake. Whatever its origin—be it genetic or environmental or a series of bad choices—my depression had, through its debilitating fluctuations between torpor and anxiety, hindered my ability to reach imaginatively beyond myself to empathize with others and thus kept me isolated and divided from those with whom I might enjoy mutually rewarding relationships. I had been stupid and blind not to see it. Kierkegaard is right: "What characterizes despair is just this—that it is ignorant of being despair."

At last, on my own initiative, I visited a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me as bipolar, prescribed an effective combination of drugs, and recommended a good psychotherapist.

One morning I walk in a park with my 3-year-old daughter and we see a mole disappear into the ground. Another time I am alone reading Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," a poem about a rueful father's affection for his infant son, and I want to cry, so intense is my longing to be with my own child. Such occurrences began to soften my carapace.

I entered a season of epiphanies, each catalyzed by the literature I had tried to harden into rungs on my career ladder. Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" taught me that there are degrees of gloom: depleting despair, yes, but also melancholy, a richer state, attuned to the mournful marriage between death and beauty. The fragility of the morning rose moves us to appreciate its brilliance right now, before it's too late. This was a category of sorrow that encouraged me to find in my affliction moments of loveliness.

Around the same time, in preparing a class on Emily Dickinson, I came across this line: "Water, is taught by thirst." Lack here is not a hole in the soul but emptiness that informs us of the nature of fullness. Why couldn't, in my case, alienation turn into empathy's mentor?

It was Blake, though, who shattered my shell. Four years ago, in 2006, when my daughter was still 3, I was drowsily reading the poet on a dreary February afternoon, when this passage startled me: "Mutual Forgiveness of each vice, / Such are the Gates of Paradise."

It occurred to me that forgiveness is a way of knowing. When we forgive someone, we suspend judgment, refusing to reduce the person to either his or her transgression or a fulfillment of our sense of right. We try to witness him as he is, free of our own prejudices, fears, desires, and hang-ups. Doing so, we open to the irreducible complexity of this particular being and to the exuberant intricacies of the universe. We get close to the real—not stable substance but sublime possibility. We experience paradise: the infinite in the finite, the "World in a Grain of Sand, ... Heaven in a Wild Flower."

Blake made me think that I might actually forgive my bipolar disorder, weird as that sounds, and, in forgiving myself, enjoy a more capacious existence. For most of my adulthood, I had blamed my depression for my inadequacies—my workaholic habits, for example, and the attendant exhaustion, irritability, and selfishness. I had turned my depression into the sinister source of my woes, a vigilant tyrant.

Now I tried to suspend that negative projection and so liberate my mental illness from demonization and myself from subjection. I soon understood that my sickness isn't a curse but a part of me no different, in a way, from my hands or my lungs—an element of my constitution, no more and no less. I also sloughed off victimhood and gained some agency, realizing that I could exert a degree of control over my condition, creatively inflect it one way or another, and be responsible for the results.

Stripped of its dictatorial force, my manic depression showed positive potencies counterbalancing its negative ones. It had made me contemplative, for instance, pushing me into desolate places where I gained knowledge that otherwise would have eluded me. It had revealed to me what I most needed to become human: vulnerability, the need to love and be loved. Most important, it had disclosed to me the requirements of fatherhood and the beauties of my daughter.

The scholarly calling that almost killed me restored me to life. For years, academe had proved a perfect breeding ground for my mania, an arena that rewarded the obsessive egotism that divorced me from my emotions. Indeed, the academic environment in which I strived rarely displayed generous humanism. It was mostly a sphere of brutal competition where intense careerism pushed aside the pursuit of truth.

But the wisdom books abide in their abundance, regardless of our petty condensations. Their glorious passages recall us, in those moments when we are charitable, to the reason we chose to be scholars in the first place: We wished to emancipate the world from despotic ignorance. Certainly my own learning, in fortunate instants, liberated me from deadly blindness and granted a more genial vision.

Eric G. Wilson is a professor of English at Wake Forest University. This essay is adapted from his most recent book, The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace, just published by Northwestern University Press.

My essay on Mania and Academia in today's Chronicle of Higher Education

2010-09-27T05:19:00.000-07:00

Here's an excerpt from my new book, published today in The Chronicle Review of The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Mania-AcademeRedemption/124570/.

News for Mercy of Eternity

2010-09-27T01:34:00.000-07:00

I'll be reading from my new book, The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace, at Malaprops bookstore in Asheville, NC on Thursday, September 30, at 7: http://thereadonwnc.ning.com/events/eric-g-wilson.

My New Book, The Mercy of Eternity, Was Just Released

2010-09-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

My new memoir, The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace, was just released: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810126850/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=198QE4AJTD3R9BBBRGTT&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846.

The Happiness Formula

2010-06-29T02:38:00.000-07:00

A recent article in The Independent questions the self-help movement. My book is mentioned.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/does-the-happiness-formula-really-add-up-2004279.html

Daydreaming

2010-06-29T02:30:00.000-07:00

In the mood for a daydream? All that wool gathering your teachers punished you for is, it turns out, good for you: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/29tier.html?8dpc

Impossible Talk

2010-06-29T02:28:00.000-07:00

I just had a very rewarding interview with Jeff Kripal and Scott Jones on their show IMPOSSIBLE TALK. We talked about all sorts of compelling subjects, ranging from irony in cinema to the golden mean to paranormal experience. The podcast is now available on
iTunes. You can subscribe by going to iTunes and searching Impossible Talk. Tell your friends!

Cary Grant, Prince of Denmark

2010-05-03T02:35:00.000-07:00

I just had an article published on Cary Grant, the greatest actor ever, and, yes, Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. It's in the magazine Bright Lights. All you film lovers might find it interesting. The essay also examines the role of Grant's melancholy in his delightfully vexed acting style. Here's the link: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/68/68carygrant.php

The Mercy of Eternity

2010-03-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

Here's the cover for my new book, coming out in the fall with Northwestern University Press. The catalog copy goes like this:

The Mercy of Eternity
A Memoir of Depression and Grace
Eric G. Wilson

In his bestselling book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008) Eric G. Wilson challenged our culture's blindly insistent pursuit of happiness at all costs. In his harrowing yet ultimately hopeful memoir The Mercy of Eternity the author turns an unsparing eye on his continuing struggle with bipolar depression, and finds within the very illness that causes so much suffering the resources for hope, forgiveness, and love.

Although it is Wilson's illness that brings these virtues into sharper relief, The Mercy of Eternity charts events and challenges that any reflective person must consider in his or her lifetime. A bright student-athlete on his way to West Point, Eric Wilson seemed to be well on the way to a fulfilling life, yet from his teen years he was haunted by overwhelming feelings of deep insignificance. As he aged, the traditional means of fulfillment—marriage and professional success—did nothing to assuage the descents into to darkness and destructive behavior.

As a scholar of literature, Eric Wilson often encounters the biggest question of life: is this suffering meaningful? From the Book of Job to Oedipus Rex to Hamlet to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and beyond, writers have wrestled with a similar question. For most of his life, Wilson has tried to eradicate either the imagined or real sources of suffering. Therapy and medication have offered some relief, but the birth of his daughter ultimately forces his hand. In some ways, the answer was in front of him the whole time, for Wilson finds in the literature of Coleridge, Blake, and others the lessons the depression might teach. When he comes upon “negative theology”--the school of thought that finds God in “dark night of the soul”—Wilson discovers the framework for a radical call to forgive depression. Only by forgiving this capricious, impersonal force is Wilson able to find the grace to move beyond the cycles of destructive self-absorption.

In a refreshingly honest coda, Wilson explains his title, based on this passage from Blake: “Time is the mercy of eternity...without Time's swiftness, which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.” Wilson admits that he still struggles, but in facing his depression instead of trying to escape it he finds wisdom and grace. Beautifully and accessibly written, The Mercy of Eternity is a brief yet profound meditation on largest question of life.

Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University. His previous book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008) was a Los Angeles Times and Calgary Herald bestseller, and was featured on NBC’s “Today Show,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Talk of the Nation,” the BBC’s “Today Programme,” and CBC’s “The Current.” It was also featured or reviewed in Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, among many others.

The Rap on Happiness

2010-02-15T03:23:00.000-08:00

Here's a piece from the New York Times Book Review that discusses a recent backlash against the self-help industry and positive psychology: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/books/review/Bloom-t.html?scp=1&sq=rap%20on%20happiness&st=cse. The article, by fiction writer Amy Bloom, mentions Against Happiness as well as another book worth checking out: Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided.

Gnostic Media

2010-02-15T03:17:00.000-08:00

Last week I had a very interesting conversation with Jan Irvin, the host of a weekly podcast for Gnostic Media Research & Publishing. His show, as he describes it, "takes you far beyond the commonly understood concepts of religious practice, history, philosophy, the ancient mysteries, and politics, into the heart of cognizance itself." We talked about America's addiction to superficial happiness and the powers of melancholia, of course, but also about an array of other subjects, ranging from shopping malls to politics to Paradise Lost. Here's a link to the show: http://gnosticmedia.podomatic.com/

Gnosis and Melancholy

2009-12-23T04:49:00.000-08:00

I just came across a very insightful lecture on Gnosticism by Erik Davis, an excellent writer on all sorts of subjects, including technology, the occult, and Led Zeppelin. (For more on Mr. Davis, see http://www.techgnosis.com/index.php.)

In the talk, Davis clearly describes the Gnostic tradition and then connects it to psychology and ultimately to melancholy. The talk is brief, too--well worth your time. Here's a link:
http://techgnosis.com/chunkshow-single.php?chunk=chunkfrom-2009-12-22-2155-0.txt.

I was pleased to hear that Mr. Davis in the lecture referenced an article I published a few years ago in The Georgia Review, called "The Dark Art": www.uga.edu/garev/spring07/wilson.pdf.

The Black Dog

2009-11-24T12:23:00.001-08:00

I just enjoyed a very interesting conversation with Jon Hansen on his blogtalk radio show. We spent some time discussing the relationship between melancholy and economics, mainly focusing on how too much optimism can lead, perhaps ironically, to failure, financial or otherwise. Here's the link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/jon-hansen/2009/11/24/against-happiness-are-we-trying-to-hard-to-be-happ

Self-Help on the BBC

2009-10-29T06:03:00.000-07:00

I appeared on BBC's Newshour Sunday to debate a self-help writer. During the segment, though, the debate quickly turned into a rich conversation. The writer, Jim Bouchard, honestly faces the difficulties of life and encourages his readers to do the same, all the while revealing the powers we all possess for transforming hardship into a joyful life. I was also heartened to find that Jim is a martial arts master--I myself am a student of Tae Kwon Do--who effectively translates the perennial wisdom of his art into sound practical advice. Here's a link to the conversation. You'll have to fast forward a bit; we get going around the 50 minute mark. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004t1b6

A Light in Winter

2009-09-14T01:48:00.000-07:00

You might find the attached article interesting. It's called "Light in Winter," published today in the on-line version of The New York Times. The piece explores how the melancholy life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge brought me closer to my daughter. Here's a link: http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/a-light-in-winter/

Melancholy in Maine

2009-05-29T06:55:00.001-07:00

I recently was up at Bates College in Maine to lecture on Against Happiness. While there, I was interviewed for a news show airing on an NBC affiliate station. The show is called "207." I enjoyed a brief but rewarding conversation on the beautiful Bates campus. Here's a link to the interview: http://www.wcsh6.com/life/programming/local/207/story.aspx?storyid=105205.

Too Much Niceness

2009-05-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article from the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It's from the Style section, and it explores a symptom of the American addiction to happiness: an overemphasis on bland agreeableness, on rote pleasantry, on, in a word, niceness. You'll find some quotations from me in the article; you might especially like the final paragraph of the piece, mainly if you're dead weary of Tom Hanks. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/fashion/24nice.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=eric%20wilson%20nice&st=cse.

The Most Dangerous Hobby in the World

2009-04-17T02:48:00.001-07:00

Of course brooding over the complexities of our needs and wants is important work, but we must also now and again escape into realms of pure desire, those regions of the heart and mind that are simply beautiful for the sake of being beautiful--not useful really at all, at least in a pragmatic way. Here's my homage to such reverie, as it exists in the world of cinema-love. It's an article I recently published in The Virginia Quarterly Review: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2009/spring/wilson-dangerous-hobby/. If you find this piece interesting, you'll also want to check out a brilliant blog on classic cinema and the wonderful ways those old films were exhibited:
http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/ The writing in this blog, all done by John McElwee, is especially strong--insightful, lucid, eloquent, at times simply exquisite.

The "Gift" of Financial Insecurity

2009-04-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

Here's an article I recently published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I think it sums up nicely many of the ideas I've been exploring in this blog. I hope you find it interesting: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i32/32b01201.htm

The Death of the American Dream

2009-04-01T07:21:00.000-07:00

Most Americans from the outset have imagined their country as a place where dreams come true, where one can realize almost any possibility one wishes.

This comes across clearly in early representations of America. In the 17th-century, Puritans from England came to this country in hopes of establishing a religious utopia, a place where they could establish heavenly bliss here on earth. In the eighteenth-century, American capitalists translated religious dreams to economic ones, claiming that America is the sphere where one can, through efficient labor, realize happiness through wealth. Many Americas in the 19th century believed in Manifest Destiny, the idea that this nation is blessed by God and thus should spread its democratic ideologies to the ends of the earth--removing all "obstacles" (such as entire Native American tribes) along the way.

Such visions suggest that Americans should be the happiest people in the world. Many have translated this idea into a prescription: Americans, because of their fortunate status, have a responsibility to be happy.

Now, of course, the economic crisis is shattering these dreams. While this is sure to bring sorrow, it is also, at least on some level, a positive development. Why? The American Dream, despite its seductions, has for hundreds of years blinded Americans to stark realities--not only to the suffering it has inflicted on those not part of the dream but also to the intrinsic tragedies in a world that falls far short of utopia.

The recession might disillusion us in a helpful way--wake us up to vital experiences we have heretofore ignored or repressed. Maybe in place of the old American Dream, always vaguely imperialistic in its reductions of capacious facts to narrow fantasies, there can arise a new one--a robust vision more sensitive to nuance and complexity, to heterogeneity and conflict, to the brisk and exhilarating interplay between joy and sorrow. Such a dream--it need not be American--might pull us from our self-serving reveries and place us firmly on the shared land.

For a thoughtful meditation on the American Dream and its possible demise, see this recent article in Vanity Fair:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904

The Edge

2009-03-06T03:27:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting piece in today's New York Times, an op-ed by Judith Warner. The article describes the potential blandness of mindfulness therapy and wonders if it's precisely our dark humor and sense of the absurd that make us human. Here's a link:

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/the-worst-buddhist-in-the-world/

I explore a similar possibility in Against Happiness: an urge for total contentment can result in an inhuman aloofness while an embrace of our emotional turbulence, frequently nostalgic or anxious, sometimes even angry or bitter, is essential to a fully lived, fully engaged life.

What Is Enough?

2009-03-02T06:52:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about Thoreau lately. His book Walden is, among other things, a profound meditation on that ever-shifting and terribly vague line between wants and needs. The distinction is of course far from simple; in fact, it's probably impossible to establish it once and for all. Obviously, we need food and shelter to survive, as Thoreau makes clear. But is that all we need to live a fulfilling life? One might argue, for instance, that friendship or artistic expression is as much a need as a want--a human need, perhaps, an abiding requirement that separates us from animals.

Wherever we draw the line between needs and wants, we are more likely to brood over this all-important division in times of loss, when we feel bereft on material or psychological levels. Obviously, we never want to lose our beloved objects or our feelings of well-being. But it is perhaps precisely an experience of loss that could grant us a surprising gain: an answer to the question, at least for the moment, of what is enough.

Such is yet another way that sorrow--maybe in the form of nostalgia or regret--can, if seen in a certain light, instruct and inspire.

Anyway, here's an interesting take on bankruptcy and wisdom from Stanley Fish: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/faith-and-deficits/?hp

John Keats and the Miracle of Melancholia

2009-02-18T02:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I finished reading a powerful new book on the poet John Keats. It's by Stanly Plumly, and it's called Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (Norton, 2008). The book made me think about how our current economic crisis might actually cause a revival of serious literature in our culture. As more and more Americans realize the ephemeral nature of the material life, they might well turn toward the more durable wisdom of writers like Shakespeare, Keats, and Woolf. Even if the works of these writers, as well as those of other powerful literary artists, don't always offer comfort, they frequently examine the ways that tragedy--far from being aberrant--is actually instructive, a revelation of what is vital and rich.

I published the following essay in the Los Angeles Times in February of last year. It's called "The Miracle of Melancholia." It explores how Keats' ideas about sorrow are pertinent to our contemporary scene. I hope you find it interesting.

In April of 1819, right around the time that he began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis – the disease that had already killed his mother and his beloved brother, Tom – the poet John Keats sat down and wrote, in a letter to his brother, George, the following question: “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”

Implied in this inquiry is an idea that is not very popular these days – at least not in the United States, which is characterized by an almost collective yearning for complete happiness. That idea is this: A person can only become a fully formed human being, as opposed to a mere mind, through suffering and sorrow. This notion would seem quite strange, possibly even deranged, in a country in which almost 85% of the population claims, according to the Pew Research Center, to be “very happy” or at least “happy.”

Indeed, in light of our recent craze for positive psychology – a brand of psychotherapy designed not so much to heal mental illness as to increase happiness – as well as in light of our increasing reliance on pills that reduce sadness, anxiety and fear, we are likely to challenge Keats’ meditation outright, to condemn it as a dangerous and dated affront to the modern American dream.

But does the American addiction to happiness make any sense, especially in light of the poverty, ecological disaster and war that now haunt the globe, daily annihilating hundreds if not thousands? Isn’t it, in fact, a recipe for delusion?

And aren’t we merely trying to slice away what is most probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world? Bereft of this integral element of our selves, we settle for a status quo. We yearn for comfort at any cost. We covet a good night’s sleep. We trade fortitude for blandness.

When Keats invoked the fertility of pain, he knew what he was talking about. Though he was young when he composed his question – only 24 – he had already experienced a lifetime of pain. His father had died after falling from a horse when the future poet was only 9. A few years later, Keats nursed his mother assiduously through tuberculosis, but she died in 1810, when he was 15. Soon after, he was taken from a boarding school he loved and required to apprentice as an apothecary; he then underwent a gruesome course in surgery in one of London’s hospitals (in the days before anesthesia).

Orphaned and mournful, Keats spent his days brooding. But after much contemplation, he decided that sorrow was not a state to be avoided, not a weakness of the will or a disease requiring cure. On the contrary, Keats discovered that his ongoing gloom was in fact the inspiration for his greatest ideas and his most enduring creations.

What makes us melancholy, Keats concluded, is our awareness of things inevitably passing – of brothers dying before they reach 20; of nightingales that cease their songs; of peonies drooping at noon. But it is precisely when we sense impending death that we grasp the world’s beauty.

Keats was of course not the only great artist to translate melancholia into exuberance. This metamorphosis of sadness to joy has been a perennial if frequently unacknowledged current in Western art.

Consider George Frideric Handel, the 18th century composer. By 1741, when he was in his mid-50s, Handel found himself a fallen man. Once a ruler of the musical world, he had suffered several failed operas as well as poor health. He was left in a state of poverty, sickness and heartsickness. Living in a run-down house in a poor part of London, he expected any day to be thrown into debtor’s prison or to die.

But then, out of nowhere, as if by some divine agency, Handel received a libretto based on the life of Jesus and an invitation to compose a work for a charity benefit performance. On Aug. 22, 1741, in his squalid rooms on Brook Street, Handel saw potentialities no one had before seen. Immediately, he felt a creative vitality course through his veins. During a 24-day period, he barely slept or ate. He only composed, and then composed more. At the close of this brief period, he had completed “Messiah,” his greatest work, a gift from the depths of melancholia.

We could also recall Georgia O’Keeffe, the 20th century painter. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, O’Keeffe left the East Coast for Taos, N.M. She fell profoundly in love with the lonely vistas of this world denuded of human corruption. However, even though she was enlivened by this part of the world, in 1932, her lifelong battle with melancholia caught up with her. She was hospitalized for psychoneurosis.

Rather than quelling her creative spirit, this breakdown did the opposite. Upon being discharged, she returned to the Southwest. There, in 1935, she painted some of her bleakest and most beautiful landscapes: “Purple Hills near Abiquiu” and “Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock Hills.” Both feature dark things amid the desert’s glare – gloomy shadows and stormy clouds. Into these haunting shades – hovering amid hard-scrabble rock and a sinister skull – one stares. One senses something there as silent and sacred as bones.

Joni Mitchell confessed in an interview that she has frequently endured long periods of gloom. But she has not shied away from the darkness. Instead, she sees her sorrow as the “sand that makes the pearl” – as the terrible friction that produces the lustrous sphere. Given her fruitful struggles with sadness, Mitchell has understandably feared its absence. “Chase away the demons,” she has said, “and they will take the angels with them.”

Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.

This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I’m not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide.

On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I’m valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I’m offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I’m saying that it’s more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie.

The Epidemic of Happiness

2009-02-16T07:26:00.000-08:00

Here's a hilarious video from The Onion. I wish I'd achieved this level of satire in my book.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/fda_approves_depressant_drug_for?utm_source=a-section

The Power of Negative Thinking

2009-02-13T07:19:00.000-08:00

Last fall, The Spectator published an article on how blind optimism, related, of course, to happiness addiction, is partly responsible for our current economic mess. The piece explores the idea that pessimism, and maybe even melancholy, are essential for good leadership. It's quite possible that Abraham Lincoln's brilliance as a leader came from his chronic melancholy. While Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate states, was overly idealistic and quick to make decisions based on his optimism, Lincoln wasn't afraid to question long-standing assumptions, to deliberate over his many options, and to be sensitive to vagueness. Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy examines this connection between Lincoln's gloom and his creative leadership. The Spectator article, in which my book is featured, offers some very interesting thoughts on this unexpected yet powerful connection between pessimism and wisdom. Here's a link to the article: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/style-and-travel/2539416/part_2/the-power-of-negative-thinking.thtml

Experiences Make Us Happier Than Possessions

2009-02-11T01:43:00.000-08:00

A new scientific study has shown that experiences make us happier than possessions. This is one of the main arguments of my book, an argument that is especially important, at least I believe, during a time when many are losing possessions or unable to purchase them. Here's a link to the article:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/10/happiness.possessions/index.html

Against Happiness now in paperback

2009-02-10T13:12:00.000-08:00

My book Against Happiness (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) was just released in paperback a couple of weeks ago. I decided to start this blog to discuss my book's special relevance in these troubled financial times.

While my book was a critical and commercial success when it was released in its hardcover form last year--it garnered praise from the likes of Lewis Black, for instance, and made the LA Times bestseller list--I believe that our current historical moment makes my book much more relevant than it was last January. Our country was not yet in a recession back in those days; indeed, most Americans were still more or less still living their lives of trouble-free decadence, seeking the happiness fix from the many material comforts our lucrative industries daily produced.

Now, however, the economic crisis is forcing Americans to question their commitments to superficial happiness. U.S. citizens are currently searching for rich experiences that don't require money; they are turning more toward the lasting treasures of the contemplative life; they are learning from their sorrow, discovering powers unavailable to them in their former contentment.

My book is precisely about the value of melancholy for living a full and vital life. I believe that the wisdom of sadness is exactly what Americans need at this moment, and I think that my book offers this wisdom. Over the next few posts, I plan to develop the ideas that seem especially applicable to our troubled times.