This article is translated from the Chinese original.
On Melancholy
Lately I’ve been reading Xiao Hang’s Outline of Disintegration, and when I came across this short passage on melancholy, I was struck by how precise and concise his description was.
Melancholy is a kind of “self-devouring” without a concrete object, an illness without a cause.
Xiao Hang argues that when a person cannot free themselves from the self, they begin to take pleasure in gnawing at themselves. At its core, melancholy is a kind of “dream-state of selfishness.” It has no objective object beyond the self, no clear reason to love or hate, only an endless falling within vague grievance and sorrow. For the melancholic, it is an illness without a cause, as though one were being punished for a crime never committed.
>What does that mean? To me, it means deliberately emphasizing one's own uniqueness, believing that "everyone else is drunk while I alone am sober," that "no one can truly understand me," that "my taste is one of a kind," and so on. Through melancholy, we draw an artificial gulf between ourselves and others, trying to preserve that illusory sense of superiority by playing the role of a lonely sufferer.The melancholic’s fear of being cured, and the pride of the defeated
Melancholy is not merely passive suffering; it can even draw vitality and force from the very “poison” that corrodes the self. Xiao Hang points out that the pain of melancholy, precisely because it fears being cured, becomes afraid that its own dissolution and turbulence might be restrained. Beneath the elegant name of “melancholy” there is, in fact, a deeply hidden “pride of the defeated and the lament of self-pity.”
>Why do so-called "landmine girls" habitually cut themselves with razors? When pain and pathology become the only signs of someone's existence, they are in fact drawing a twisted vitality from that destructive "poison." For them, being cured is instead a threat, because it means being stripped of the unique identity of "the sufferer," and having to fall back into the ordinary and vulgar life of normality. They do not want to lose that morbid privilege.Melancholy offers an “aesthetic experience” that transcends the physical world
Xiao Hang describes melancholy as a kind of “sublimation” driven not simply by pride or straightforward despair. Through profound contemplation and a dreamlike state, melancholy allows a person to transcend the physical world and obtain a peculiar solitude and space for reflection. It offers the individual a pure aesthetic experience, turning the despair born of the enormous gap between oneself and the infinity of the world into a kind of “pathological beauty.”
>It's like the involuntary "third-person questioning" that begins in my head when I'm feeling emo late at night. In that state, it feels as if my soul leaves my body and watches me coldly from the outside, almost cruelly interrogating and cross-examining me without end. Yet strangely, this extreme inwardness produces a sense of detachment, letting me gaze at the psychological spectacle created by my own mind.Melancholy is a profound resonance between the subjective inner world and the objective world
Melancholy is not entirely cut off from the world. It shapes the soul and creates a resonance between subjective experience and objective existence. It reveals the violent contrast and tension between inner turbulence and the lively external world, allowing one to sense, even in a noisy public square, that strange feeling of alienation: an outward urge to expand, paired with an extreme isolation.
>You are so special. You're different from every other boy I know. You give me a sense of distance.