News > March 6, 2008

By Molly Nevola | Staff writer

In a nation addicted to happiness, he calls for the pursuit of sorrow. But it is a call to a contemplative life – a life of peace and one of hope. The university’s very own Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English Eric Wilson has taken a stand, criticizing the nation’s overemphasis on joy at the expense of sadness in his newly acclaimed book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

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Eric Wilson, Tom H. Prichard Professor of English, has received national acclaim for his first commercial book, Against Happiness. (Alison Cox/Old Gold & Black)

The book, which has generated public heat in reviews across the country, has a two-fold purpose, according to Wilson.

He noted that first, it challenges what he sees as America’s addiction to happiness

Second, it explores the power of forcing oneself to divorce the conventional and find the self-revelatory power of melancholy.

“About 85 percent of people say they are happy or very happy,” Wilson said, “And this is a statistic I find strange, due to all the tragedy in the world.”

But this professor of American and British romanticism by no means fails to distinguish between depression and melancholy, nor does he make light of the medical condition. Rather, he challenges an America desirous of a self-help fix, of constant contentedness.

“When we are melancholy, we have a deep yearning for a richer experience, an intimacy with the world and more creative and innovative ways of seeing the world,” Wilson said. When asked about what led him to draft the book, Wilson pointed to his own personal experience.

“During certain pivotal times in my own life, my melancholy has led me to insights that I never would have gotten otherwise,” he said. Wilson grew up in Taylorsville, N.C. where he was groomed to be a fine young man, he said. The star quarterback of his high school football team, Wilson was encouraged to be popular, but felt as if he led a double life. He would return home from school and listen to the music by the likes of John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen and read the works of Franz Kafka by night.

After graduating high school, Wilson went on to the United States Military Academy at Westpoint, where he suffered a period of doubt and sadness. “I realized I didn’t want to be there – the values I had been brought up with, I realized may not have been as good as I thought they were.”

Wilson left the academy after a month, an action of which his parents were surprisingly fully supportive. He went on to study literature and philosophy at Appalachian State University. This experience, however, shaped Wilson’s life for the better.

“It was my unease in relation to society’s expectations of me, my agitation that led me to find out more about myself,” he said. Melancholy, Wilson said, was able to create a rebellion against what was expected of him by his culture, society, hometown and family. Wilson came to realize how important the pensive state of melancholy was and became particularly interested in writers who explored the idea.

He began to study English poet and philosopher Samuel Coleridge as well as fictional novelist Herman Melville, both of whom suggest that melancholy acts are more meditative and contemplative than acts of those people who are continuously happy.

“My wish is that it brings a message of hope,” Wilson said, “that it shows people who are feeling sad, time to time or even all the time, that it’s OK to feel this way because you may be finding out essential things about yourself.” Wilson found inspiration for his book from several influential poets and philosophers and sites his teaching at Wake Forest as an integral part in his writing.

“Many of the ideas in the book I have explored in classrooms … teaching has been absolutely essential,” he said. He primarily sites famed English poet John Keats for influencing his work. Keats expresses a connection between joy, beauty and melancholy in his “Ode to Melancholy,” a connection which many of Wilson’s ideas originated.

Following a positive review in the Wall Street Journal, Against Happiness faced vicious attacks, many by people who have trouble with an attack on happiness.

“People ask, ‘why would you attack happiness?’ But it’s a certain kind of happiness — American happiness — and if we sit with our sadness, it could lead to joy,” Wilson said. Others have trouble with Wilson’s atypical writing style.

“It’s not a tradebook kind of style; it has some literary qualities that some reviewers find offputting,” he said. Still others attack Wilson’s perception of American happiness, the concept that he expressly challenges in the book.

Wilson set the record straight: “For me American happiness is a desire to smooth out the rough spots of life; we often do that with all sorts of technologies,” he said.

But in the end, Wilson is pleased that the book has received the attention that it has and that the message is being spread to a large audience.

“I’m a private, solitary person so it’s kind of weird to be exposed to the media; I’ll be happy to return to my normal life,” he said.

These things come and go, Wilson said, but the work has been gratifying and he is, ironically, quite happy.