Melancholy and the Infinite Saturday Afternoon

It's a late Saturday afternoon and I'm procrastinating writing an article that was due today. I might add that it's raining and that I've just accepted a job that I would never have considered were we not ankle-deep in a recession/ downturn/general economic cess pool. 

Here is a quote from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, his letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, written while in ruin in prison. 

If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy? Besides, feasts are not for me any more. I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is over for me, very fortunately, I dare say. But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as any one can get.

If that wasn't tear-inducing enough, here is another:

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Now we shall move in on, in a multimedia tour of the morose and maudlin...

Concert footage of Morrissey singing "Angel, Angel, Down We Go Together


The Smiths performing "That Joke Isn't Funny Any More" in 1985.


And lastly, The Smiths performing "Still Ill," quite assuredly one of my best go-to songs for any malaise of the soul.

The afternoon is shifting into a evening, still marked by a day of rain and unproductivity.