On Poe and Purple.

Reading isn’t the most comfortable of occupations when you feel cold, tired and vaguely out of sorts. And that’s why, having read a mere ten pages of The Fall of the House of Usher, I gave up and laid my head on the desk. And then I tried not to go to sleep because I knew that if I did I would wake up, ten or fifteen or thirty minutes later, feeling colder than when I dropped off. It’s happened before, often.

But I did notice something interesting before the spirit weakened. I’ve said before that I insist there are two forms of melancholy: the black and the purple. Black melancholy is a form of depression and not at all pleasant. The purple variety, however, rides on the soft waves of reflection and resignation. It washes the spirit with a dark but somehow wholesome calmness, and makes the skin tingle gently and pleasurably if you’ve a mind to allow it. Bearing this in mind, it seemed appropriate that Poe should say this about his first view of the Usher mansion:

… a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.

Maybe that’s the clue to purple melancholy. It’s poetic.