The Beauty of Sadness

“Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.”

                                                                                - Aristotle

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found that the most beautiful things to me are usually pretty sad.  Lots of people have asked me, “How can you find that beautiful?  Doesn’t it just get you down?”   The answer, quite simply, is yes, of course it gets me down, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also appreciate the inherent beauty.  Some of the most beautiful things can bring me to tears and make my heart feel like an under-inflated balloon.  Those moments, to me, are when you know the art is real.  Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy art that makes me smile and laugh, but rarely will art such as that resurface in my mind for days, weeks even.  In that respect, there is no comparison to the beauty of sadness.

Perhaps it’s the feeling that others have suffered as well; that you are not alone.   Whatever the case may be, I think I will always prefer, artistically at least, the melancholy to the joyful.

This is one of the saddest songs I know.