This episode examines the relationship between beauty and sadness. Here, Mr. B explores the nature of sadness itself, a few realities of sadness in the modern world, and, moving beyond this narrow rendering of emotion, he seeks to accept and embrace the compassion and communion that can be found within the beautiful depths of sadness.
Here's the resources that Mr. B refers to during this episode. Please,... investigate the truth for yourself...
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
"I am sitting at the open window (at four a.m.) and breathing the lovely air of a spring morning.... Life is still good, [and] it is worth living on a May morning.... I assert that life is beautiful in spite of everything! This 'everything' includes the following items: 1. Illness; I am getting much too stout, and my nerves are all to pieces. 2. The Conservatoire oppresses me to extinction; I am more and more convinced that I am absolutely unfitted to teach the theory of music. 3. My pecuniary situation is very bad. 4. I am very doubtful if Undine [an opera Tchaikovsky composed] will be performed. I have heard that they are likely to throw me over.
In a word, there are many thorns, but the roses are there too."
Jorge Luis Borges
"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."
Charles Eisenstein
"We are each other and we are the world."
Eric G. Wilson
"Our minds run over a daunting litany of global problems. We hope with our listing to find a meaning, a clue to our unease.... I can now add another threat, perhaps as dangerous as the most apocalyptic of concerns. We are possibly not far away from eradicating a major cultural force, a serious inspiration to invention, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are wantonly hankering to rid the world of numerous ideas and visions, multitudinous innovations and meditations. We are right at this moment annihilating melancholia."
Courtney Stephens
John Locke
Greek Theory of Humours
Hey,... melancholia represents 25% of "who I am"!!
John O'Donohue
"One year in university at the end of the semester I returned home for the summer holidays. When I walked into the kitchen my father looked up at me and I saw something in his gaze that I had never seen before. Some finality had entered his looking. Whether it was out in the mountains or among the fields around the house, his eyes had glimpsed a door opening towards him. His countenance had become more luminous and his natural gentleness was being claimed by a new silence. As we held each other for a moment in that gaze I knew death had picked his name out. Days later illness arrived and in three weeks the door of death had closed behind him. The gaze had revealed everything; time had stood still. The image of that gaze has always remained with me for it was a moment of the deepest and most tender of knowing, a moment radiant with the strange beauty of sadness."
Abdu'l Baha
"The more difficulties one sees in the world the more perfect one becomes. The more you plough and dig the ground the more fertile it becomes. The more you put the gold in the fire the purer it becomes. The more you sharpen the steel by grinding the better it cuts. Therefore, the more sorrows one sees the more perfect one becomes. That is why, in all times, the Prophets of God have had tribulations and difficulties to withstand. The more often the captain of a ship is in the tempest and difficult sailing the greater his knowledge becomes. Therefore, I am happy that you have had great tribulations and difficulties. For this I am very happy -- that you have had many sorrows. Strange it is that I love you and still I am happy that you have sorrows."
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