The Melancholy Korean

Ah, hello. We meet again, but under trying and sad circumstances. Please forgive my lack of self-possession and alacrity. You know what has happened.  A catastrophe, I’m afraid.  Melancholy has been in quite a state of shock, as you might imagine.  Felicity left last night, and with all the, how shall I say, angry protestations and strong emotional outpourings, we have not had a moment’s peace since nine o’clock last evening.

I wanted to ask you, our guests, dear, dear guests, sweet and patient and loving guests, to leave for a few days and return next week when his emotions would have calmed down a bit, but Melancholy, when I broached the subject, would have none of it. The iron law of good manners, I heard him say. Perhaps it was another, if you forgive the oxymoron, slightly frightening phrase.

He’s not in a state to receive visitors, on that point I was quite insistent, and if you do see him, please urge him back to his room.  The doctor said he needs rest.  Melancholy was disappointed, to say the least, when he learned he was to stay upstairs for the next few days, but he asked me, well, insisted, is perhaps the more accurate word, to share this quotation with you.  It’s from a book called Revolt of the Masses.  I can’t make out the author.  Melancholy has beautiful handwriting, of course, but the ink has smeared on the page.

The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As today his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts. Let us recall that at the start we distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself.  Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude.  Life has no savor for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental.  Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself.  This is life lived as a discipline—the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us—by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige."