Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag draws a scalpel line between two states our culture loves to blur: the aesthetically tolerable sadness and the clinical wreckage we keep trying to dress up as depth. By calling depression "melancholy minus its charms", she punctures the long romantic tradition that treats suffering as a kind of style - the tortured artist glow, the soulful brood, the dramatic interior weather. "Charms" is the key insult: it suggests that melancholy, as society consumes it, comes with a pleasing costume and a narrative payoff. Depression doesn’t. It is the same darkness with the light sucked out.

The parenthetical - "the animation, the fits" - is doing quiet, devastating work. Animation implies movement, even a performable liveliness: melancholy can still generate art, conversation, flirtation, a sense of self as interestingly afflicted. Fits hints at theatricality, the episodic flare-ups that can be witnessed and therefore socially legible. Depression, for Sontag, is what remains when sadness stops being expressive and becomes inert. No crescendo, no catharsis, no audience.

Context matters: Sontag wrote against metaphor as a cultural trap, especially around illness. Here she’s not merely offering a definition; she’s refusing the sentimental language that makes pain more palatable to outsiders. The intent is moral as much as diagnostic: stop rewarding a prettified sadness, stop mistaking a consumable mood for a condition that erases agency, and stop using the romance of melancholy as an alibi for not taking depression seriously.