In the midst of his book review in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz makes this observation:

"Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color was probably the most significant factor in making color television a fixture in suburban living rooms and helped assuage the peculiar melancholy of the school year's Sunday nights."

I was struck by his casual reference to Sunday night melancholy, because I've always assumed it was peculiar to me -- some evidence of mental illness kept at bay, the way shadows lurk around a light, waiting for its thin and fragile filament to snap. As if to underscore the commonality of it, the very next day I read this passage in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:

"On its way home the MG becomes infested with malaise. It is not unexpected, since Sunday afternoon is always the worst time for malaise. Thousands of cars are strung out along the Gulf Coast, whole families, and all with the same vacant headachy look. There is an exhaust fume in the air and the sun strikes the water with a malignant glint. A fine Sunday afternoon, though. A beautiful boulevard, ten thousand handsome cars, fifty thousand handsome, well-fed and kind-hearted people, and the malaise settles on us like a fall-out."

My first memory of the Sunday evening melancholy is of standing in the checkout line in a grocery store in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, manning a slender cart sparsely filled with tuna cans and thin, plastic-wrapped bricks of noodles, perhaps supplemented by a bag of chips and a few frozen dinners. I would often stand there with my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and the deepest sadness would wash over me. I assumed it was because Sunday evening meant she was driving back home (my car couldn't tolerate long drives). But the melancholy continued to recur, even after she was a college student with me, even after we were married and there were no more classes, just the weekly grind and grace of life. I concluded that even though my recollection of the melancholy begins with the dimly let grocery in Chapel Hill, it likely had always been with me in some form.

But I always believed it was only me, until I read Schwarz's reference to "the peculiar melancholy," with that particular article -- the -- denoting it as a commonplace, like shin splints, or dandruff. And there's Percy, writing of the malaise that "it is not unexpected," and centering it not solely on his narrator, but on all the travelers along that highway.

One of the beautiful things about reading, I think, is discovering that one is not the only one to think that, feel that, fear that, to have sinned or lied or hoped or bled in that way. Walker Percy's narrator, Binx Bolling says this, for example:

"For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. . . Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord."

The long, sharp edge to this reality is the accompanying fact that writing is a dangerous thing, because one reveals truths about oneself without knowing if anyone else thinks it, feels it, fears it, and then hopes that one's readers don't all sign a petition to have one committed for terminal oddness and for being a threat to oneself, one's children, and society at large.

It's always a special relief to the writer, then, to discover that he is not, in fact, the only one. The irony is that he usually discovers this by reading someone who has been dead for quite some time, because communing with interesting but long-dead people requires only the one-way flow. He devours them without the danger of watching the dregs of himself pour out in a sudden torrent of truthfulness and longing, because he is barely restraining it all as it is, what with that filament being so thin and stretched to breaking. It's far safer for him to listen to the dead, to devour them, and then to carefully set down his own truths one letter at a time, in measured doses of wine and poison, so that by the time the full corpus has been assembled, and it is clear that he is indeed a threat to himself, his children, and society at large, he is quite conveniently dead, and entirely unconcerned about much of anything beyond whether the therapists his children are seeing can undo the damage. And then, if he was in possession of a scrap of talent and a bale of good fortune, some other disturbed and thin-filamented writer will devour his corpse, just as he ate the ones before him.

Now that I am thinking about it, I realize that David's musicians may well have had the Sunday (or for them was it Saturday?) evening melancholy in mind when they composed the 42nd Psalm:

Why are you cast down, O my soul?
And why are you disquieted within me?

This is one of the quiet joys of reading the Psalms, this revelation that none of us are the first to walk down a dark and lonely path. Anyone who believes the earth-bound walk with God is all happiness and sunshine has never really pondered the Psalms. It is fashionable in some churches to believe that one's health and wealth are evidence of God's favor. When I read the Psalms, however, I begin to think the opposite, that perhaps God thinks very little of people who never suffer. I usually conclude, when my thinking wanders in these directions, that such a notion is born in arrogance, for none of us can ever understand the path to which another is called; we can only consider our own, in wonder and fear. And it's a hopeful notion, as one stares down one's path, perhaps in dread, perhaps delaying yet another day in fruitless preparation, to learn from the suffering Psalmists that their God, who is our God, "heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds." This is helpful, given that one's path is likely to cause wounds and a broken heart.

I wonder if God was melancholy on that first Sunday evening. I wonder if he looked out to the horizon of time, knowing what would come, what we would do to each other, what we would do to ourselves. Perhaps he sighed. It would have been a deep and world-weary sigh, spreading out over the new world like the first sharp breeze of fall. Perhaps it penetrated the very soil and water, and later worked its way into those of us who feel sadness spill over our shoulders like shadows on trees in fading sunlight. On the other hand, I might be projecting. On a grand scale, no less.

The point of all this, I suppose, is to share my discovery with those of you who might need it, namely, that you are not the only one, either. This is, I think, a neglected part of the Gospel's message. You are not alone in your dark night of the soul, my daughter, my son, because when you have bled, I have bled, and when you have wept, I have wept. Where you live in fear of death, I died, that you need fear the valley of the shadow of death no longer.

And so he leads us through it, if we will only put one foot in front of the other. If we are not fearless, then at least we can be assured that the path has been walked before, and is being walked even now, each of us in his own struggle. Somehow, knowing that you are not the only one makes your path a little brighter. And if not brighter, perhaps there's some comfort in knowing, as you stumble and cry out in the darkness, that the rest of us are finding our way as well.

In telling you that you are not alone, I am, of course, really telling myself. But thanks for listening.