Down in the dumps.(The Straggler)

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CONSERVATIVES, it says here, are happier than liberals. I am looking at this much-discussed study from New York University on "The Palliative Function of Conservative Ideology." So far as I can make out--and you should by no means quote me on this; my powers of attention are not what they should be, for reasons to be explained--the conclusion of the study is that we conservatives don't fret so much about social inequality. With one less thing to fret about, we're happier. Well, that's nice. This seems to me just another shot at proving how smug and callous conservatives are, leaving those sensitive, neurasthenic souls of the other party to anguish over the wretched of the earth.

Happier we may be, in the generality, net-net and long-term, but a conservative can be as glum as you please when the mood takes him. Ay, in the very temple of the Right, veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, as Keats did not quite say. She's fixed her cold grip on me recently, and I report to you now from beneath the sign of Saturn.

Part of it is the weather. It hasn't snowed for days, but there's been no warmth, so old, congealed, dirty snow is everywhere. Few meteorological consequences are as unsightly or depressing. The caked gray mess brings to mind the gloomier kind of Russian poet--Yesenin, perhaps--or the even gloomier Scandinavian variety. The champion here is surely Sigbjorn Obstfelder, a late-19th-century Norwegian, whose verses should not be read in the cold and dark: "I found a corpse between the glints of snow,/ the snow candles,/ a corpse, still living,/ a poor frostbitten starling ..." And that was a Christmas poem!

Another part is work. I am preparing a book for the presses. These late stages of dealing with the editor's comments and suggestions bring one face to face with one's own faults of spelling, grammar, usage, punctuation, style, and structure. It's necessary work, and a routine part of the book-production process, but as a lesson in one's own fallibility, it's humbling ... which is only a pace or two away from being humiliating. I ought to be inured to this, having had much sterner lessons in human imperfection during my days as a computer programmer. No matter how carefully you check and test, there's always one misplaced comma in your code that brings the company's overnight processing cycle to a juddering halt, followed by an irate 3 A.M. call from the data center.

And some other part is temperamental. The old four-humors model of personal character was not completely misguided, and there are plenty of melancholics here on the political right, whatever those NYU researchers think they have found. Churchill had his "black dog" (a phrase he took from Dr. Johnson, another conservative depressive); Teddy Roosevelt nursed that odd enthusiasm for the wistful, death-haunted poems of E. A. Robinson; and the great Tory anarchist Enoch Powell, asked by an interviewer in his old age how he would like to be remembered, stunned the radio audience by replying: "I should like to have been killed in the war."

Glum people have not had a good press, though. Dante ...