The Ecology of Suffering: Thinking with the Elements in Decadent Literature

Abstract

How should one seek out a suitable place to suffer in the world? What would a city built for sorrow look like? And what sort of elemental conditions or precise ecosystem would it need for the right amount of melancholy to thrive? In 2019, the American poet and essayist Anne Boyer published a literary meditation on her cancer diagnosis in The New Yorker. In it, she detailed the blueprints of a space for communal grief that she had dreamed up long ago:

Before I got sick, I’d been making plans for a place for public weeping, hoping to install in major cities a temple where anyone who needed it could get together to cry in good company and with the proper equipment. It would be a precisely imagined architecture of sadness: gargoyles made of night sweat, moldings made of longest minutes, support beams made of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on.

Boyer writes how she took pleasure in envisioning how this gathering of distraught bodies might enrage societies at large because it would expose the exquisite, rotten truth – that suffering is what is shared – and something in this idea, with its prodding of ugly societal ethics and its excessive indulgence in the luxuries of sadness, feels potently decadent. If fin-de-siècle European writers and artists had contributed to a decadent handbook of suffering, what advice might it have included? What maps would they have drawn up, and where would they have told us to go?