In sooth, I know not why I am so sad

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me; you say it wearies you.
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

- The Merchant of Venice, Act I Scene 1.

In the opening lines of TMoV, Antonio ponders his mysterious sadness. Later on in that conversation, his fellow merchant, Gratiano, gives his diagnosis:

You have too much respect upon the world.
They lose it that do buy it with much care.
Believe me, you are marvelously changed.

Recently I told my friend John that I have begun to take slights very personally. When people act meanly or condescendingly towards me, I feel put off, annoyed, discomforted. I attributed it to being in law school. My internal unconscious monologue, I hypothesized, must be, "I’m a future lawyer. I don’t deserve to be treated this way! I’m going to have some social power, damn it! Dont’ fuck with me."

John reported that he felt something like this as well, since becoming a lawyer, but he chalked it up to his belief that if someone disrespected or was mean to him, it meant that person might be disrespectful or mean to others as well, and confrontation would help those other people. Lawyers are advocates for others, after all. A somewhat nobler (if perhaps less convincing, for that same reason) explanation for his similar state of mind.

In any case, we have too much respect upon the world. Take these worldly losses too seriously, and you end up feeling sad. We cannot live in this world without losing material things, and without coming under criticism, some of it unwarranted. Place too much store by what the world deals you, including what other people do to you, and you are setting yourself up to be sad.

Still, I wonder if previously, I was not taking such things seriously enough. I’ve lived a relatively carefree life, materially speaking. In addition, until law school, I got by with very little interpersonal conflict. Most people I know are conflict-avoiders. So perhaps I’ve never actually known what my reaction would be to being criticized.

Is there a graceful way to take unfair, unconstructive criticism? What is the line between self-respect and self-regard?

Some people are just never happy

But Antonio does not necessarily agree that being invested in the world has anything to do his sadness. Instead, he chalks it up to preordination:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano—
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

Even when I didn’t take personal slights so seriously, I wouldn’t say that I was happy. I remember being happy for about a year. It was junior year, in fact. I think it had something to do with feeling secure in my position in school. Declaring philosophy, having a decent on-campus part-time job that I enjoyed, deciding that I was happier not doing the dating/boyfriend thing. Two years later, I was dissatisfied with analytical Anglo-American philosophy (thank you Existentialism), working three part-time jobs that I sort of tolerated (thank you Silicon Valley), and recovering from falling in love/infatuation and entertaining all the old nuclear fantasies (thank you social programming).

It seems like so far, the only way for me to forget about the world is to be doing "well" within it. You only notice things when they are broken. I guess I still subscribe to Gratiano’s view.

On the other hand, I’ve recently been suspecting that I am just an inexplicably sad person a la Antonio or (if I’m feeling self-congratulatory) Hamlet. Perhaps accepting this is part of not being so sad. Sometimes the requirement of happiness is the most cruel thing of all.

Turn that frown upside down. Or else.

Gratiano, in fact, tries to talk Antonio into being happy, just after Antonio has declared that he is terminally unhappy.

In summary, he says that some people think that being unhappy and silent is constitutive of wisdom, when in fact they are just as foolish as everybody else, but unhappier. Far better to be openly a fool and happy than silent, considered wise, and miserable. Since we are all fools, it is against our nature to be unhappy.

This does not do very much to convince Antonio. In fact, he suspects that Gratiano is merely making excuses for his own flaw - talkativeness.

Lean on me

Soon after this, however, Bassanio comes along, and Antonio’s spirits seem to pick up. He is genuinely interested in helping Bassanio, and ends up promising him the money that becomes one of the central plot points of the play. It’s not laid out explicitly in the dialogue (as it is in the first part of the scence - perhaps a parody of Socrates?), but Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that one way for us to (at least temporarily) ward off sadness is to concern ourselves with the problems of others, and to feel that strange human feeling of connectedness and shared goals.