Can a Mood Be True?
Hudson River and lower Manhattan, as seen from my apartment. Even drab scenes should make our hearts overflow with gladsadness.
Hoboken, New Jersey, May 31, 2024. 6:00 AM-ish. At this moment, I’m ebullient. I’m beaming at the world, the world is beaming back. Look at that beautiful barge gliding up the Hudson this misty morning!
What accounts for my cheery mood? Proximate causes come to mind: I slept well last night, and I’m halfway through my mug of morning coffee. Peak caffeine buzz, baby!
Plus, my semester is over. Teaching is grand, but so is summer vacation, even, especially, when I have no plans. Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go. Nowhere to go!
Later, as the caffeine wears off, I’ll probably slump into low-level gloom. I’ll fret about… Oh, there’s always stuff to fret about. Mortality looms, shouldn’t fritter away my precious time, need a summer project, blah blah blah.
My mood-control is limited. I can, sometimes, talk myself out of a glum or grumpy mood. I remind myself what a lucky bastard I am, especially compared to many people. Most people. Yeah, that old trick works for me. But sometimes a bad mood resists my efforts to wish it away, and I must wait for it to pass, like a summer squall.
My point is that moods are ephemeral and fickle as weather. So the idea that a mood can be true is absurd, right? It’s a category error, like saying a sunny day is true. And yet that is the proposition I’d like to explore, that a mood can be true.
Moods and truth are, at first glance, antithetical. Moods are transient, subjective, first-person. My mood is entirely mine, just as yours is entirely yours. Truth, in contrast, is objective, third-person, enduring. The statements 1 + 1 = 2 and The earth is an oblate spheroid are true not just for me or for you but for everyone everywhere, even extraterrestrials; truth transcends a particular time, place, point of view.
But hold on. Moods can be false, that is, based on a false premise, right? I felt false despair in the early hours of November 4, 2020, when I believed Trump had won; meanwhile, Trumpers were feeling false glee.
Those afflicted with bipolar disorder cycle between delusional despair and exuberance, delusional in the sense of being unjustified by objective circumstances. The disorder is thought to stem from biological factors, bad genes and neurochemistry.
If a mood can be an inappropriate, false response to external circumstances, doesn’t that imply that a mood can be an appropriate, true response? And don’t some moods reflect circumstances that apply not only to you but to many, even all people?
Let’s return to bipolar disorder. You could argue that at any given moment, exuberance is justified by circumstances that apply to all of us. Science says our existence, and especially our awareness of existence, is infinitely improbable and hence miraculous--because what is a miracle but something infinitely improbable? We should be blown away by every miraculous moment of every miraculous day.
And yet. We learn as children that we and everyone we love will die someday. Worse, physics says the universe is descending toward heat death, an eternity of cold, dark nothing that extinguishes all meaning. Despair seems a reasonable response to this prospect.
So which mood is true? Exuberance or despair? Both, perhaps. Throughout my life I’ve had moments in which I’m overwhelmed by a kind of swoony yearning, a blend of joy and heartache. My eyes tear up, I feel like laughing and crying. Call this mood gladsadness. I’m so glad to be alive, so sad that all I love is doomed.
The circumstances might be predictable. I’m playing hockey with old friends on a pond deep in Fahnestock Park. Or I’m paddling a canoe around Catfish Pond with my son and daughter as our grinning dog Merlin swims circles around us.
I’ve even felt gladsadness, I’m embarrassed to say, listening to a favorite Beatles tune or watching a mawkish movie. Sometimes gratitude and grief well up in me for no obvious, proximate reason.
A caveat is in order. Gladsadness never lasts long, and it overwhelms the analytic, verbal part of my brain. Only later, reflecting on gladsadness, do I tell myself what it means: It is an appropriate response, a true response, not just to the circumstances of my little life but to Life, human existence, with all the good and bad, beauty and horror.
Gladsadness is not true in the sense that a scientific statement is true. A mood is only true, perhaps, in the sense that a work of art like a poem or song or painting is true. Unlike scientists, artists do not tell us, This is how the world is. Artists say, Try looking at the world this way. Art can nonetheless make you feel as though you are seeing things as they truly are.
Here’s an example of what I mean: In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Andrei, an officer in the Russian army, falls, wounded, during the battle of Austerlitz. Lying on his back looking at the “lofty infinite sky,” Andrei feels not fear but peace. “How was it I did not see that lofty sky before?,” he thinks. “And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky.”
Hard-core materialists, like biologist Robert Sapolsky or philosopher Daniel Dennett (RIP), might trace Andrei’s “revelation” to endorphins that his wounded body squirts into his bloodstream. Tolstoy might not object to this interpretation. He depicts Andrei as a bit of a cold fish, ruled by his head more than his heart; hence, perhaps, the abstraction of Andrei’s vision.
But we shouldn’t assume that Tolstoy wants us to see Andrei’s epiphany as either true or false. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic, so Tolstoy can have it both ways: Beyond the painful hurly-burly of mortal life lies something sublime and eternal. Or not. Artistic “truth” is deeper than scientific truth, because it reminds us that reality transcends whatever we say about it.
I’m glad my spells of gladsadness are fleeting. You can’t teach college kids, pay bills, buy groceries if you’re in a state of constant, blubbering bliss. I can’t, anyway. My tendency toward habituation, taking things for granted, ensures that I get chores done.
Is gladsadness really true? Oh, hell, I don’t know. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed (endured?) a full-blown episode. But I try to pause now and then, no matter what I’m doing, to recall this bittersweet mood. The memory is just a faint simulacrum of the real thing, but it still feels right, it feels true, because it helps me cherish what I have before its gone.
Further Reading:
I toy with the idea that moods are true in Mind-Body Problems (see especially the chapter titled “The Gladsadness”) and My Quantum Experiment (see the end of “The Strange Theory of You and Me”).
And here are some relevant columns:
Nicaragua, Quantum Mechanics and Other “Solutions” to Habituation
The Ironic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Can Physics Ease the Sting of Death?
Theories of Consciousness, Gaza and My Cognitive Dissonance