Varieties of Melancholy
A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods
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Narrated by:
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Rachel Lanning
About this listen
An insightful and consoling guide to the melancholic state of mind.
This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression, rage, or bitterness. It’s a serene, wise, and kindly response to the difficulties of being alive. It helps us navigate a wise and rational middle ground between extreme despair and naïve optimism.
But melancholy is a well-kept secret. It isn't celebrated or recommended. It remains relatively unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age.
This book carefully collects and interprets a wide range of universally recognizable forms of melancholy, rendering us less confused by our precious yet elusive feelings. We discover everything from the melancholy of a Sunday evening and the melancholy of adolescence to the melancholy of parties and the infatuated melancholy of having a crush.
Offering a rich and varied portrait of melancholy and its range of emotions, this book leads the listener toward deeper insight, more authentic acceptance, and more honest self-compassion.
AN IN-DEPTH EXPLORATION OF A COMPLEX EMOTION through the lens of art, architecture, literature, and philosophy.
HOW TO INTERPRET AND ACCEPT our melancholy moods.
INCREASE SELF AWARENESS through meditating on melancholy.
EXAMINES 35 VARIETIES OF MELANCHOLY including: Dating and Melancholy, Loneliness and Melancholy, Adolescence and Melancholy, and Politics and Melancholy.
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With vulnerability and honesty, Jerry Sittser walks through his own grief and loss to show that new life is possible - one marked by spiritual depth, joy, compassion, and a deeper appreciation of simple and ordinary gifts. This 25th anniversary edition features a new introduction and two additional chapters, one which provides help for pastors and counselors.
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- By Anonymous User on 06-23-23
By: Jerry L. Sittser
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He Held Radical Light
- The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art
- By: Christian Wiman
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Christian Wiman explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known.
By: Christian Wiman
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Desire
- The Journey We Must Take to Find the Life God Offers
- By: John Eldredge
- Narrated by: Kelly Ryan Dolan
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Sometimes it seems we just can't get what we want. Circumstances thwart our best-laid plans. We struggle to live a heartfelt life. Worst of all, says Eldredge, the modern church mistakenly teaches its people to kill desire (calling it sin) and replace it with duty or obligation (calling it sanctification).
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Nothing Less Than Life-Changing
- By Randall on 09-28-04
By: John Eldredge
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The Spiritual Teachings of Seneca
- Ancient Philosophy for Modern Wisdom
- By: Mark Forstater, Victoria Radin
- Narrated by: David Troughton, Louisa Millwood Haig
- Length: 1 hr and 36 mins
- Abridged
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Seneca was dedicated to Stoicism, and in his essays and letters he explained the stoic position on many fundamental issues: pleasure and the problem of desire, happiness, and contentment; anger, fear, living in the present, how to think for yourself, anxiety and tranquillity, goodness, freedom, trusting the universe; courage, opportunity, cruelty and how to deal with it, friendship, love and trust, death and how to live, learning , chance and fate, time, aspirations, wisdom - and more.
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Odd presentation style
- By Mark on 08-03-08
By: Mark Forstater, and others
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Let Go
- Seven Stumbling Blocks to Christian Discipleship
- By: Casey Cole OFM
- Narrated by: Casey Cole OFM
- Length: 4 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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"What must I do to gain eternal life?” The rich man who asked this of Jesus was told to sell all he had and give to the poor. But, more importantly, he was told, “Come, follow me!” Franciscan Casey Cole challenges us to let go of something more difficult than material wealth: expectations, anxiety, comfort, wounds, enemies, power - and our very selves. Speaking from both personal and pastoral experience, he outlines the stumbling blocks that turn us away from following Jesus as true disciples. The response to “What must I do?” is simple but not easy: Let go. Now.
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Truly a good listen
- By Anonymous User on 12-23-22
By: Casey Cole OFM
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Wrestling with God
- Finding Hope and Meaning in Our Daily Struggles to Be Human
- By: Ronald Rolheiser
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Wrestling with God, Ronald Rolheiser offers a steady and inspiring voice to help us avow and understand our faith in a world where nothing seems solid or permanent. Drawing from his own life experience, as well as a storehouse of literary, psychological, and theological insights, the beloved author of Sacred Fire examines the fears and doubts that challenge us. It is in these struggles to find meaning, that Rolheiser lays out a path for faith in a world struggling to find faith, but perhaps more important, he helps us find our own rhythm within which to walk that path.
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Still Wrestling
- By Joseph B Oberting on 10-13-20
By: Ronald Rolheiser
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The Screwtape Letters
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrated by: Joss Ackland
- Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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A masterpiece of satire, this classic has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to "Our Father Below". At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C. S. Lewis gives us the correspondence of the worldly-wise old devil to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging and humorous account of temptation - and triumph over it - ever written.
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This is the Best Audio Screwtape, a Masterpiece
- By James on 08-22-12
By: C. S. Lewis
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The Fall
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
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Wow Wow Wow
- By Lauren C on 07-14-21
By: Albert Camus
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The Three Marriages
- Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
- By: David Whyte
- Narrated by: David Whyte
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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According to Whyte, we humans are involved not just with one marriage with a significant other. We also have made secret vows to our work and unspoken vows to an inner, constantly developing self. Whyte's thesis is that to separate these marriages in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself; that in each of these marriages, will, effort, and hard work are overused, overrated, and in many ways self-defeating.
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RARE SELF-HELP BOOK THAT ACTUALLY HELPS
- By Elizabeth on 03-05-09
By: David Whyte
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For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.
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A nice petite primer on Proust
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We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence - one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives.
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Poignant and timeless
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A Therapeutic Journey follows the arc from mental crisis and collapse, to convalescence and recovery. Written with kindness, knowledge and sympathy, it is both a practical guide and a source of consolation and companionship in what might be some of our loneliest, most anguished moments.
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Deep, intelligent, compassionate
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What listeners say about Varieties of Melancholy
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- beecroft
- 02-21-24
Hurt locker
Lov3d part on adolescence.as a former teacher , it solidified a lot of my thoughts, and recall when I was a teen
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