Why I cheer the return of melancholy

Been brooding, in these toxic times, over the story of Manfred Gnadinger, the German-born hermit whose sculpture garden in Camelle, on the Galician coast, was damaged by the oil-spill from the tanker Prestige, and who subsequently died, according to those who knew him, of melancholy.

Not enough of us die of melancholy. And when we do, the doctors call it something else. Depression, usually. But depression and melancholy are not synonymous. Depression is a condition you are meant to deal with. Take pills, get pissed, play with your genitals, leave your genitals alone, join a gym, find a partner, leave a partner, try liposuction, put your buttocks where your mouth is, go on Big Brother, get kicked off Big Brother, change your sexual orientation, get thee to a nunnery, expose yourself to light – fly to Galicia even.

Melancholy, on the other hand, though it was long thought by the ancients to be a morbid condition caused by excessive secretion of black bile, was also called by them "the sacred disease". Which might have meant that the gods had a hand in it, or that those it claimed enjoyed other privileges as a consequence. There is argument as to whether it was Aristotle or his pupil Theophrastus who made the famous connection in The Problematica – "Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics, or poetry or the arts, are clearly melancholics?" – but it's a true observation, whosoever it was.

True if you leave out politics that is, politics no longer being a calling with which eminence has anything to do.

Depression happens to you, melancholy is an option. "I imagine that for one to enure himselfe to melancholy," that distinguished melancholic Montaigne wrote in an essay on the variegations of our natures, "there is some kinde of purpose of consent and mutuall delight."

How much delight there was in Manfred Gnadinger's decision to die of melancholy I would not dare to guess. But we must assume, since he had been a hermit in Galicia for more than 40 years, that he had consented to the sadness of that calling. The Galicians called him Man, short for Manfred, but suggestive of something pared down and elemental in him too. "I was looking for a place to be alone," he told a journalist just before his death. "This is my world. I don't think I like other people."

Misanthropy, we are inclined to call that. A judgmental term. We are not meant not to like other people. I prefer melancholy. It restores dignity and refuses the tyranny of normative behaviour, there being no reason on earth why we should like other people much, and every justification, even in the blue and green of Galicia I would imagine, for not liking them at all.

Photographs and descriptions of Man's sculpture garden, known locally as el museo del alemán, suggest one of those domestic eccentricities you sometimes drive past in remote areas, art and dereliction mixed, amorphous forms, piles of twisted stones, things thrown away as much as thrown together, but nothing wasted, the detritus of life somehow making a terrible sense. Normally you accelerate by such a place, for fear of who you'll find there, and because it calls into question the ordered nature of your own existence – nice things here, rubbish there, and no melancholy commingling of emptiness and meaning. But tourists visited Man's garden, for which privilege he charged them a dollar – chicken-feed.

He could see the sea from his tiny hut. And presumably would have watched the oil approaching. Shortly before the end, the authorities gave him a pair of wellingtons to wear with his loincloth, so oil-drenched had his garden become. Wellingtons and a loincloth – I wish I had seen it. Not to smirk, but weep. You try to keep it simple but the bastards always have to complicate it for you. Nobody has ever told me how wellingtons are made but I wouldn't be surprised if there is oil in them.

Man's final wish was that his "museum" should be left untouched, as a permanent reminder of the spill.

Behold what I bequeath – ruination.

No doubt he wasn't a laugh a minute, Manfred. And would probably have shooed me off had I tried to talk Montaigne or Theophrastus to him. But I have grown attached to him as an idea. We don't do hermits any more, for the same reason we don't do melancholia. We do good works or viagra instead, go clubbing, waylay the unwary with charity boxes. Refuse the body its needful hour of rest; refuse the mind the indifference to desire it craves. We grind away, making ourselves rich or famous or purposeful. Anything not to look unhappy.

"I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth," Hamlet told his friends, and even then, when melancholy was all the rage, they had to set about searching for the cause. Women, ambition, madness. Leave the man alone. He simply didn't find the world funny any more. Russell Harty once asked Peter Cook if he had returned from America in order to recharge his batteries. I forget the exact wording of Cook's reply. Something to do with would have if he could have, but frankly did not know where his batteries were to be found. But I haven't forgotten the depths of distracted melancholy in his expression.

Misogyny, we charge Cook with. All the mis's – misogyny, misanthropy, misorder, with envy and drunkenness thrown in. We can't allow that he had forgone all his mirth, misplaced the batteries, and consented to those losses, full stop.

The heroes of our time are too hectic. They don't mope enough. Young Werther's sorrows once had all of Europe by the ear, but he wouldn't do for us, he'd be too listless to solve a crime or fabricate a fantasy.

Ah! Sun Flower – I have always loved that most languorous of Blake's Songs of Experience, "Where the youth pined away with desire." So I sorrow for Manfred, who pined away on my behalf, I being too busy.