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DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? for CAT 2024 is part of CAT preparation. The Question and answers have been prepared according to the CAT exam syllabus. Information about DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? covers all topics & solutions for CAT 2024 Exam. Find important definitions, questions, meanings, examples, exercises and tests below for DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer?.

Solutions for DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? in English & in Hindi are available as part of our courses for CAT. Download more important topics, notes, lectures and mock test series for CAT Exam by signing up for free.

Here you can find the meaning of DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? defined & explained in the simplest way possible. Besides giving the explanation of DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer?, a detailed solution for DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? has been provided alongside types of DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? theory, EduRev gives you an ample number of questions to practice DIRECTIONSfor the question :Read the passage and answer the question based on it.Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be the charms of van Gogh’s quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one self-portrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work become the charms of his persona and his predicament.But there’s another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaigne’s discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the “melancholic,” choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard, despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something in common with our understanding of depression today—or at least of the depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of romantic geniuses—the suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy. But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a final solution.Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person—her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.Q.It can be inferred from the passage that artists such as Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace are attributed to:a)Be victims of melancholyb)Have succeeded using the fruits of melancholyc)Drivenmy a dark bile that emerged in their workd)Have suffered from melancholic depressionCorrect answer is option 'B'. Can you explain this answer? tests, examples and also practice CAT tests.