Mr. Cassidy was an Englishman who stayed, once a month, at the Strathearn, the hotel where I worked in Scotland. For a few of his visits, we found ourselves talking for several hours at the bar of the Wishart Suite once my shift was over. He told me, in the midst of one of these conversations, that he wasn’t surprised that I had Irish blood in me. Half-Irish himself, he had spent a lot of time in the country, and he saw that, culturally, they cherished melancholia—considering it a state worth experiencing on the level of other so-called “positive” emotions.

I’m not sure what led him to say that, to see that in me. I don’t recall having said anything particularly melancholic that evening. One of the last things I remember doing before he said that was musing about the moon or something. Perhaps, in that, he saw wistfulness and nostalgia, which tend to emerge when I muse, no matter what I’m musing about.

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