Mankind, Robert Burton writes in his monumental book on melancholy, is the sovereign master of the world, yet at the same time, he lives a life of misery, lower than all the animals, plagued by dark thoughts, by a death urge. One can also see this differently, as George Steiner did. Sadness is a pre-requisite of thinking and therefore also of humanity. Reason and critique require a consciousness that understands the distinction and attempts to remove them in a single thought.  Indispensable as a metaphor and an idea, sadness sometimes ends fatally. Depression is the scourge of humanity, a life-threatening and widespread disease, described and lamented by the literature of all ages and all continents. It leads to individuality, to Hamlet, and to the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares. And sometimes, for example in a young woman by the name of Antigone, sadness becomes political. Can they share and organize sadness, can it assemble and unite us as a society?