The God of Melancholy

I was wondering about the curious title of The Rings of Saturn after finishing the book because although the book is about lots of different things, astronomy is nowhere writer's concern. After thinking about it for some time I came to some interesting conclusions.

The book starts with the following epigraph from an encyclopedia entry on the rings of Saturn:

The Rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet's equator. In all likelihood these are the fragments of former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effects(-->Roche Limit)

The planet Saturn is generally considered to be the patron god of melancholy. A god for sadness? You will ask. Well, as it turns out, the Greeks were not a very happy people. They understood the tragedy of human condition much better than today's channel surfing and crack-wise-with-friends generation. But that doesn't solve the puzzle of the meaning of the title. Does Sebald mean that the beautiful thing (the moon) that once was, is now destroyed as perhaps does every other thing, and is now replaced by another beautiful thing by some mysterious force in nature which takes care of transience and mutability of everything. The rings, perhaps, remind us of the inevitable cycle (and hence the rings) of destruction that history goes through. This is what he writes somewhere else in the book:

"On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark."

Sebald, not surprisingly, doesn't believe in the idea of historical progress, his view of history is more attuned to Nietzschean eternal recurrence. Whatever has happened will happen again and whatever is happening has already happened before in the past!

The title may also signify the strange connection between beauty and sadness. Doesn't anything beautiful also leave you with a faint feeling of sadness, by thinking that what you are looking at will not last, will perish sooner or later. And if you want to cling or attach to that beautiful thing, it will ultimately result in pain and a feeling of loss. Or the connection may also mean that when you are sad the world looks more beautiful. This may sound strange. And yes to some extent it is definitely false. After all who can forget Hamlet's (the most famous depressive in literature) lament when he compares earth to a sterile promontory and the overhanging firmament to a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours and cries out in pain as to how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable the uses of the world are to him. But be that as it may, an enlightened sadness (of the kind the narrator of the book feels) does sharpen your perception and cleans up your mind. So that you start seeing new things which were hidden earlier when you were happy and hidden connections between things and everything starts making sense in a mystical, elevated sort of way. I already sound like a new age lifestyle philosopher and Guru who wants to sell the idea of salvation through sadness and I hate that. So I will stop now.