Our museums are not our new cathedrals. They are smart filing cabinets for the art of the past. Our libraries are not our homes for the soul. They are architectural en-cyclopedias. And if we were to show up at any university humanities department in urgent search of purpose and meaning, or were to break down in a museum gallery in a quest for forgiveness or charity, we would be swiftly removed and possibly handed over to psy-chiatric authorities. The intensity of need and the emotional craving that religions once willingly engaged with have not been thought acceptable within the contemporary cultural realm. The implication is that any moderately educated and sensible person already knows how to manage the business of living and dying well enough without the need for a nanny.

The contemporary education system proceeds under two assump-tions about how we learn. First, it believes that how we are taught matters far less than what we are taught. What educates students is-it's believed - the soundness of certain arguments, not especially the manner of their delivery. Teaching should not rely on gloss and charm. It is not, and should never be, a branch of the entertainment industry.

The priority of modern politics is economic growth. But human-ity's struggle towards material security will only be worthwhile if we understand and find ways to attenuate the psychological afflic-tions that appear to continue into, and are sometimes directly fostered by, conditions of abundance.

All substantial endeavours marriage, child-rearing, a career, politics were understood to be sources of distinctive and elaborate misery. Bud-dhism described life itself as a vale of suffering; the Greeks insisted on the tragic structure of every human project; Christianity inter-preted each of us as being marked by a divine curse.

All substantial endeavours marriage, child-rearing, a career, politics were understood to be sources of distinctive and elaborate misery. Bud-dhism described life itself as a vale of suffering; the Greeks insisted on the tragic structure of every human project; Christianity inter-preted each of us as being marked by a divine curse.

There can wisely be no 'solutions', no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. What we can aim for, at best, is consolation-a word tellingly lacking in glamour. To believe in con-solation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we'd like to render as com-fortable, as interesting and as kind as possible.

What separates the sane insane from the simply insane is the honest, personable and accurate grasp they have on what is not entirely right with them. They may not be wholly balanced, but they don't have the additional folly of insisting on their normalcy. They can admit with good grace-and no particular loss of dignity - that they are naturally deeply peculiar at myriad points. They do not go out of their way to hide from us what they get up to in the night, in their sad moments, when anxiety strikes, or during attacks of envy. They can at their best - be drily funny about the tragedy of being human. They lay bare the fears, doubts, longings, desires and habits that don't belong to the story we commonly tell ourselves about who we are. The sane insane among us are not a special category of the men-tally unwell; they represent the most evolved possibility for a mature human being.

The melancholy know that many of the things we most want are in tragic conflict: to feel secure and yet to be free; to have money and yet not to have to be beholden to others; to be în close-knit com-munities and yet not to be stifled by the expectations and demands of society; to explore the world and yet to put down deep roots; to fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, sex and sloth and yet stay thin, sober, faithful and fit.

We may look like the ultimate owners of our skulls but we remain practical strangers to too much of what unfolds within them. A casual acquaintance may, in a few minutes of conversation, deduce more about our psyches than we have been able to determine across many decades. We are frequently the very last people to know what is at work within 'us'.

The imbalances go in endless directions. We are too timid or too assertive; too rigid or too accommodating; too focused on material success or excessively lackadaisical. We are obsessively eager around sex or painfully wary and nervous in the face of our own erotic impulses. We are dreamily naive or sourly down to earth. We recoil from risk or embrace it recklessly. We emerge into adult life determined never to rely on anyone or are desperate for another to complete us. We are overly intellectual or unduly resistant to ideas. The encyclopedia of emotional imbalances is a volume with-out end.