The Anatomy of Melancholy

Pleb: Robert Burton
Patrician: Thomas Browne

God: Patrick BBC

The section on academia is depressingly accurate to this day

do u have to know latin to read this

protopsychology.
it´s not the exaltation of melancholy and sadness that they tell me it is.

Both are great though.

True. Browne's tough-going in the Pseudodoxia, however. As is the second volume of the Anatomy (which really picks up at the end).

Very cool, very erudite. Hopefully you're at least familiar with Greek/Roman history/philosophy, and the Bible. The usually brief chapters give it an episodic feeling, usually only reaching climaxes of insight or emotion for a few paragraphs at a time before retreating and breaking off at the end of the section.

I've heard a lot of people read it in snippets, but IMO you should read start to finish. The overall development is vague, but it's there, and he builds on himself, if not with the intensity of Aristotle.

The biology is basically totally wrong; the psychology is far more correct, more literarily interesting, and more moving.

Something to keep in mind, which isn't ever explicitly said (so far at least; I'm not done with the third partition), is that Burton himself was possibly depressed, which could help explain not just why he started writing about melancholy, but why he knows so much of its quiet, sorrowful machinations, as opposed to just its outbursts of anger or frustration.

Overcoming melancholy is a task to be actively shouldered, and it will likely be hard going:

The melancholy man "himself must do his utmost endeavour to resist and withstand the beginnings" of depression, because its withdrawn, fantastical characteristics have a sickly appeal to them: "'tis a bosom envy, 'tis delightsome melancholy, a friend in show, but a secret devil, a sweet poison, it will in the end be his undoing." "This solitude undoeth us...Nature may justly complain of thee, that...thou art a traitor to God and nature, an enemy to thyself and to the world. Thou has lost thyself wilfully, cast away thyself...by not resisting such vain cogitations, but giving way unto them."

Obviously his angle is ultimately to help people out of their depression (dragging them out of it where necessary and possible), but it's interesting to note that he doesn't maintain absolutely that depression can be overcome, or even that suicide is inherently bad. He tries to raise the spirits of those who suffer, often heavily leaning on (borderline trite, and, as he admits, probably ineffective) biblical ideas:

"Misery is virtue's whetsone."

But on the other hand he knows how terrifying depression can be:

"They are torn in pieces, and crucify theyr own souls...consuming body and soul and gnawing the very heart, a perpetual executioner, continual night...an epitome of hell; and if there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart."

Which alone may strip us of the will to live:

"In all other maladies we seek for help...so sweet, so dear, so precious above all other things in this world is life...but to a melancholy man, nothing so tedious...that which they so carefully seek to preserve he abhors, he alone; so intolerable are his pains."

So, possibly, suicide:

Depression "grinds their souls day and night, they are perpetually tormented...death alone must ease them." "Death is better than a bitter life."

However, (next comment, text limit)

2/2

He has a surprisingly objective view of suicide. He considers the typical angles from antiquity and Christianity:

"He that stabs another can kill his body; but he that stabs himself kills his own soul."

But he writes them off as trite and unaware of what melancholy really is and what it does to us:

"Forestus hath a story of two melancholy brethren that made away with themselves, and for so foul a fact were accordingly censured to be infamously buried, as in such cases they use, to terrify others...but upon farther examination of their misery and madness, the censure was revoked, and they were solemnly interred...Seneca well adviseth: 'be justly offended with him as he was a murderer, but pity him now as a dead man.' Thus of their goods and bodies we can dispose; but what shall become of their souls, God alone can tell; His mercy may come betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat. What happens to someone may happen to anyone. Who knows how he may be tempted? It is his case, it may be thine: We ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures as some are; charity will judge and hope the best; God be merciful unto us all!"

The Biblical teachings come through, I think, in the most tender way possible, far removed from any banal, clinical sermon you might hear from someone talking to a crowd, because Burton is only talking to you, and, for the first time in my life at least, coupled Biblical lessons with an empathy for melancholy. I cried reading II.3.3:

"Is not God better to thee than all temporalities and momentary pleasures of the world? be then pacified. And though thou beest now peradventure in extreme want, it may be 'tis for thy further good, to try thy patience, as it did Job's, and exercise thee in this life: trust in God, and rely upon Him, and thou shalt be crowned in the end...God is a spectator of all thy miseries, He sees thy wrongs, woes, and wants...'The patient abiding of the meek shall not perish for ever'...A good hour may come upon a sudden; expect a little."

In short, he covers the whole range of issues dealing with depression, with really learned perspectives, interesting stories, and pithy quotes from books that probably nobody will ever read again. There's definitely moral instruction abounding

"If thou seest aught amiss in another, mend it in thyself"

And his anecdote of a librarian is a beautiful view of bookreading, heavily reminiscent of Machiavelli's own daily 4 hours of peace "among the ancients" with his books:

"I no sooner come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance, and melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich men that know not this happiness."

>Dum spiras spera
>[While thous breathest, hope]

Read this book.

>
no

excellent posts. i've had this sitting on my shelf for a while, but i will make sure it's one of the next ones I read

Cheers! I spent like 6 months asking about it on lit when it popped up on shelf threads, but I never got any real answers as to what it was about; hope I offered more than that.

PS You might want to read it just a bit at a time, sort of like reading Montaigne or the Bible. Lack of narrative and frequent topic shifts make it hard to read in big chunks, I think. I've never done more than 40 pages at once.

I love reading this book out loud! No one likes to listen to me, though. I've been picking it up when I feel like it, not yet done with the Democritus to the Reader or whatever, which is what, 200 pages? His prose is very elegant.

weird thread

nice book