If appetite will not obey, let the faculty of movement overrule it, resist it, and compel it to act otherwise. In a fever, appetite wants to drink; sore, itching eyes want to be rubbed. But reason says no, and therefore the faculty of movement does not act. Our imagination would force a thousand fears, suspicions, and chimeras upon us, but we have reason with which to resist; yet we allow it to be overpowered by appetite.

Imagination drives the spirits, which, through a wonderful natural alliance, compel the nerves to obey, and the nerves our several limbs: we give our passions too much freedom. To someone sick with a fever, everything tastes bad and unpleasant, “through no fault of the food,” as Plutarch says: the fault is in our taste. In the same way, many things offend us not in themselves but because of our disordered judgement, jealousy, suspicion, and the like. We bring these troubles upon our own heads.

If, then, our judgement is so disordered, our reason overruled, and our will swept headlong that we cannot seek our own good or control ourselves—as commonly happens in this disease—the best way to find relief is to share our misery with a friend, instead of smothering it within our own breast. “The evil is nourished and grows by being concealed,” and so forth. That which most tormented us, a cause of fear and grief, “what now burns you,” becomes another hell; for “grief shut within chokes us and seethes inside”: concealed grief strangles the soul.

But once we share it with a discreet, trustworthy, loving friend, it is immediately removed—perhaps through his counsel, wisdom, persuasion, advice, or helpful measures that we could not otherwise apply to ourselves. A friend’s counsel is a charm, like mandrake wine: “it lulls cares to sleep.”

And as a bull tied to a fig tree suddenly becomes gentle—which some, says Plutarch, interpret as an image of kind words—so a savage, hardened heart is softened by gentle speech. All adversity finds relief in lament, as Isidore holds, and telling it brings consolation.

Good is the consolation of a friend.

Conversation with friends is comforting at all times: like fire in winter, shade in summer, “like sleep on the grass to the weary,” food and drink to the hungry or thirsty. Democritus’s eye-salve is less effective for the eyes than this is for the heart. Good words are cheering and powerful in themselves, but far more so from friends, who are so many supports, mutually sustaining one another like ivy and a wall, as Camerarius has aptly illustrated in an emblem.

“Even a simple telling often soothes the mind”: merely relating our troubles often eases our distressed mind, even amid the greatest hardships. Many have thus found relief by unburdening themselves to a faithful friend. He sees what passion and discontent prevent us from seeing; he calms our minds, eases our pain, and soothes our anger. “What pleasure comes from this, what freedom from care!” Chrysostom adds: what pleasure, what security it brings! Nothing is so effective or so refreshes the human soul.

Cicero, as I remember, deeply laments the lack of such a friend in a letter to his dear Atticus. “I live here,” he says, “in a great city, where I have a multitude of acquaintances, but among them all not one man with whom I dare breathe freely in confidence or joke without restraint. Therefore I await you, long for you, send for you. Many things trouble and distress me; if only you were here, I could quickly unburden myself of them in a conversation as we walked.” This man or that might perhaps say the same, with the old man in the comedy:

Among my friends today there is no one To whom I dare disclose my secrets.

And this man or that may meanwhile suffer much distress from it. Let him, then—whoever suffers from this illness—by every means find a trustworthy friend, “always having some Pylades to care for Orestes”: a Pylades to whom he may open himself freely and safely.

For it is the same here as in every other circumstance. “If someone had ascended to heaven,” and so forth, as the speaker in Cicero says: if a man had gone to heaven, seen the beauty of the skies, the wandering and fixed stars, and so on, “his wonder will be without delight.” It will give him no pleasure unless he has someone with whom to share what he has seen.

It is the best thing in the world, as Seneca therefore advises in such a case, to find a trustworthy friend to whom we may freely and sincerely pour out our secrets. Nothing so delights and eases the mind as having a receptive heart into which our secrets may descend, someone whose integrity we trust as our own, whose speech may ease our helpless condition, whose counsel may relieve us, whose cheerfulness may dispel our mourning, and whose very presence may please us.

This was the counsel that the politically shrewd Commynes gave to all princes and others distressed in mind, prompted by Charles, Duke of Burgundy, who was deeply troubled: first pray to God and lay oneself open to him, then to some particular friend whom we hold most dear, telling him all our troubles. Nothing is so powerful in strengthening, refreshing, and healing the wounded soul of a miserable man.