The Anatomy of Melancholy

I shall show you why people resemble houses. Parents are the builders who lay their children’s foundations, Polish them, teach them letters, and spare no expense. While I was under my builders’ authority, I was upright; But once I moved into a mind of my own, I ruined their work at once, utterly. Idleness came: that was my storm, And with it came hail and rain. It swept my virtue away, and so on.

A young man is like a fine new house: the carpenter leaves it well built, sound and made of solid materials; but a bad tenant lets the rain in and, through lack of repair, lets it fall into decay, and so forth. Our parents, tutors and friends spare no expense in bringing us up with every kind of virtuous education. But when we are left to ourselves, idleness, like a storm, drives every virtuous impulse from our minds, “and we become worthless”: suddenly, through sloth and such bad ways, we come to nothing.

First cousin to idleness, and an accompanying cause that goes hand in hand with it, is “excessive solitude”—too much being alone—which all physicians testify is both cause and symptom. Considered here as a cause, it is either compelled, imposed on us, or voluntary.

Enforced solitude is commonly found among students, monks, friars and anchorites, whose rules and way of life require them to abandon all company and human society and withdraw to a private cell: “secluded in superstitious idleness,” as Bale and Hospinian aptly call it. Such are the Carthusians of our time, who eat no meat, as their rule requires, keep perpetual silence and never go out.

Those who live in prison or some deserted place and cannot get company—as many of our country gentlemen do in isolated houses—must either remain alone without companions, or live beyond their means and entertain everyone who comes as though they were innkeepers, or associate with their servants and farm labourers, people unequal and inferior to them in rank and of a different disposition. Or, as some do to avoid solitude, they spend their time with disreputable fellows in taverns and alehouses and so give themselves over to unlawful amusements or dissolute ways.

Others are driven onto this rock of solitude by poverty or a strong fear of some infirmity or disgrace; or through shyness, uncouthness or lack of worldly experience they cannot adapt themselves to other people’s company. “No place is more welcome to the unhappy than solitude, where there is no one to reproach them with their misery.”

This enforced solitude takes hold and produces its effects soonest in those who have spent their time merrily, perhaps in entirely innocent recreation, in good company, in some large household or populous city, and are suddenly confined to a deserted country cottage far away, deprived of their freedom and cut off from their usual companions. Solitude is deeply irksome to such people, unbearably tedious, and a sudden cause of great harm.

Voluntary solitude is melancholy’s familiar companion. Like a Siren, a lure or some Sphinx, it gently draws us into this gulf from which there is no return; Piso calls it a primary cause. At first it is most pleasant for those inclined to melancholy to lie in bed all day and remain in their rooms; to walk alone in a secluded grove, between wood and water, beside a brook; to meditate on some delightful, pleasant subject that most engages them: “a lovely madness,” and “the mind’s most welcome delusion.”

It is an incomparable delight to indulge in melancholy like this, building castles in the air, smiling to oneself, acting an endless variety of parts which one supposes and vividly imagines oneself to be playing, or sees performed in the mind. “Enticing indeed at first,” says Lemnius: to picture and contemplate such pleasant things, sometimes “present, past or yet to come,” as Rhazes says.