The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 10. Discontents, cares, miseries and the like as causes.

Discontents, cares, setbacks, miseries—whatever disturbs the spirits and causes grief, anguish and perplexity—may properly come under this heading. Some may judge them out of place here; yet since Aristotle in his Rhetoric defines these cares, like envy, rivalry and the rest, in terms of grief, I think I may properly place them in this irascible group. Like the others, they are both causes and symptoms of this disease, producing similar troubles and usually accompanied by anguish and pain.

The familiar derivation will show it: cura, “care,” as though from cor uro, “I burn the heart.” “Maddening cares, sleepless cares, harmful cares, sad, biting, torturing cares,” and so on: biting, eating, gnawing, cruel, bitter, sick, sad, restless, pale, grim, miserable, intolerable cares, as the poets call them—worldly cares, as countless as the sands of the sea. Galen, Fernel, Felix Platter, Valescus of Taranta and others count afflictions and miseries—all these conflicts and vexations of the mind—among the principal causes, because they take away sleep, impede digestion, dry out the body and consume its substance.

Numerous as they are, their causes are just as varied. Not one person in a thousand is free of them or can free himself—no one whom that “goddess Ate,”

Walking softly over human heads, With tender soles upon her feet— Walking aloft over people’s heads, Treading so softly with tender feet—

Homer’s goddess Ate, has not drawn into this discontented company or afflicted with some misery or other. Hyginus, fable 220, tells an entertaining story to this purpose. Lady Cura happened to cross a brook and, picking up some muddy clay, made a figure from it. Jupiter came by soon afterwards and gave it life; but Cura and Jupiter could not agree what to call him or who should possess him. They referred the matter to Saturn as judge, and he gave this ruling: His name shall be homo, “human being,” from humus, “earth”; “Let Care possess him as long as he lives.” Care shall have him while he lives, Jupiter his soul and Tellus his body when he dies.

But to leave stories aside. Discontent, care and misery are a universal and continuing cause, an inseparable condition of human life. Even if no particular affliction troubled a person in this life—and who is free of such affliction?—the mere thought of this common misery would be enough to wear him down and make him weary of living: the thought that he can never be safe, but remains exposed to danger, sorrow, grief and persecution.

To begin at the hour of his birth, as Pliny describes it so well: he is born naked and starts crying at once; he is swaddled and bound like a prisoner, unable to help himself, and so he continues to the end of his life. “Food for any wild beast,” says Seneca, unable to bear heat or cold, labour or idleness, exposed to Fortune’s insults. Lucretius compares him to a naked sailor cast ashore by shipwreck, cold and comfortless in an unknown land.