The Anatomy of Melancholy

Talkative Fabius will be tired before he can tell half of them. They fill whole volumes, and some will be discussed more fully elsewhere, at a more suitable point. Meanwhile, I may say this much: they generally crucify the human soul, waste our bodies, dry and wither them, shrivel them like old apples, turn them into so many skeletons—“he is all skin and bones, so wasted is he with cares.” They produce “a foul and dismal time,” burdensome days, “and ungrateful seasons”: slow, dull and weary times.

They make us howl, roar and tear our hair, like Sorrow in Cebes’ Picture, and groan in the sheer anguish of our souls. Our hearts fail us, as David’s did, Psalm 40:12, because of the innumerable troubles surrounding him. We are ready to confess with Hezekiah, Isaiah 58:17, “See, instead of happiness I had bitter grief”; to weep with Heraclitus, to curse the day of our birth with Jeremiah, 20:14, and our stars with Job.

We are ready to accept Silenus’s maxim: best never to have been born, and next best to die quickly. Or, if we must live, to abandon the world like Timon, creep into caves and holes like our anchorites, throw everything into the sea like Crates of Thebes, or, like the four hundred listeners of Theombrotus of Ambracia, throw ourselves down from a height to escape these miseries.