The Anatomy of Melancholy

In general we may conclude this much about melancholy: that it is most pleasant at first, I say, “the mind’s most welcome delusion,” a most delightful disposition—to be alone, live alone, walk alone, meditate, lie in bed for whole days, dreaming awake, as it were, and fashion a thousand fantastic imaginings for themselves. They are never happier than when doing this; for the time they are in paradise and can scarcely bear to be interrupted, like the man in the poet,

“By heaven, my friends, you have killed me, not saved me,” he says.

You have undone him, he complains, if you disturb him. Tell him what harm will follow, what the outcome will be: it makes no difference. “The dog returns to its vomit”; it is so pleasant that he cannot refrain. He may perhaps continue like this for many years because he has a strong constitution, or because some business intervenes to divert his thoughts. But at last, “the imagination is injured”: his fancy is impaired and, now accustomed to such trifles, cannot stop working on, like fate. The scene changes suddenly: Fear and Sorrow displace those pleasing thoughts, and suspicion, discontent and perpetual anxiety take their places.

Thus, little by little, with idleness and voluntary solitude as the shoehorn, Melancholy, that deadly fiend, is drawn on: “As far as its crown reaches into the heavenly air, so far its root stretches into Tartarus.” It was not so delicious at first as it is bitter and harsh now. A cankered soul wasted by cares and discontents, weariness of life, impatience, agony, inconstancy and indecision plunge them into unspeakable miseries.

Some of them cannot endure company, light or life itself; they are unfit for action, and so on. Their bodies are lean and dried up, withered and ugly, their looks harsh and very dull, and their souls tormented, according to how deeply they are entangled, how much the humour has intensified, or how long they have been troubled.

To distinguish all these symptoms more clearly, Rhasis the Arabian divides them into three degrees. The first is “false thinking”: false notions and idle thoughts, misconstruing and magnifying, making everything they imagine or fear worse. The second is “speaking what has been falsely conceived”: talking to themselves, making inarticulate, disordered sounds and speeches and strange gestures, and openly expressing their minds and inward notions through words and actions—laughing, weeping, being silent, not sleeping or eating their food, and so on. The third is putting into practice what they think or say.

Savonarola, rubric 11, treatise 8, chapter 1, on illness, confirms as much: when he begins to express in words what he conceives in his heart, talks idly, or jumps from one thing to another—what Gordonius calls things “having neither head nor tail”—he is at the middle stage. But when he also begins to act upon it and put his follies into effect, he has reached the furthest extent of melancholy, or madness itself.