The Anatomy of Melancholy

Some monasteries and collegiate houses might well have been spared, their revenues put to other uses: one here and there, at least in substantial towns or cities, for men and women of every rank and condition to live in, secluded from the world’s cares and turmoil. People who did not wish to marry, or were unsuited to it, or were unwilling to be troubled with ordinary affairs and did not know where to settle, could live apart there for greater convenience, good education and better company; to pursue their studies, I say, advance the arts and sciences, serve the common good and, as some truly devoted monks of old had done, freely and sincerely serve God.

For these people are neither solitary nor idle. As the poet answered the farmer in Aesop who accused him of idleness, he was never so idle as in the farmer’s company. Or as Scipio Africanus said in Cicero: “Never less alone than when alone; never less idle than when at leisure”—never less solitary than when he was alone, never busier than when he seemed most idle.

Plato reports in his dialogue On Love, in that extraordinary tribute to Socrates, how a profound thought happened to enter Socrates’ mind and he stood still pondering, “lost in thought on the very same spot,” from morning until noon. When he had not yet finished his meditation, “he remained standing in thought,” and continued until evening. The soldiers—for he was then on campaign—watched him in amazement and deliberately kept watch all night. He remained motionless “until sunrise,” until the sun rose in the morning; then, saluting the sun, he went on his way.

I do not know in what frame of mind steadfast Socrates acted thus, or what he felt; but this would be harmful to another man. I cannot easily guess what intricate problem could so thoroughly absorb him. But this is “idle leisure”; it is quite otherwise with these people. As Seneca says, “Solitude persuades us to every evil.” This solitude ruins us; “it fights against social life”; it is a destructive solitude.

These people are devils when alone. As the saying goes, “A solitary man is either a god or a demon”: a man alone is either a saint or a devil; “his mind either languishes or swells with pride.” And “woe to the solitary,” in this sense: woe to anyone so alone. These wretches often degenerate from human beings, turning from sociable creatures into beasts, monsters, inhuman and hideous to behold, haters of humankind. They even loathe themselves and hate human company, like so many Timons and Nebuchadnezzars, through indulging these pleasing inclinations too much and through their own fault.

Thus the reproach Mercurialis once addressed to his melancholy patient in consultation 11 may justly be applied to every solitary and idle person individually. “Nature seems entitled to complain of you,” and so on. Nature may justly complain of you: she gave you a good, healthy constitution, a sound body, and God gave you so divine and excellent a soul, so many good abilities and useful gifts; yet you have not only despised and rejected them, but corrupted and polluted them, destroyed their balance and perverted those gifts through dissipation, idleness, solitude and many other ways. You are a traitor to God and nature, an enemy to yourself and the world.

“Your destruction comes from yourself”: you have wilfully lost and cast yourself away. You yourself are the active cause of your own misery, by yielding to such empty thoughts instead of resisting them.