The Anatomy of Melancholy

No rank, age or sex can protect anyone from this common misery. “A person born of woman lives only a short time and is full of trouble,” Job 14:1, 22; “while his flesh is upon him, he will suffer, and while his soul is within him, it will mourn.” “All his days are sorrow, and his labours grief; even at night his heart finds no rest,” Ecclesiasticus 2:23. And 2:11: “All that is in it is sorrow and vexation of spirit.”

Entering, advancing, retreating, departing—it is much the same. Blindness seizes us at the beginning, labour in the middle, grief at the end, error throughout. What day dawns for us without some grief, care or anguish? What morning have we seen so secure and pleasant that clouds have not gathered before evening? One person is miserable, another ridiculous, a third odious. One complains of this grievance, another of that. “Sometimes the sinews trouble us, sometimes the feet”—Seneca—“now a discharge, now a disease of the liver; now there is too little blood, now too much.” Now the head aches, then the feet; now the lungs, then the liver, and so on.

“This man abounds in understanding, but his low birth shames him,” and so on. He is rich, but low-born; another is noble, but poor; a third has means, but perhaps lacks health or the intelligence to manage his estate. Children trouble one, a wife another, and so on. “No one easily comes to terms with his condition”: no one is pleased with his fortune.

A pound of sorrow is commonly mixed with a dram of contentment: little or no joy, little comfort, but danger everywhere, conflict and anxiety in every place. Go where you will and you will find discontents, cares, woes, complaints, sickness, diseases, burdens and outcries. Look into the marketplace, says Chrysostom, and there is brawling and conflict; into the court, and there is roguery and flattery; into a private home, and there are worry, care and sadness, and so on. As the ancient poet said,

Nothing breathing on nurturing earth is more wretched than man.

No creature is so miserable as humanity, so universally afflicted: in misery of body, misery of mind, misery of heart; in misery asleep, in misery awake, in misery wherever one turns, as Bernard found. “Is not human life on earth a trial?” Our life is nothing but a trial—Augustine, Confessions, book 10, chapter 28—“a chain of perpetual evils; and who can endure troubles and hardships?” Who can bear its miseries?

In prosperity we are arrogant and unbearable, in adversity dejected, in every condition foolish and miserable. In adversity I long for prosperity; in prosperity I fear adversity. What middle state can be found? Where is there no trial? What condition of life is free of it? Wisdom has labour attached to it, glory envy; riches and cares, children and burdens, pleasure and disease, idleness and poverty go together—as though, in the Platonists’ view, a person were born in order to be punished in this life for earlier sins.