The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or, as Pliny complains, all things considered, Nature might better be called our stepmother than our mother. No creature’s life is so fragile, so fearful, so mad, so furious; only humanity is afflicted by envy, discontent, grief, greed, ambition and superstition.

Our whole life is an Irish Sea, where nothing can be expected but raging storms and troublesome waves without end—

I see so vast a sea of troubles That there is no chance of swimming free.

No halcyon days, when a person can feel safe or be content with his present condition. As Boethius concludes, there is something in each of us that we seek before trying it and abhor once we have tried it. We wish for it earnestly and covet it eagerly, then soon grow tired of it.

Thus between hope and fear, suspicion and anger—“between hope and dread, amid fears and angers”—between making friends and falling out, and so on, we squander our best days and fritter our time away foolishly. We lead a quarrelsome, discontented, turbulent, melancholy, miserable life; so much so that, if we could foresee what lay ahead and had the choice, we would refuse this painful life rather than accept it.

In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves and cheats, full of filthy puddles, dreadful rocks and precipices; an ocean of adversity, a heavy yoke. Illnesses and calamities overtake and follow one another like the waves of the sea. If we escape Scylla, we run into Charybdis; and so, in perpetual fear, labour and anguish, we pass from one plague, one misfortune, one burden to another, “serving a harsh servitude.” You could as easily separate weight from lead, heat from fire, moisture from water or brightness from the sun as misery, discontent, care, calamity and danger from a human being.

Our towns and cities are so many dwellings of human misery, enclosing grief and sorrow, innumerable troubles, mortal labours and every kind of vice as though in pens—as the writer aptly observes from Solon. Our villages are like molehills, and people like so many ants, busy, forever busy, going to and fro, in and out, thwarting one another’s plans as the lines of different sea charts cross on a globe or map.

Now light-hearted and merry, but presently—as another writer continues—sorrowful and dejected; now hopeful, then distrustful; patient today, crying out tomorrow; now pale, then red; running, sitting, sweating, trembling, limping, and so on. A few, perhaps one in a thousand, may be “Jupiter’s chick” in the world’s opinion, “the white hen’s son”: a happy and fortunate man, “happy enough to be envied,” because he is rich, handsome, well connected, honoured and in office. Yet ask the man himself and perhaps he will say that he is the most miserable and unhappy of all. A fine shoe: “This shoe is new and elegant,” as the man said, “but you do not know where it chafes”—you do not know where it pinches.