The Anatomy of Melancholy

If appetite will not obey, let the faculty of movement overrule it, resist it, and compel it to act otherwise. In a fever, appetite wants to drink; sore, itching eyes want to be rubbed. But reason says no, and therefore the faculty of movement does not act. Our imagination would force a thousand fears, suspicions, and chimeras upon us, but we have reason with which to resist; yet we allow it to be overpowered by appetite.

Imagination drives the spirits, which, through a wonderful natural alliance, compel the nerves to obey, and the nerves our several limbs: we give our passions too much freedom. To someone sick with a fever, everything tastes bad and unpleasant, “through no fault of the food,” as Plutarch says: the fault is in our taste. In the same way, many things offend us not in themselves but because of our disordered judgement, jealousy, suspicion, and the like. We bring these troubles upon our own heads.

If, then, our judgement is so disordered, our reason overruled, and our will swept headlong that we cannot seek our own good or control ourselves—as commonly happens in this disease—the best way to find relief is to share our misery with a friend, instead of smothering it within our own breast. “The evil is nourished and grows by being concealed,” and so forth. That which most tormented us, a cause of fear and grief, “what now burns you,” becomes another hell; for “grief shut within chokes us and seethes inside”: concealed grief strangles the soul.

But once we share it with a discreet, trustworthy, loving friend, it is immediately removed—perhaps through his counsel, wisdom, persuasion, advice, or helpful measures that we could not otherwise apply to ourselves. A friend’s counsel is a charm, like mandrake wine: “it lulls cares to sleep.”

And as a bull tied to a fig tree suddenly becomes gentle—which some, says Plutarch, interpret as an image of kind words—so a savage, hardened heart is softened by gentle speech. All adversity finds relief in lament, as Isidore holds, and telling it brings consolation.

Good is the consolation of a friend.

Conversation with friends is comforting at all times: like fire in winter, shade in summer, “like sleep on the grass to the weary,” food and drink to the hungry or thirsty. Democritus’s eye-salve is less effective for the eyes than this is for the heart. Good words are cheering and powerful in themselves, but far more so from friends, who are so many supports, mutually sustaining one another like ivy and a wall, as Camerarius has aptly illustrated in an emblem.