The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy is, perhaps, the oddest book I have ever read. Once upon a time, it was a Great Book (Samuel Johnson said it was "the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise") and maybe it still a Great Book (Nicholas Lezard recently said it was "the best book ever written"), but the estimations of it being a Great Book hinge on not treating it like a Book.  And therein lies the fundamental oddity.

The book was written in the early 17th century--Burton spent his whole life revising it, and it kept getting longer and longer--it is well over 1000 pages.  It is, as the title suggests, a complete and thorough discussion of melancholy--a complete description of the causes of melancholy, the types of melancholy, the cures of melancholy.  Oh, and Burton has no problem wandering off into a tangent to discuss whatever else Burton decided was worth relating.  Burton seems to have read everything ever written about melancholy and included it all.  This means the book is in part a pure scientific treatise, but one in which every mythological or literary mention of melancholy is treated with the same sense of authority as every medical treatise.  Thus, in reading about the causes of melancholy (for 400 pages) we discover that just about everything (well, make that everything) causes melancholy--after all, someone somewhere once mentioned that X, whatever X is, has caused someone somewhere to be melancholic.  Oh, but do not despair, everything also cures melancholy.  And since everyone is melancholic, then everyone already knows about being melancholic.

So, one might think that a book detailing every aspect of being depressed would be, well, depressing.  But, there is yet another oddity.  The book isn't depressing.  If you open up at random, it is actually funny.  Consider a passage picked at random:

"Who can give a reason of this diversity of meteors, that it should rain stones, frogs, mice, &c. Rats, which they call lemmer in Norway, and are manifestly observed (as Munster writes) by the inhabitants, to descend and fall with some feculent showers, and like so many locusts, consume all that is green. Leo Afer speaks as much of locusts, about Fez in Barbary there be infinite swarms in their fields upon a sudden: so at Aries in France, 1553, the like happened by the same mischief, all their grass and fruits were devoured, magna incolarum admiratione et consternatione (as Valleriola obser. med. lib. 1. obser. 1. relates) coelum subito obumbrabant, &c. he concludes, it could not be from natural causes, they cannot imagine whence they come, but from heaven. Are these and such creatures, corn, wood, stones, worms, wool, blood, &c. lifted up into the middle region by the sunbeams, as Baracellus the physician disputes, and thence let fall with showers, or there engendered? Cornelius Gemma is of that opinion, they are there conceived by celestial influences: others suppose they are immediately from God, or prodigies raised by art and illusions of spirits, which are princes of the air; to whom Bodin. lib. 2. Theat. Nat. subscribes. In fine, of meteors in general, Aristotle's reasons are exploded by Bernardinus Telesius, by Paracelsus his principles confuted, and other causes assigned, sal, sulphur, mercury, in which his disciples are so expert, that they can alter elements, and separate at their pleasure, make perpetual motions, not as Cardan, Tasneir, Peregrinus, by some magnetical virtue, but by mixture of elements; imitate thunder, like Salmoneus, snow, hail, the sea's ebbing and flowing, give life to creatures (as they say) without generation, and what not? P. Nonius Saluciensis and Kepler take upon them to demonstrate that no meteors, clouds, fogs, vapours, arise higher than fifty or eighty miles, and all the rest to be purer air or element of fire: which Cardan, Tycho, and John Pena manifestly confute by refractions, and many other arguments, there is no such element of fire at all. If, as Tycho proves, the moon be distant from us fifty and sixty semi-diameters of the earth: and as Peter Nonius will have it, the air be so angust, what proportion is there betwixt the other three elements and it?"

Now consider that passage.  First, what it is doing in a Treatise on Melancholy?  I have no idea.  Second, note everything which falls from the sky--how do we know all those things fall from the sky--well, someone said they did.  Burton takes all those accounts seriously, and then weaves it all into a scientific sounding account of meteors.  (The paragraph from which the above was taken, by the way, goes on and on for quite a bit longer.)

Glancing through the book, it becomes obvious that Burton is laughing the whole way through, but the joke is simply taking everything seriously.  It is not that melancholy is funny or that people wrote strange things about it, but the sum total of the attempt to understand melancholy leads one to realize that the whole history of man's attempt to understand himself is so fraught with curiosities and oddities and cranks that it is in the end pretty funny that we are like that.  Burton would have loved blogs--here we have lots of people pretending to explain something, anything.  Imagine taking all the blogs seriously.  Imagine for a second thinking the thoughts of a random person writing on random things was seriously worthy of attention.  What is more idiotic and inane that a random professor writing up thoughts on Burton's 17th century book?  It's funny when you think about it. And the joke is on both the blogger and the reader of the blog.

So, yeah, I liked Burton's book--but I didn't enjoy reading it. At all.  It is, to put it mildly, one of the most tedious books I have ever read.  Imagine reading 50 pages of prose exactly like the passage above.  Now imagine reading 500 pages of it.  The mind rapidly numbs after about a page.  It is funny, really funny, that Burton wrote this book.  It is funny, really funny, that I read it.  And even funnier that I assigned it in my tutorial.  And even funnier still that I am writing about it on this blog.  And even funnier that the Reader of the blog (another funny thing there) is now deciding not to read the book when the book is so funny.  And if you can learn to laugh at the whole joke of this book from its Creation to the Reader reading a blog post about it, then maybe, just maybe, that is the cure for melancholy.  If we can learn to laugh at the Comedy of Human Existence, then why be depressed?