An important contributor to the scholarly rediscovery of texts from the classical tradition that ushered in the Renaissance, the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) also breathed new life into the link between melancholia, art, and genius. Like many before him, Ficino considers fear and sadness to be the core symptoms of melancholia, but he also counts weariness, lethargy, apathy, hopelessness, and pessimism among its related symptoms. Moreover, in Three Books on Life (1489), he proposes various cures that draw on the powers of the celestial bodies to reenergize the exhausted. He was the first to address the specific forms of mental and physical exhaustion experienced by scholars in a lengthy medical-spiritual treatise.
Ficino was both a Neo-Platonist scholar and a priest and was interested in medicine, astrology, magic, and music. He claims that he had two fathers: Diotifeci Ficino of Figline in Valdarno, who was a medical doctor, and the wealthy and powerful banker Cosimo de’ Medici, who became his patron and encouraged him to found the Platonic Academy in Florence: “From the former I was born, from the latter reborn. The former commended me to Galen as both a doctor and a Platonist; the latter consecrated me to the divine Plato. And both the one and the other alike dedicated Marsilio to a doctor—Galen, doctor of the body, Plato, doctor of the soul.” The most important duty of priests and doctors alike, Ficino believes, is “to see to it that men have a sound mind in a sound body…. But since medicine is quite often useless and often harmful without the help of the heavens—a thing which both Hippocrates and Galen admit and I have experienced—astronomy certainly pertains to this priestly charity no less than does medicine.”
1Ficino translated Plato into Latin and wrote treatises on a wide range of subjects, including pestilence, Plotinus, and the music of the spheres. Born under the sign of Saturn, moreover, he also endeavored to revalorize the saturnine temperament in
Three Books on Life and to free it from its traditionally negative connotations. “Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning,” he writes in a letter to a friend; “set, as he is, almost in the midst of my ascendant Aquarius, he is influenced by Mars, also in Aquarius, and the Moon in Capricorn. He is in square aspect to the Sun and Mercury in Scorpio, which occupy the ninth house.”
2According to the astrological and Neo-Platonist doctrines in which Ficino believed, the planets influence numerous aspects of life on Earth—just as the moon rules the waters and governs the movement of ebb and tide, and the female menstrual cycle. In Ficino’s cosmos, everything revolves around the principle of analogy: the microcosm is mirrored in the macrocosm; all material things have their equivalent in immaterial ideas; and all matter ultimately corresponds to and reverberates with other matter. Astrological doctrine suggests that the movement and positions of the celestial bodies at the time of a person’s birth determine his or her character, disposition, and energy level, and even profession, talents, and significant events later in life. The positions of the planets are analyzed by their geometric aspects relative to one another and by their movements through spatial divisions of the ecliptic and the sky—that is, the signs of the zodiac and their positions in the so-called houses. It is, above all, the planet on the ascendant at the hour of one’s birth, it was assumed, that imprints its own qualities on those who are born under its sign.
Saturn and Mars have traditionally been viewed as harmful planets, associated with misfortune and a host of disagreeable psychological qualities. Saturn’s image was particularly gloomy: the slowest moving of the planets, and the one with the longest circuit, it was aligned with fear, coldness, and dryness. Similarly, in debates about whether the melancholic or the phlegmatic temperament is more disagreeable, melancholia usually won the day.
3 Yet in
Three Books on Life, Ficino not only presents the first medical treatise dedicated specifically to the mental and physical health of the scholar but also seeks to revalorize the melancholic temperament and its related characteristics. Driven partly by personal motives, Ficino presents the saturnine disposition as one that is, or can be if fostered and nourished in the correct manner, closely connected with scholarship and genius.
Emphasizing Saturn’s benign qualities—above all, perseverance, patience, steadfastness, and concentration—Ficino presents a peculiar mixture of humoral, Neo-Platonic, alchemical, and magical cures for those born under the planet’s sign. His therapeutics are designed primarily to revitalize and reenergize those worn down by the negative and exhausting side effects of the saturnine disposition, such as fatigue, torpor, sluggishness, and dullness, as well as fear, sadness, madness, and frenzy. Building on the authority of Aristotle or, rather, the Pseudo-Aristotle of
Problemata 30.1, who lavishes extended praise on melancholia and aligns it with genius and art, Ficino, too, argues that a melancholic nature is “a unique and divine gift.”
4 His
Three Books on Life were highly influential during his lifetime and ushered in what would become a veritable melancholia fashion in Europe, which was evidenced, for example, by the immense popularity of Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and which culminated two centuries later in the Romantic celebration of hypersensitivity, world-weariness, and artistic genius.
As the title suggests, the
Three Books consist of three separate parts. Book 1,
On a Healthy Life or
On Caring for the Health of Learned People, is primarily medical in outlook, drawing on Galen’s humoral theory. Book 2,
On a Long Life, deals with the health concerns of older people and contains practical suggestions for living a long and energy-abundant life. The final book,
On Obtaining a Life Both Healthy and Long from Heaven, is dedicated to astrological magic and how it can be deployed to reinvigorate worn-out bodies and minds. Synthesizing medical, astrological, and philosophical discourses, it is without doubt the book that is most challenging for the modern reader, owing not just to the now discredited assumptions of Ptolemaic astronomy but also to Ficino’s belief in Neo-Platonic concepts, such as the existence of a world-soul, various “supramundane” or “supracelestial” gods, the intelligence of the spheres, star-souls, and a host of demons of varying moral allegiances. Ficino believes that there are three worlds: the terrestrial, the celestial, and the angelic. He conceives of the heavenly bodies as intermediaries, copies of pure Platonic ideas, whose task it is to intercede between the material and the immaterial worlds.
5In Book 1, On a Healthy Life, Ficino warns scholars not to neglect body and spirit. The spirit, in particular, is the instrument
with which they are able in a way to measure and grasp the whole world. [It] is defined by doctors as a vapor of blood—pure, subtle, hot, and clear. After being generated by the heat of the heart out of the more subtle blood, it flies to the brain; and there the soul uses it continually for the exercise of the interior as well as the exterior senses. This is why the blood subserves the spirit; the spirit, the senses; and finally, the senses, reason.
6The idea that spirit is a “vapor of blood…generated by the heat of the heart” is a surprisingly materialistic definition of spirit for a Neo-Platonist and aptly illustrates Ficino’s often conflicting intellectual allegiances. He proposes three causes of melancholia in the learned: the first being celestial; the second, natural; and the third, human. The celestial causes can be explained by the fact that
both Mercury, who invites us to investigate doctrines, and Saturn, who makes us persevere in investigating doctrines and retain them when discovered, are said by astronomers to be somewhat cold and dry…, just like the melancholic nature, according to physicians. And this same nature Mercury and Saturn impart from birth to their followers, learned people, and preserve and augment it day by day.
7The second (and natural) cause of melancholia lies in the fact that the soul of those engaged in the sciences, especially the difficult ones, “must draw in upon itself from external things to internal as from the circumference to the center.” Furthermore, the scholarly soul must stay immovably at the center, and to be fixed in the center, Ficino believes, is above all the “property of the Earth itself, to which black bile is analogous.”
8 Therefore, he argues,
black bile continually incites the soul both to collect itself together into one and to dwell on itself and to contemplate itself. And being analogous to the world’s center, it forces the investigation to the center of individual subjects, and it carries one to the contemplation of whatever is highest, since, indeed, it is most congruent with Saturn, the highest of planets. Contemplation itself, in its turn, by a continual recollection and compression, as it were, brings on a nature similar to black bile.
9The third (and human) cause of melancholia in scholars identified by Ficino is once again based on a materialistic conception of the relationship between mind and body: frequent agitation, he argues, “greatly dries up the brain,” exhausts all reserves of bodily moisture, and, as a consequence, extinguishes all heat. The brain becomes dry and cold, and, as a result of the relentless activity of intellectual inquiry, the spirit, too, is gradually depleted. The spent spiritual substance has to be replenished from the subtle and clear parts of the blood, which is thus also exhausted. The blood that remains is consequently rendered “dense, dry and black,” resembling black bile. Furthermore, the scholar’s dependence on the brain and the heart means that less blood and energy can flow to the stomach and the liver. Therefore, foods, especially fatty ones, are not properly digested. Finally, a lack of physical exercise, common among sedentary scholars, means that “thick, dense, clinging, dusky vapors” are not sufficiently purged.
It is Ficino’s second point about the link between melancholia and the activity of self-contemplation that constitutes his most interesting and original contribution to the corpus of exhaustion theories. Unlike Galen, who believed that the spirit was a slave to the mixtures of the body, and unlike the medieval theologians, who understood acedic exhaustion as the result of a moral and spiritual failing, Ficino proposes that exhaustion can be the result of specific mental activities. Black bile, he writes, “continually incites the soul both to collect itself together into one and to dwell on itself and to contemplate itself.” This statement reveals most clearly the way in which he seeks to redefine the melancholic temperament as positive: Ficino aligns it not only with scholarship and the ability to contemplate abstract philosophical questions but also with the quality of self-reflexivity as such.
The early modern period is often seen as being characterized above all by the birth of the self-reflexive, self-aware subject, the individual who questions established values and authorities, and who reflects on his or her own status as a thinking and evaluating being. William Shakespeare’s
Hamlet (1603) illustrates this changing paradigm: Hamlet can be interpreted as a representation of the acedic and melancholic type, and his story as a cautionary tale about the adverse effects of introspection.
10 Walter Benjamin, for example, writes: “The indecisiveness of the prince, in particular, is nothing other than saturnine
acedia. Saturn causes people to be ‘apathetic, indecisive, slow.’ The fall of the tyrant is caused by indolence of the heart.”
11 G. F. Hegel presents a similar interpretation: Hamlet’s “noble soul is not made for this kind of energetic activity; and, full of disgust with the world and life…he eventually perishes owing to his own hesitation and a complication of external circumstances.”
12Incapable of blindly following the old ways (that is, simply to avenge the murder of his father by killing Claudius, his uncle), Hamlet is also unable to break with the avenger’s role. He is paralyzed by a form of self-reflexivity that has become an instrument of self-torture rather than enlightenment. His critical self-awareness has turned into a curse; the ability to think through a problem and to look at it from various angles results in inaction and self-loathing. Trapped in a state of pathological indecisiveness as a result of a perverted form of self-analysis that is both exhaustive and exhausting, he not only fails to solve his original problem but provokes further catastrophes and bloodshed.
The burden of contemplative self-reflexivity, and the way in which it literally weighs down the new scientifically orientated subject, are also illustrated by Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving
Melencolia I (1514). It shows a despondent female figure who, with her head in her hand, sits surrounded by the scattered paraphernalia of science and art, staring gloomily into the distance. She listlessly holds a geometrical tool in her lap but is too weary to use it. An hourglass in the background signals that she is wasting time and that it is running out; a set of empty scales indicates that she may have lost her sense of balance; a scattering of tools suggest that she has probably worked too hard and on too many projects simultaneously; and an emaciated, sleeping dog and a limp, depressed-looking putto with a bowed head further reinforce the all-pervasive sense of exhaustion. Although the tools of critical reasoning and the keys to facilitate access to various spheres of knowledge are within touching distance, the woman is, like Hamlet, simply too weary to act, weighed down by the boundless possibilities and responsibilities that come with her newly gained status as a self-reflexive subject.
In The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (1998), the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg describes a similar struggle with the burden of autonomy and the responsibility for constant self-improvement and self-realization, a “terrible,” new kind of freedom that is perceived as an affliction rather than an opportunity, and that he sees as being responsible for the rapid spread of depression-related illnesses in the post–Second World War period. Yet Ficino’s, Shakespeare’s, and Dürer’s examples reveal that self-reflexivity and an awareness of the range of possible choices a contemplative, self-aware subject faces were considered a profoundly exhausting burden many centuries earlier. Indeed, the birth of the modern subject in the fifteenth century might be seen as entailing a sense that exhaustion is a necessary correlative of self-consciousness as such.
Ficino also distinguishes between natural and pathological melancholia. Following Galen’s argument on melancholic vapors and adustion, he states that when an excess of melancholic humor is burned, its fumes cloud our judgment and render us excitable and frenzied. However, when it is extinguished and only a “foul black soot remains, it makes people stolid and stupid.” This pathological form of melancholia, he hastens to emphasize, is not at all conducive to genius and scholarship. By contrast, the natural—that is, the temperamental—form of melancholia can lead to refined judgment, perseverance, and wisdom. But, Ficino warns, this is not automatically the case:
If [black bile] is alone, it beclouds the spirit with a mass that is black and dense, terrifies the soul, and dulls the intelligence. Moreover, if it is mixed simply with phlegm, when “cold blood” stands in the way “around the heart” it brings on sluggishness and torpor by its heavy frigidity; and as is the nature of any very dense material, when melancholy of this kind gets cold, it gets cold in the extreme. When we are in this state, we hope for nothing, we fear everything, and “it is weariness to look at the dome of the sky.”…When [black bile] is too abundant, whether alone or joined with phlegm, it makes the spirits heavier and colder, afflicts the mind continually with weariness, dulls the sharpness of the intellect, and keeps the blood from leaping “around the Arcadian’s heart.”
13Black bile mixed with phlegm, then, can induce sluggishness, lethargy, and hopelessness. Excessive amounts of black bile can lead to both mental and physical fatigue and cognitive impairments, as well as slowing the movement of the blood. Yet Ficino concludes that black bile as such is not harmful, provided that it is rarefied and mixed with other humors. Combined with appropriate amounts of phlegm, yellow bile, and blood, this humor, too, can unfold its beneficent characteristics. Like Hippocrates and Galen before him, Ficino argues that the right mixture of humors is the prerequisite for both physical and mental health. Black bile differs from the other humors principally in its tendency toward extreme states: “For black bile is like iron; when it starts to get cold, it gets cold in the extreme; and on the contrary, once it tends towards hot, it gets hot in the extreme.” It thus needs to be tempered by the more moderate humors. Melancholia, too, is of course a state of extremes: either its sufferers are agitated, frenzied, mad, and furious or they are subdued, weary, fearful, and hopeless. Therefore, those born under the sign of Saturn, and who are battling with an excess of black bile, need above all to learn to explore the states of mind located on the spectrum between the polar extremes.
Ficino also singles out specific behaviors that can adversely affect a scholar’s natural proclivity to melancholic exhaustion and deplete his energies: among these, he counts sexual intercourse, gluttony, and sleeping in the morning. Just like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century campaigners against masturbation, Ficino strongly believes that the loss of seminal fluid drains the spirits, weakens the brain, and ruins the stomach and the heart. Overindulging in wine and food, too, is harmful, as excessive consumption directs all human energy to the stomach and to the task of digestion. Finally, Ficino identifies staying awake during the night and sleeping after sunrise as crimes against the cosmic rhythm: the man who sleeps during the day “no doubt fights both with the order of the universe and especially with himself, while he is disturbed and distracted by contrary motions at the same time.” Scholars, in particular, need to rest regularly, to give their minds the opportunity to recuperate and relax, since “fatigue of the body is bad, that of the mind is worse, and the worst is fatigue of both at the same time, distracting the person by opposite but simultaneous motions and ruining life.”
14The main component of Ficino’s therapeutic regime designed to battle melancholic exhaustion is dietetics. He compiles long lists of forbidden foods and strongly promotes the beneficial qualities of others, especially cinnamon, saffron, and sandal. He is also fond of dairy products, pine nuts, melon and cucumber seeds, light wine, gold and silver infusions, salads, and raisins. Furthermore, he praises the healing powers of sweet lyres and song and recommends “the frequent viewing of shining water and of green or red color, the haunting of gardens and groves and pleasant walks along rivers and through lovely meadows; and I also strongly approve of horseback riding, driving, and smooth sailing, but above all, of variety, easy occupations, diversified unburdensome business, and the constant company of agreeable people.”
15He provides recipes for various energizing syrups, pills, and electuaries. One of his pills, which he calls the golden or magical one, is designed to draw out phlegm, choler, and black bile; to strengthen the body; and to sharpen and illuminate the spirits, so that they “may rejoice in their expansion and light”:
Take, therefore, twelve grains of gold, especially its leaves if they are pure; one-half dram apiece of frankincense, myrrh, saffron, aloe-wood, cinnamon, citron-peel, Melissa, raw carlet silk, white ben and red; one dram apiece of purple roses, of red sandal, or red coral, and of the three sorts of myrobalans (emblic, chebule, and Indic), with an amount of properly washed aloe equal to the weight of all the rest. Make pills with pure wine of the best possible quality.
16The recommendation of specific dietary regimes is a staple in the corpus of exhaustion theories: most therapeutic suggestions proposed by figures as diverse as Galen, George Cheyne, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Silas Weir Mitchell, and various practitioners and popular writers interested in chronic fatigue syndrome revolve around cutting out specific food groups and promoting the inclusion of others.
In Book 3,
On Obtaining a Life Both Healthy and Long from Heaven, Ficino’s cures become even more esoteric and drift from the terrain of humoral medicine into that of astrological magic. Here, he seeks to draw on the natural powers of the celestial bodies and to enlist the services of various demons to reinvigorate the exhausted bodies and minds of his readers. The therapeutics suggested in the final part of his study are based on the principle of cosmic sympathy, an all-encompassing macro-microcosm analogy.
17 Ficino believes that various materials, such as stones, metals, and talismans, as well as certain herbs and spices, contain the quintessence of the “world soul” and can thus enable us to enter into a closer relationship with the world of ideas. For example, “orphic dancing”—that is, movements and music that echo the movements of the spheres—can be invigorating and calming. Song imitating the celestials “wonderfully arouses our spirit upwards to the celestial influence and the celestial influence downwards to our spirit.”
18The key common property of the human species, Ficino proposes, is solar. He infers this to be the case “from the stature of man, erect and beautiful, from his subtle humors and the clearness of his spirit, from the perspicuity of his imagination and his pursuit of truth and honor.” To replenish his energy, man should therefore surround himself above all with things solar, which are
all those gems and flowers which are called heliotrope because they turn towards the Sun, likewise gold, orpiment and golden colors, chrysolite, carbuncle, myrrh, frankincense, musk, amber, balsam, yellow honey, sweet calamus, saffron, spikenard, cinnamon, aloe-wood and the rest of the spices; the ram, the hawk, the cock, the swan, the lion, the scarab beetle, the crocodile, and people who are blond, curly-haired, prone to baldness, and magnanimous. The above-mentioned things can be adapted partly to foods, partly to ointments and fumigations, partly to usages and habits. You should frequently perceive and think about these things and love them above all; you should also get a lot of light.
19Saturn, in contrast, does not represent the common quality and lot of the human race, but only that of individuals “set apart from others, divine or brutish, blessed or bowed down with the extreme of misery.” Those born under the planet’s sign should “beg grace from that star rather than from another, and to await from any given star not just any gift and what belongs to other stars, but a gift proper to that one.” For the purpose of reenergizing the children of Saturn, Ficino thus recommends materials that are “somewhat earthy, dusky and leaden; we use smoky jasper, lodestone, cameo, and chalcedony; gold and golden marcasite are partly useful for this.” He defends Saturn against the charge of being harmful by nature and instead suggests that the planet’s unique gifts should be used “just as doctors sometimes use poisons:…The force of Saturn, therefore, cautiously taken, will sometimes profit, just as doctors say those things do which are astringent and constrictive, even those things which stupefy, as opium and mandrake.” According to the macro-microcosm analogy, Saturn both resembles and shapes the intellectual because he is the head of the widest sphere and travels a lengthy circuit: “He is the highest of planets; hence they call that man fortunate whom Saturn fortunately favors.”
20Essentially,
Three Books on Life propagates the combination of the powers of medicine, religion, and astrology to replenish human energies and thus to counter an exhaustion seen to threaten human life as such. Astrological doctrine does of course suggest a largely deterministic worldview, in that our fate is assumed to be predetermined or at least substantially shaped by stellar constellations on which we have no influence. However, Ficino is quick to deny this charge: he repeatedly asserts the importance of free will, agency, and the responsibility of individuals to improve and enhance their fate. The gifts from the celestial bodies come into our bodies through our rightly prepared spirit: we need to understand who we are and what are the forces that shape us, and we can reach our full potential only when we, “by prayer, by study, by manner of life, and by conduct imitate the beneficence, action, and order of the celestials.” To live well and prosper, it is essential to know one’s “natural bent” and one’s beneficial personal star.
21 Living in harmony with one’s celestial patron enables us fully to tap into our energy reserves, while battling against the order of the universe will result in complete exhaustion: the heavens will feel like our personal enemy, drain our resources, and thwart our efforts, and all our labors will be in vain.
In
The Rings of Saturn (1995), the German writer W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) revives the age-old connection between astrology and mood. Sebald’s essayistic and partly fictional, partly autobiographical text, in which an existentially depressed and increasingly world-weary narrator wanders through a ruin-strewn East Anglia, is based on his “pilgrimage” through Suffolk in 1992, which culminated in a nervous breakdown exactly one year later. Convalescing in the hospital, while still suffering from various, possibly psychosomatic, ailments, including severe mental, spiritual, and physical exhaustion manifest in complete paralysis, Sebald’s narrator recollects the details of his journey. It took place in August—a time of year traditionally thought to be under the influence of the dark forces of Saturn. During his wanderings, he contemplates the material traces of human history, a history that, in his view, is above all characterized by calamities and cruelty. The narrator’s gaze is that of a severe melancholic, unfailingly drawn to that which is dead, dying, decaying, or vanishing. He finds evidence of human callousness and nature’s indifference to our plight in the most innocent-looking flotsam and jetsam, and every object he contemplates inevitably sets in motion a process of association that builds up to yet another case in point proving the cruelty, frailty, and pointlessness of human existence and the transient nature of all our passions and efforts.
Even the sight of a seemingly innocuous dish of fish and chips, served in an empty seaside guesthouse, appears to him “dreadful.” Sebald’s description of the dish is reminiscent of that of a war zone or of a site where a massacre has taken place: “The tartare sauce that I had had to squeeze out of a plastic sachet was turned grey [
gräulich] by the sooty breadcrumbs, and the fish itself, or what feigned to be fish, lay a sorry wreck among the grass-green peas and the remains of soggy chips that gleamed with fat.”
22 This plate of food, like everything else he encounters on his wanderings, is viewed through a glass darkly and illustrates the ways in which someone whose judgment and perceptive apparatus are clouded by melancholia might perceive and interpret phenomena: Sebald here conjures up imagery of rust, destruction, decay, and ruins. The German word
gräulich denotes both grayness and horror. Moreover, the dish reminds Sebald of the terrible misfortunes that herrings, the “restless wanderer[s] of the seas,” suffer on a daily basis at the hands of an uncaring fishing industry and leads him to question whether the unremitting, grand-scale fish genocides that are taking place in our oceans are ethically justifiable.
23 We simply don’t know anything about the inner life of the herring, Sebald muses, and therefore cannot know whether they are able to feel fear and pain like we do.
The long sentences of a seventeenth-century medical writer that meander cumbersomely across the pages remind him of “sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness.” Sebald describes the decaying seaside town of Lowestoft, one of the many victims of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal economic policies, in characteristically gloomy terms:
The damage spread slowly at first, smouldering underground, and then caught like wildfire. The wharves and factories closed down one after the other…. Nowadays, in some of the streets almost every other house is up for sale; factory owners, shopkeepers and private individuals are sliding ever deeper into debt; week in, week out, some bankrupt or unemployed person hangs himself; nearly a quarter of the population is now practically illiterate; and there is no sign of an end to the encroaching misery. Although I knew all of this, I was unprepared for the feeling of wretchedness that instantly seized hold of me in Lowestoft.
24In the course of his pilgrimage, Sebald is drawn not only to ruins of all kinds, to decaying manor houses and disaster zones, but also to English eccentrics, many of whom are collectors of strange objects and have curious obsessions to which they dedicate all their time. To the narrator, their peculiar projects and collectibles emphasize further the absurdity of human existence and the arbitrary and futile nature of our efforts and desires. Sights that would evoke neutral or even positive associations in nonmelancholic observers consistently remind him of monstrosities, acts of barbarism, and the inevitability of death: a couple making love on a beach, for example, which he observes from afar, makes him think of the last shudders of a hanged man and a beastly sea monster, the last of its kind: “Misshapen, like some great mollusk washed ashore, they lay there, to all appearances a single being, a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils.”
25The title of Sebald’s text suggests a causal link between Saturn and his narrator’s unremittingly disconsolate thoughts on the history of human cruelty, which render him increasingly hopeless and weary and drain him ever more insistently of the will to live, and references to the planet’s gloomy powers are woven into the fabric of numerous reflections. Saturn is mentioned, for example, in a passage on the night in Thomas Browne’s writings that chimes with the narrator’s own sad song: “The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn—an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.”
26Saturn here is associated with prostration, graveyards, and the Grim Reaper. Sebald’s narrator is drawn again and again to “chronicle[s] of disaster,” including historical volumes that detail the horrors of the First World War, such as sinking battleships, plane crashes, the perishing masses in the swamps of Galicia, bombed cities, corpses rotting in the trenches, burst zeppelins, and many other “scenes of destruction, mutilation, desecration, starvation, conflagration, and freezing cold.” One of the many calamities that preoccupy him and on which he reflects in some detail is the story of a devastating drought in China between 1876 and 1879, which claimed the lives of millions who died of exhaustion and hunger:
A Baptist preacher named Timothy Richard, for example, noted that one effect of the catastrophe, which grew more apparent week by week, was that all movement was slowing down. Singly, in groups and in straggling lines, people tottered across the country, and the merest breath of air might suffice to topple them and leave them lying by the wayside forever. Simply raising a hand, closing an eyelid, or exhaling one’s last breath might take, it sometimes seemed, half a century. And as time dissolved, so too did all other relations.
27Here, it is the description of the physical and behavioral symptoms of exhaustion—the slowing of movement, the astonishing effort that even such small gestures as raising a hand or lowering an eyelid require, and the gradual loss of strength—that must have chimed with the narrator’s own experiences. They provide an apt image of his own melancholic exhaustion, which is represented as a form of existential hopelessness that is philosophical and historical in origin. The narrator is saddened so severely by the horrors of history that he loses all hope in the future of humanity.
It is, above all, the memory of the Holocaust that haunts Sebald’s text. Sebald left Germany to work at the University of Manchester from 1966 to 1969 and, after a year in St. Gallen in Switzerland, accepted a teaching position at Norwich University in 1970, never to return permanently to Germany. Although he does not explicitly mention the Third Reich in The Rings of Saturn and instead focuses on tales of dreadfulness, suffering, and cruelty from other historical periods, it becomes ever more obvious that it is the unbearable memory of recent German history and the horrific cruelties carried out by his countrymen that weigh on the narrator and deprive him ever more of his energy, his faith in humanity, and, ultimately, his will to live. Human existence appears to him as nothing but a grand theater of cruelty and absurdity, and, fittingly, his body expresses his philosophical misgivings by succumbing to complete paralysis at the end of his journey into the heart of saturnine darkness.
The Danish director Lars von Trier, too, pays homage to the ancient tradition that links melancholia and Saturn in his film
Melancholia (2011), in which two sisters prepare for an apocalyptic clash between Earth and the rogue planet Melancholia, which has entered Earth’s orbit. The sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Clare (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are both of a melancholic disposition, Justine being prone to existential weariness and extreme physical and mental exhaustion, while Clare is firmly in the grip of fear. Trier assigns one of the age-old core symptoms of melancholia, sadness and fear, to each sister, thus acknowledging the different guises in which melancholia can manifest itself. Part 1 of the film is dedicated to Justine’s story. A beautiful advertising executive, Justine succumbs to a severe form of depression on her wedding night and, unable to keep her true feelings hidden and to participate in the lavish celebration organized in her honor on her sister’s luxurious estate, loses both her husband and her job.
Although, on the surface, Justine’s sadness seems “causeless,” the onset of her depression appearing to be triggered by a celestial constellation and the foreboding sense of the arrival of the planet Melancholia, this reading does not hold. Rather than representing her as unreasonable, Trier shows that Justine is in fact a realist, someone who can see through social convention and who understands life as what it really is: a pointless and cruel game with no purpose, structured around empty and meaningless ritual. In various interviews, Trier emphasized that the key idea for the film came to him in a therapy session, when his analyst told him that depressives tend to be more level-headed in the face of impending disaster, since they expect the worst and, when the worst happens, are consequently less surprised.
28 Justine is very much based on Trier’s own experience of depression, and
Melancholia, together with
Antichrist (2009) and
Nymphomaniac (2013), forms a part of what he describes as his “depression trilogy.”
Antichrist is dedicated to the exploration of excessive grief, while
Nymphomaniac analyzes the anatomy of addiction.
Trier carefully establishes various triggers for Justine’s mental and physical breakdown, these being psychological, sociopolitical, and philosophical. Justine’s connection with her new husband seems lifeless from the start—although he appears to be in love with her, he is not her intellectual match. Unable to articulate his feelings and reverting to clichés in his short and embarrassing wedding-supper speech, he fails both to read and to halt his bride’s dramatic change of mood. Justine’s parents, too, let her down in her hour of need. Her mother delivers a cynical and bitter address, in which she attacks the idea of marriage and love, and repeatedly advises Justine to get out of it all as quickly as she can. Justine’s father is preoccupied with flirting and clowning, and although his daughter repeatedly begs him to stay because she urgently needs to speak to him, he leaves his room at night, having been unable to resist the offer of a ride home. Justine’s unappetizing boss spends the evening trying to bully her into supplying a tagline for an advertising campaign, until she explodes and tells him what she really thinks of him and of the marketing business in general.
Even Clare is unsympathetic to Justine’s breakdown. She is bitterly disappointed by her sister’s lack of gratitude for the wedding party she has organized and cannot understand why Justine is unable at least to keep up the masquerade until everyone has left. At one point during the wedding party, Justine withdraws into a study and begins to tear down the art books that are on display there. She replaces the abstract Kazimir Malevich prints with images that externalize her state of mind, including Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow and John Everett Millais’s painting of the drowned Ophelia. It becomes obvious that she longs for death—for snow, stillness, the end of everything. Her death wish is, of course, ultimately granted when the cataclysmic planetary collision takes place. The overture to Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, which opens and closes the film, as well as the highly aestheticized cinematography and stylized images of the catastrophe further emphasize the powerful pull of the death drive: the end, to Justine, is a thing of absolute, sublime beauty, the glorious fulfillment of her greatest desire.
Justine’s mental and physical decline after the wedding night is rapid—she is so exhausted that she cannot wash herself and is barely able to leave her room. She describes her condition to her sister as akin to wading through a field of gray yarn, which is slowing her movements and pulling her to the ground. She drags herself around the house like a zombie and breaks into tears during a meal because, to her, all food tastes like ashes. The film opens with a close-up of her postwedding face—an image epitomizing absolute exhaustion: her hair is limp and unwashed; her eyes are droopy and clouded, and she can barely manage to keep them open; her complexion is ashen; and her ice-blue lips are drained of all blood.
When eventually catastrophe does strike, however, Justine is the only one who is able to cope. Clare’s rich, rational husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland), turns out to be a coward who kills himself when he realizes that Melancholia has not passed Earth, as he believed it would, but is indeed on collision course with it. Clare, having been obsessed with the planetary clash for months, becomes increasingly unhinged and hysterical, and, on the day the world literally ends, Justine is the one who takes control and who appeases Clare’s little boy. She builds a magic tepee—a soothing illusion that provides solace for both Clare and her son and that represents the power of art and make-believe to furnish us at least with some temporary (if illusory) protection from the horror that is reality.
Like Ficino and Sebald, Trier ultimately valorizes melancholia. The existentially depressed melancholic, although paralyzed by her condition under normal circumstances, is the only figure in this film who recognizes, and is able to cope with, the truth. All the other characters are either deluded or bitter, nihilistic, or facetious. And, of course, it is the melancholic who is associated not only with insight and knowledge but also with art and the capacity to use her imagination and creativity to provide consolation to others. The most radical message of Trier’s film is that the melancholic is right: her worldview, her pessimism, her uncompromising perception of the sad and naked truth of human existence as determined by hypocrisy, greed, cruelty, and futility are represented as the truth in the end.
The idea that melancholic or depressed people may have a more truthful or realistic view of the world around them than the nondepressed, manifest above all in their bleakly pessimistic and self-critical outlook, is embraced even by psychoanalysts and psychologists. Sigmund Freud, for example, believed that melancholics have a “keener eye for the truth than others who are not melancholic.”
29 The psychologist Shelley E. Taylor writes that normal human thought and perception
is marked not by accuracy but positive self-enhancing illusions about the self, the world, and the future. Moreover, these illusions appear actually to be adaptive, promoting rather than undermining mental health…. The mildly depressed appear to have more accurate views of themselves, the world, and the future than do normal people…[they] clearly lack the illusions that in normal people promote mental health and buffer them against setbacks.
30According to Taylor and Trier, then, it is the nondepressed who are deluded about the nature of reality. The melancholics and the depressed have simply taken off their rosy glasses and put down the shield of soothing illusions, daring to stare unprotected into the abyss of human existence. In Sebald’s case, it is the confrontation with the sheer horror of the truth about human nature and human history that plunges him into a vortex of existential exhaustion. Ficino, too, acknowledges the emotional, spiritual, and cognitive burden that comes in the wake of self-reflexivity and as a consequence of the new avenues of rational and critical enquiry open to the early modern subject. However, his account is essentially optimistic: as long as we know ourselves, our strengths, our weaknesses, and of course our beneficial stars, and do not fight against our astrologically predetermined nature but instead embrace it, we can learn to explore our full potential and live rich and energy-abundant lives.