17 In Praise of Melancholy

A bad and peevish disease, which makes men degenerate into beasts.

Melanelius, quoted by Burton

Great is the force of imagination, and much more ought the cause of melancholy to be ascribed to this alone, than to the distemperature of the body.

Arnoldus, quoted by Burton

The greatest enemy to men, is man, who by the devil’s instigation is still ready to do mischief, his own executioner, a wolf, a devil, to himself, and others.

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

For guidance on the vexing issue of melancholy, depression, black bile, we must turn to the world expert, renowned scholarly reflector and gentle intellect, Robert Burton, who wrote that most cheerful and cheering of books, An Anatomy of Melancholy, in 1621. Boswell reports that the melancholic Johnson described it as ‘the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours earlier than he wanted to rise’. In its day, it was a huge bestseller, running to at least eight editions, by which, my edition reports, ‘the bookseller got an estate.’ Throw away your Prozac and buy this book.

That the book was a big hit should come as no surprise, because it came out during a miserable period in history. Merry England was dead or dying. Burton’s book, 780 pages of the most delightful misery, happily written when bipolar disorder was still called melancholy, was published roughly halfway between the Henrician Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, those two major disasters for lovers of life and liberty. Old medieval values were still widespread, but the age of anxiety, Puritanism, individualism and money-grubbing was gaining momentum. Merry England was under attack from the new Puritan middle class. A population increase had led to a massive rise in poverty. The Tudors were cracking down on beggars and idlers, on wandering musicians and strolling players. The old religious festivals had been banned by Cranmer. Merry-making on Sundays was attacked. The fun was being drained from national life. It is, therefore, safe to assume that there were more melancholy people in 1624, than, say, in the fifteenth century, when such a book did not need to be written. The book is also almost contemporary with Shakespeare’s study of isolation, Hamlet, and Marlowe’s study of ambition, Dr Faustus. It was also written during the great expansion of government power of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The meat of Burton’s book is thousands of quotes on the subject of melancholy from classical sources (for this reason, it has traditionally been plundered by writers looking to make themselves look clever with Latin quotes). This would suggest that the Ancient Romans and Greeks suffered from melancholy, too, which doesn’t surprise me, as the Romans, particularly, lived in a rapacious, warlike, exploitative oligarchy, much like Britain and the US today. Some of them might have enjoyed this, but it led to misery on a grand scale for the mass of the citizens and slaves.

It may also be true that, aside from external factors, melancholy is just a fact of life. Indeed, says Burton, when reflecting on the causes of melancholy, it seems to have been a curse of man ever since the Fall. So, it’s simply tough luck, Burton appears to be saying: deal with it. Melancholy is part of what it means to be human, and it’s been part of the human condition since God first condemned us to delve and spin rather than just loaf around in the Garden of Eden:

[Man’s] disobedience, pride, ambition, intemperance, incredulity, curiosity; from whence proceeded original sin, and that general corruption of mankind, as from a fountain flowed all bad inclinations and actual transgressions which cause our several calamaties inflicted upon us for our sins …

Melancholy, therefore, is a punishment for evil: Paul, Rom ii, 9: ‘Tribulation and anguish on the soul of every man that does evil.’ So, there is no escape. Even the wise, lucky and prosperous, Burton says, suffer from melancholy:

From these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it … Q. Metellus, in whom Valerius gives instance of all happiness, ‘the most fortunate man then living in that most flourishing city of Rome, of noble parentage, a proper man of person, well qualified, healthful, rich, honourable, a senator, a consul, happy in his wife, happy in his children,’ etc, yet this man was not devoid of melancholy, he had his share of sorrow … for a pint of honey thou shalt here likely find a gallon of gall, for a dram of pleasure a pound of pain, for an inch of mirth an ell of moan; as ivy doth an oak, these miseries encompass all our life.

This itself is massively cheering: if you are depressed, he is saying, there is nothing wrong with you. It’s natural!

In the Middle Ages, the sin of sloth came very close to melancholy. The original term for the seventh deadly sin was ‘acedia’, which meant something closer to unhappiness. As Thomas Pynchon puts it in his 1993 essay, ‘Nearer, My Couch, to Thee’, on the subject:

‘Acedia’ in Latin means sorrow, deliberately self-directed, turned away from God, a loss of spiritual determination that then feeds back on in to the process, soon enough producing what are currently known as guilt and depression, eventually pushing us to where we will do anything, in the way of venial sin and bad judgement, to avoid the discomfort.

Acedia was a radical giving-up on life, and it was used to apply to a monk who felt that nothing was worth it, he was losing his faith and becoming slack in his observances, wailing, ‘Oh, what’s the point?’, when a brother tried to get him out of his cell. Sloth was the worst of all sins, since it would lead to the other sins.

So, in other words, depression was a sin – which must have made it doubly difficult to cope with: for not only were you depressed, you were also conscious of the knowledge that you were committing a deadly sin by being depressed, a fact that surely would have only made you more depressed, making you more sinful, and so on and so forth right into the seventh circle of hell.

Among the causes of melancholy, Burton lists bad diet. Pork, goat, beef, venison, fish, pulses, root vegetables, cucumbers, gourds, bread and wine … it seems that everything is bad for you. Beer, perhaps, gets off most lightly: ‘“’tis a most wholesome (so Polydore Virgil calleth it) and a pleasant drink”, it is more subtile and better, for the hop that rarefies it, hath an especial virtue against melancholy, as our herbalists confess.’ I, personally, also find beer to be an effective antidote against black bile.

One of Burton’s other solutions is merriment: ‘In my judgement none so present, none so powerful, none so apposite as a cup of strong drink, mirth, music, and merry company.’ He calls music ‘a roaring-meg against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul’. This is the power of jazz, or rock ’n’ roll, or modern dance music. It gets us into ourselves; it is the precise opposite of a distraction. All the other things are distractions because they are about hopes or regrets. Music brings us into the present. It can literally transform. And the blues, of course, the soundtrack to slavery, forges something good and life-affirming from the rough materials of misery.

A similar approach to melancholy appears in medieval texts, which recommend joyful thoughts for good health and promote what historian Linda Paterson calls ‘a wilfully cheerful disposition’. The thirteenth-century troubadour Peire d’Alvernhe, for example, wrote:

For gloom and deep brooding produce no goodness or acts of prowess, but only damage and disruption; for just as all harmful frustration arises from greed, so all black deeds soaring from habitual moroseness. Anyone who desires joy should therefore keep to the straight path, and leave gloom and vile looks to villains and base churls.

Today, gone are good company, good cheer and good beer as cures. Melancholy has been professionalized, commodified, industrialized. It has been transformed into a ‘condition’ with a costly chemical cure. In come the new top five: Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Wellbutrin and Effexor, all of which sound like the names of far-off galaxies in an episode of Star Trek. Otherworldly; manna from heaven, and certainly charmless, sterile, antiseptic, coldly rational, unromantic, pleasure-free. These pills make the most gigantic profits for their dealers, the drugs giants like GlaxoSmithKline, Wellcome, Pfizer and the rest. Depression is big business. In 2000, sales of prescription anti-depressants reached over $10 billion in the US, and that figure rockets every year. It is estimated that one in twenty-five people in the UK are on anti-depressants, as well as 60,000 children, the emerging market. It’s a growth industry. Buy shares in depression! Money from misery! Profits from pain! While this is all excellent news if you a director of or shareholder in one of the pharmaceutical giants, it produces an enormous bill for the NHS in the UK and for individuals in the US with their private healthcare insurance (and their private healthcare insurance in turn keeps people in jobs they hate). And are they doing any good? One recent study even linked anti-depressant use to suicide, and there are apparently so many of us taking them in the UK that they have entered the water supply through our excrement and urine, raising the possibility that even more of us are on them than is thought.

Other drugs such as Ativan and Xanax are being sold as antianxiety drugs, drugs to help you fight panic. No one ever suggests, of course, that the fault for your depression may lie not with you but with the things that you are expected to do in our hypercompetitive, meritocratic, money-based, godless society. Yes, you are depressed, but that’s the fault of the world, not you. So don’t change yourself to fit in with an unhelpful world; instead, change your world.

One friend of mine who ‘suffers’ from ‘depression’ is John Moore. In his case, the condition has been named ‘bipolar disorder’, but I think it more elegant, respectful, noble and enjoyable to call it melancholy. In a previous book, I described John as the laziest man in the world. What I did not mention before is that John is of chronically atrabilious temperament. His bile is black. When his now ex-wife would try to get him out of bed in the morning, he would reply: ‘I’ll get out of bed when there’s something worth getting up for.’ As Burton says: ‘It is a received opinion that a melancholy man cannot sleep overmuch … nothing offends them more, or causeth this malady sooner, than waking.’ Yes, well, idlers know the feeling: Victoria chides me daily for being grumpy on waking.

John has been on anti-depressants for over four years. He says he started taking them as a result of peer pressure; his melancholy made him unsuited to working in the world:

I think I started taking them to be seen to be taking them, as I was being told that my depression was unacceptable. I needed to show that I was taking steps to become one of the TV-watching classes. You need to be on medication to watch Pop Idol and X-Factor.

I want to get off them but I am physically addicted. Therefore I would need to go cold turkey, but it’s hard to find the time to do that when you’re on the working treadmill. My doctor told me that I didn’t need to get off them, that some people took them all their lives.

Doctors would say this. The pharmaceutical industry in the US spends 17 per cent of its turnover on marketing and advertising. In 1998, that amounted to $7 billion. That’s mainly golfing trips to Barbados and an endless supply of ballpoint pens and notepads to those publicly funded drugs salesmen called GPs.

The mental effect is subtle: if you were feeling a depth of emotion before, it flattens things out. But they don’t do anything to solve the problem. To me they are like a sticking plaster, a bodge job: anti-depressants are synonymous with botched workmanship and low quality.

The vision of a whole world on anti-depressants is a depressing one indeed: anti-depressants smooth off the rough edges where the life is. They add blinkers. They seek to remould everyone into the same shape so we can continue functioning in society, continue working uncomplainingly and unreflectively. This remoulding itself makes us ill and depressed, and so it goes on. Norman Mailer wrote about the forties hipsters who were fighting ‘a slow death by conformity with every rebellious and creative instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will ever discover) …’

Moore is of the view that we should embrace our black bile, accept it and learn from it. He says in his case that, as surely as spring follows winter, the miseries will last a few months and then he will return and embark on a period of happiness and creativity:

You get so much more clarity about things. It’s like fishing, you go beneath the surface and bring things back which are very useful. There’d be no Keats, Byron or Shelley if they’d been on Prozac. Society needs manic depressives, it needs people potholers, to bring back their treasures from the underworlds, and to polish them and turn them into things that are beautiful and glittering.

What the orthodox solution of pills and blotting-out completely misses is the truth that there can be something pleasurable and even useful in melancholy. Burton’s description of the pleasures prefigures the romantic poets wandering around in the wilds and then recollecting the emotion in tranquillity:

… most pleasant it is at first, to those who are to melancholy given, to lie in bed whole days, and keep their chambers, to walk alone in some solitary grove betwixt wood and water, by a brook side, to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect them most … a most incomparable delight it is to melancholize, and build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose and strongly imagine they represent.

So, instead of rejecting it, a useful way to deal with melancholy would be to embrace it. In fact, I think that even simply renaming depression ‘melancholy’, which is so much more colourful and expressive a word, can do a lot to disarm it. ‘Bipolar disorder’ sounds like the enemy. There is something quite cool about melancholy; it has an air of candles, romantic love, garrets, pages of half-finished manuscript falling from the hand, a wistful sighing, billowy white shirts, the death of Chatterton the boy poet. Melancholy is depression re-created. Instead of saying, ‘I’m depressed,’ just say, ‘I’m feeling atrabilious today, so I think I’d better stay at home or go for a walk in the orchard.’ Then recreate your misery as a creative act.

I also think that the problem with drugs, therapy and self-help books is that they place such a heavy burden on the individual. They say that you are disordered, at fault, wonky, abnormal, suffering from a chemical imbalance, off-centre, skewed, and therefore must be cured and made to fit in with society. But could it not equally be true that it is not the individual who is at fault but the society he or she is living in, with its blasted ringtones and work obsession? The world is crazy, not me. The revolution of the individual as free from the collective has led to a tightening of the mind-forg’d manacles.

It may be objected here that I am presenting a contradiction: I blame our depression on society and not on the individual; I blame capitalism, the Thing, the Construct, the Combine – whatever we call it – for our misery; then I go on to say that each man is individually responsible for his own life and that the blaming must stop. Well, in this paradox is the truth: both of these are true. We are both the cause and effect of capitalism. When I blame society, I also blame the individual, since we as individuals are complicit in the creation of the very society that oppresses us. Therefore, we are our own oppressor, and that is why it is simultaneously most definitely not our fault and most radically our fault. By the way, we can also congratulate ourselves on the creation of the good things of society.

The simple answer is to accept responsibility and act accordingly. Quitting your job, refusing to vote, not taking pharmaceutical drugs: these are acts not of apathy but of a radical re-engagement with society and with your own self. It is, in actual fact, lazy and apathetic to be employed, to vote and to take Prozac, because in doing these things we are handing control over our lives to others and implicitly accepting that we are more or less useless unless we contort our very selves to conform to a pre-planned model of how we should act. These are acts of giving up. Once you disengage from the structures that bind you, you find that you begin to re-create a life of self-reliance. And self-reliance, rather than the sticking-plaster method, will help you to come to terms with your melancholy, rather than trying to banish it with drugs. In any case, the drugs don’t work: study after study confirms that placebos have the same effect as the pills and recovery is made by the body itself. Good doctors also help: when the patient trusts the doctor, the body is more likely to heal itself.

A very simple trick for those looking for an antidote to melancholy is to engage in some physical work. Baking bread, gardening, carpentry: all these things are productive, creative and use the body. They unite body and soul; they are acts of harmony. You may be surprised to hear an idler recommending the benefits of physical labour, but it undoubtedly helps. We need to replace soul-destroying work with soul-creating work.

Keats, in his ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1820) advises not getting wasted (which he calls Lethe) and not taking anti-depressants (which he calls wolfsbane and nightshade). Instead, he suggests going for a walk and gazing at the flowers and recognizing that melancholy is a sister to joy and must be embraced:

1.

No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

2.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand wave,

Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

3.

She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

THROW AWAY THE PILLS