Idleness: Melancholy's Greatest Cause (and Symptom)

Idleness & MelancholyBurton cites idleness as both a symptom and cause of melancholy and enlists the authority of Rhasis, Plutarch, Homer, Montaltus and Mercurialis who account idleness as melancholy's greatest cause. Here is Burton's description of idleness written in 1628:

"…. idleness (the badge of gentry), the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, step mother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, and the sole cause of this [melancholy] and many other maladies, the devil's cushion...his pillow and chief reposal.... Nothing begets it [melancholy] sooner, increaseth and continueth it oftener, than idleness; a disease [melancholy] familiar to all idle persons, an inseparable companion to such as live at ease, a life out of action, and have no calling or ordinary employment to busy themselves…As fern grows in untilled grounds, and all manner of weed, so do gross humours in an idle body….An idle dog will be mangy….wit without employment is a disease, the rust of the soul, a plague, a hell itself, the greatest danger of the soul.”


---Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (with the Latin completely given in translation and embodied in an All-English text), edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith, Tudor Publishing Company, New York, MCMXLVVIII pages 210-213.

The Vile Maze of Melancholy: A Hitchhiker's Guide

A Jounrey Through Melancholy
The Vile Maze of Melancholy: A Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Introduction

Herewith and hereafter I shall map a journey through melancholy’s vile maze.

The road is well-marked by tangled thickets, dark woods, deep pits, primrose paths, briar patches, cul-de-sacs and rocky roads.

I write as a hitchhiker because the journey is made with borrowed resources. My own wings are not suited for lofty flight. Weak knees impede my progress through difficult terrain and my vision is neither far-sighted nor insightful. I am no Lynceus; neither am I a Phaeton or an Icarus, foolish travelers who ignored the advice of their wise elders. I am Davus not Oedipus. I am no solver of riddles.

Like Dante, I need a Virgil to guide me, a Beatrice to inspire me.

I have found my Virgil: Robert Burton (1577-1640), clergyman, man-of-affairs, Oxford don and ‘by any known standard…regarded as one of the most learned men that every lived” (Bergen Evans). But his erudition did not protect him from shipwrecking his life on the jagged rocks of melancholy. In 1621, Burton published a tour de force The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of the most popular books of the age and one of the richest books in the English language (twenty per cent of which is written in Latin).

I shall begin now, hoping to find my Beatrice along the way.