The Noonday Demon

by Solomon, Andrew

  Samuel Johnson, whose life Boswell recorded, was also given to severe depression, and indeed, their mutual experience of depression for some time bound the two men. Johnson maintained that Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy was the only book that got him up “two hours sooner than he wished to rise.” Johnson was always aware of mortality and terrified of wasting time (though in his blackest depressions he lay unproductive for long stretches). “The black Dog,” wrote Johnson, “I hope always to resist, and in time to drive though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking.” And as Boswell once said to him, playing on Dryden’s line, “Melancholy, like ‘great wit,’ may be near allied to madness; but there is, in my opinion, a distinct separation between them.”

  William Cowper poeticized his sorrow, but it was perhaps even more desperate than Boswell’s. To a cousin Cowper wrote in 1772, “I will endeavour not to repay you in notes of sorrow and despondence, though all my sprightly chords seem broken.” The following year he had a severe breakdown and was utterly incapacitated for some time. During that time he wrote a horrifying series of poems, including one that ends, “I, fed with judgement, in a fleshly tomb, am / Buried above ground.” Cowper did not find much salvation in writing; ten lines a day were not likely to mitigate his desperation. Indeed, though he knew himself to be a great poet, he felt that his ability with words was almost irrelevant to his experience with depression. In 1780, he wrote to John Newman, “I am trusted with the terrible Secret Myself but not with the power to Communicate it to any purpose. I carry a load no Shoulders Could Sustain, unless underpropped as mine are, by a heart Singularly & preternaturally hardened.” Edward Young, writing roughly contemporaneously, spoke of “the stranger within thee” and described the bleakness of the world: “Such is the earth’s melancholy map! But far / More sad! this earth is a true map of man!” And Tobias Smollett wrote, “I have had a hospital these fourteen years within myself and studied my own case with the most painful attention.”

  The lot of women was particularly hard. The Marquise du Deffand wrote to a friend in England, “You cannot possibly have any conception of what it is like to think and yet to have no occupation. Add to that a taste that is not easily satisfied and a great love of truth and I maintain that it would be better never to have been born.” In another letter, she wrote in disgust with herself, “Tell me why, detesting life, I still fear death.”

  The Protestant ascetics of the later eighteenth century attributed depression to society’s decadence and pointed to high rates of the complaint among an aristocracy nostalgic for its past. What had once been a mark of aristocratic sophistication was now the mark of moral decay and weakness, and the solution was to eviscerate complacency. Samuel Johnson said that hardship prevents spleen and observed that “in Scotland, where the inhabitants in general are neither opulent nor luxurious, Insanity, as I am informed, is very rare.” John Brown held that “our effeminate and unmanly Life, working along with our Island-Climate, hath notoriously produced an Increase of low Spirits and nervous Disorders.” Edmund Burke argued that “melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body. The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or labour.” Voltaire’s Candide struggles even after his troubles have come to an end; finally his depressed mistress asks, “I should like to know which is the worst, to be ravished a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet of a Bulgar regiment, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fé, to be dissected, to row in the galleys—in fact to experience all the miseries through which we have passed—or just to stay here with nothing to do?” The problem is solved when she and Candide apply themselves to tending the kitchen garden; tilling the soil has a most propitious effect on mood. And yet the contrarian idea, that a high life might lift the spirits and work weigh them down, was also in circulation; Horace Walpole wrote a friend a prescription, “Rx CCCLXV days of London,” to lift the weight of an illness no country cordial had been able to heal.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, the spirit of romanticism was starting to stir, and disillusion with the dryness of pure reason set in. Minds began to turn to the sublime, at once magnificent and heartrending. Depression was let in once more, better loved than it had been since Ficino. Thomas Gray captured the mood of an age that would once more look on depression as the source of knowledge rather than as a folly removed from it. His “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” became a standard text of wisdom achieved through a sadness proximate to truth, through which one learns that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Looking out at the playing fields of Eton, he saw:

  To each his suff’rings: all are men,

  Condemn’d alike to groan,

  The tender for another’s pain,

  The unfeeling for his own.

  . . . . . . . . .

  No more; where ignorance is bliss,

  ’Tis folly to be wise.

  S. T. Coleridge wrote in 1794 that his will was palsied by “The Joy of Grief! A mysterious Pleasure broods with dusky Wing over the tumultuous Mind.” Immanuel Kant held that “melancholy separation from the bustle of the world due to a legitimate weariness is noble” and that “genuine virtue based on principles has something about it which seems to harmonize most with the melancholy frame of mind.” This was the mood in which the nineteenth century was to greet depression.

  Before leaving the eighteenth century, it is worth looking at what was happening in the colonies in North America, where the moral force of Protestantism was even stronger than in Europe. The problem of melancholy had much vexed the settlers, and a school of American thought on the subject had evolved shortly after they had arrived in Massachusetts. Of course the settlers tended to be conservative in comparison to their counterparts in Europe; and since they often represented extreme religious views of one kind or another, they favored religious explanations of depression. At the same time, they had a lot of depression to cope with. Their lives were extremely hard; their societies maintained certain formal rigidities; the mortality rates were extremely high; and their feeling of isolation was particularly intense. Horace Walpole’s prescriptions were unavailable to them; there was not much by way of glamour or fun to lift melancholic spirits. The focus on salvation and its mysteries also drove people to the point of distraction, since the sole focus of their lives was something definitionally uncertain.

  Melancholiacs in these societies were almost always held to be the subjects of the devil’s interference, prey through their own weakness or their inattention to the redeeming God. Cotton Mather was the first to comment at length on these problems. Though in his earlier life he was inclined toward extreme moral judgment, his position softened and changed somewhat when his wife, Lydia, developed a depression “little short of a Proper Satanical Possession.” In the years that followed, Mather gave considerable time and attention to the problem of melancholy, and began to hatch a theory in which the divine and the biological, the natural and the supernatural, acted in complex synchrony.

  In 1724, Mather published The Angel of Bethesda, the first book written in America to address depression. He focused more on treatments than on the diabolical causes of the complaint. “Lett not the Friends of these poor Melancholicks, be too soon Weary of the Tiresome Things, which they must now Bear with Patience, Their Nonsense and Folly must be born with Patience, We that are Strong must bear the Infirmities of the Weak; and with a patient, prudent, Manly Generosity, pitty them, and Humour them like Children, and give none but Good Looks and Good Words unto them. And if they utter Speeches that are very Grievous (and like Daggers) to us, We must not Resent them as uttered by these Persons; tis not They that speak; Tis their Distemper! They still are Just what they were before.” The treatments Mather suggested are an odd mix of the exorcistic, the biologically effective (�
��the Decoction of Purple-flowered Pimpernel; as also the Tops of St. Johns Wort; as a Specific for Madness”) and the rather dubious (the application of “living swallows, cut in two, and laid hott reeking unto the shaved Head” and “the Syrup of Steel, four Ounces, a Spoonful to be taken twice a day in a Convenient Vehicle”).

  Henry Rose, publishing in Philadelphia in 1794, attributed to the passions the ability to “increase or diminish the power of the vital and natural functions.” He maintained that as “they exceed their order and limits, the passions become dissolute and ought to be avoided; not because they disturb the tranquility of the mind alone, but as they injure the temperament of the body.” In the best Puritan tradition, he recommended dispassion—the quelling of strong feeling and eros—as the best means to protect oneself from going right over the edge. This Puritanical notion was to keep its hold over the American popular imagination long after it had faded elsewhere. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, America boasted religious revivals closely associated with illness. The United States was the location for “evangelical anorexia nervosa,” in which people who believed themselves unworthy of God deprived themselves of food (and often sleep) until they starved themselves to illness or even death; those who suffered accordingly were called “starving perfectionists” by their contemporaries.

  If the Age of Reason was a particularly bad one for depression, the Romantic period, which went from the end of the eighteenth century to the flowering of Victorianism, was a particularly good one. Now melancholy was thought of not as a condition for insight, but as insight itself. The truths of the world were not happy; God was manifest in nature but his precise status was in some doubt; and the stirrings of industry bred the first strains of modernist alienation, distancing man from his own production. Kant held that the sublime was always “accompanied by some terror or melancholia.” In essence, this was the time when an unqualified positivism was denounced as naive rather than holy. Clearly, in the past, the rather distant past at that, man had been closer to nature, and the loss of that immediate relationship to wilderness amounted to the loss of some irretrievable joy. People in this period explicitly mourned the passage of time—not simply growing old, not simply the loss of young energy, but that time could not be held in check. This is the era of Goethe’s Faust, who said to the moment, “Stay! Thou art fair!” and for that sold his soul into eternal damnation. Childhood recapitulated innocence and joy; its passing led into a postlapsarian adulthood of shadows and pain. As Wordsworth said, “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”

  John Keats wrote, “I have been half in love with easeful death”—for the very exercise of life was too exquisitely painful to bear. In his paradigmatic “Ode on Melancholy” and in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he speaks with unbearable sadness of a temporality which makes the most cherished thing the most sad, so that there is in the end no separation between joy and sorrow. Of melancholy itself he says:

  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:

  Aye, in the very temple of Delight

  Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.

  So Shelley also conjures the mutability of experience, the quickness of time, the sense that a respite from sorrow is followed only by greater sorrow:

  The flower that smiles today

  Tomorrow dies;

  All that we wish to stay,

  Tempts and then flies.

  . . . . . . . .

  Whilst yet the calm hours creep,

  Dream thou—and from thy sleep

  Then wake to weep.

  In Italy, Giacomo Leopardi echoed the sentiment, writing, “Fate has bequeathed unto our race / no gift except to die.” This is a far cry from the moodiness of Thomas Gray pondering beauty in a country churchyard; it is the earliest nihilism, a vision of utter futility, more like Ecclesiastes (“Vanity of vanities: all is vanity”) than like Paradise Lost. In Germany, the feeling would acquire a name beyond that of melancholy: Weltschmerz, or world-sadness. It would become a lens through which all other feeling would have to be perceived. Goethe, the greatest exponent of Weltschmerz, did perhaps more than any other author to delineate the stormy, tragic nature of existence. In The Sorrows of Young Werther, he narrates the impossibility of entry into the true sublime: “In those days I yearned in happy ignorance to get out into the unfamiliar world, where I hoped to find so much nourishment, so much enjoyment for my heart, wherewith to fill and to satisfy my aspiring, yearning bosom. Now I am returning from the wide world—O my friend, with how many disappointed hopes, with how many ruined plans? . . . Does not man lack force at the very point where he needs it most? And when he soars upward in joy, or sinks down in suffering, is he not checked in both, is he not returned again to the dull, cold sphere of awareness, just when he was longing to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite?” Depression, here, is truth. Charles Baudelaire introduced the word spleen and its concomitant emotion to French romanticism. His dank world of sorry evil could no more manage to transcend melancholy than could Goethe’s striving after the sublime:

  When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid

  Upon the spirit aching for the light

  And all the wide horizon’s line is hid

  By a black day sadder than any night

  . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  And hearses without drum or instrument,

  File slowly through my soul; crushed, sorrowful,

  Weeps Hope, and Grief, fierce and omnipotent,

  Plants his black banner on my drooping skull.

  Beside this poetic line runs a philosophical one that reaches back beyond Kant’s romantic rationalism, Voltaire’s optimism, and Descartes’s relative dispassion to a fearful impotence and helplessness rooted in the character of Hamlet or even to De Contemptu Mundi. Hegel, in the early nineteenth century, gave us, “History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history. There are certain moments of satisfaction in the history of the world, but this satisfaction is not to be equated with happiness.” This dismissal of happiness as a natural state to which civilizations might reasonably aspire initiates modern cynicism. To our ears, it seems almost obvious, but in its time it was a heretical position of gloom: the truth is that we are born into misery and will miserably go on, and that those who understand misery and live intimately with it are the ones who best know history past and future. And yet glum Hegel states elsewhere that to give in to despair is to be lost.

  Among philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard is depression’s poster boy. Free of Hegel’s commitment to resisting despair, Kierkegaard followed every truth to its illogical final point, striving to eschew compromise. He took curious comfort from his pain because he believed in its honesty and reality. “My sorrow is my castle,” he wrote. “In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I loved my melancholy.” It is as though Kierkegaard believed that happiness would enfeeble him. Incapable of loving the people around him, he turned to faith as an expression of something so remote as to be beyond despair. “Here I stand,” he wrote, “like an archer whose bow is stretched to the uttermost limit and who is asked to shoot at a target five paces ahead of him. This I cannot do, says the archer, but put the target two or three hundred paces further away and you will see!” While earlier philosophers and poets had spoken of the melancholic man, Kierkegaard saw mankind as melancholic. “What is rare,” he wrote, “is not that someone should be in despair; no, what is rare, the great rarity, is that one should truly not be in despair.”

  Arthur Schopenhauer was an even greater pessimist than Kierkegaard because he did not believe that pain is ennobling in any way; and yet he was also an ironist and an epigrammatist for whom the continuity of life and history was more absurd than tragic. “Life is a business whos
e returns are far from covering the cost,” he wrote. “Let us merely look at it; this world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible affliction, until they fall at last into the arms of death.” The depressive, in Schopenhauer’s view, lives simply because he has a basic instinct to do so “which is first and unconditioned, the premise of all premises.” He answered Aristotle’s age-old suggestion that men of genius are melancholy by saying that a man who has any real intelligence will recognize “the wretchedness of his condition.” Like Swift and Voltaire, Schopenhauer believed in work—not because work breeds cheer so much as because it distracts men from their essential depression. “If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease,” he wrote, “men would either die of boredom or kill themselves.” Even the bodily pleasure that should remove one from despair is only a necessary distraction introduced by nature to keep the race alive. “If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?”

  It was Friedrich Nietzsche who actually attempted to bring these views back to the specific question of illness and insight. “I have asked myself if all the supreme values of previous philosophy, morality, and religion could not be compared to the values of the weakened, the mentally ill, and neurasthenics: in a milder form, they represent the same ills. Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state.”