The Unending Conversation

Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is probably better known of than actually read. Edited versions are readily available, but surely there are very few readers who know the vast tome in its entirety. Simply reading a brief selection is a journey into an astonishingly fertile mind. The learned references are testimony to a life of intensive, scholarly research. Burton’s was a mind that not only knew so much but one that could interweave his learning into coherent patterns of thought. It was thinking that stimulates other thoughts, the author’s own and the readers’ who have consulted the book in the four centuries since its first publication.

Who wants to read a hefty tome about depressive states of mind? But Burton’s Anatomy is so much more than a treatise on misery and dejection. If the title sounds drearily off putting the writing is lively in manner and eloquently expressed. There is a curiosity about everything. Burton’s definitions (there are many) of melancholy embrace a panoply of emotions that are not necessarily depressive. There are long digressions on the nature of love or the examination of demonology. The range of consideration is encyclopaedic. Like Pliny’s Natural History, the formal subject matter may seem at times little more than a framework for all manner of asides. In Pliny it is nature examined. In Burton it is human nature.

Perhaps few people now would consider seriously the existence of evil spirits. And yet we see evil at work in the world. What may begin in the mind manifests in lived experience. Burrton’s examination of the categories and hierarchies of demons identifies in accessible terms the moral dilemmas that face us every day.

So, too, with love. It takes many forms that spark Burton’s interest. Not least of these is the idea of beauty as the engine of desire. This is ennobled by an affirmation of love at first sight, that intriguing and marvellous recognition of a whole person in a single glance. The poetry of this is familiar above all from Dante. More playfully it is present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although Burton never refers to either of these sources. The mythology of antiquity engages his attention. The goddess Venus (Burton seems more familiar with Latin than Greek) casts her spell in these pages.

The digressive manner would become no more than a learned meander were it not for the central thesis that humanity is given to sadness and anguish however spirited and generous a mind in general may be. We must remember that tragedy is held in higher regard than comedy. Melancholy, said Burton, is ‘the character of mortality’. Death shadows all life. And yet Burton is both spirited and generous in his considerations. There are many asides that testify to a well-furnished mind in a reverie if not a delirium of imaginative thinking.

The curiosity is infectious. Once the reader’s mind is engaged personal responses cannot fail to intervene. The encyclopaedic range is a challenge that a thoughtful reader is ready to undertake. More recent examples of this manner include George Steiner’s After Babel. A study of translation becomes an enquiry into the nature of language. Words do not fail the author.. Steiner’s discourse infuses the enquiry with a personal engagement. The method is Robert Burton's, although it is more of an approach to living than a literary method. It may lead after reflection to the content of contemplative tranquillity.

Such books fuel thoughts on the human capacity to define humanity through language. They are books about the essences of life where one thought leads to another. A past master of the connecting narrative was W.G. Sebald. In The Rings of Saturn a journey by train becomes an exploration of whatever comes to mind. The banality of country rail station evokes a thought wholly unrelated to the situation. This stream of consciousness is surely true of every journey we make as passengers. We think of many things. The sight of a tree, a house, a car: they all trigger thoughts One thought leads to another, like a game of Chinese Whispers.

One book leads to another in a continual chain of reading. The more we read the more we find we need to read. There is never an end to what can be known of the world.

What we need to know fundamentally is that knowledge is more than a random collection of facts. A disordered mind may mutter about many things that have no relation to one another nor to the situation the speaker is in. For an ordered series of thoughts a framework is necessary to collate and cohere the facts into a direction and purpose.

Of course a fact in isolation may be misleading. We establish the truth by connecting facts to other facts. By these connections we may create a pattern of truth. The task is to make the right connections. This is not easy. It is a question of balancing information into a harmonic structure. This balancing proscribes the impulsive act of leaping to conclusions.

Order and harmony are not obviously in plain sight. Things do not come together spontaneously. Harmony is not reached without a conscious moderation. The arrangement of furniture in a room is not a matter of happenstance. We find that every item has a natural place (by the window, by the door, by the left wall or the right). Cohesion comes after experiments in harmony the way an arrangement of musical notes creates melody. A wrong note jars. Even when improvised music has a correct order. It is correct because it is natural. Anything other is discordant.

What we hear is not music alone but words in search of an audience. There is a conversation. Beyond the trivia and the tittle tattle are the vital words of thought and their response. It is a conversation that began a long time ago. Of course it began in antiquity. The questions raised by the ancients are questions every generation must consider. To receive these questions is to engage with them. To evade giving an answer is to evade the responsibility (and vitality) of intellect. However meagre our responses may be they have a valid place in the conversation.

The conversation is so embedded in our history that it conveys a kind of immortality. Authors who are no more live on, not only through their work but also through a less tangible presence in the collective mind. The Anatomy of Melancholy’s reputation precedes any reading of it. It is there within our consciousness, if only as a title. To be so known is to live beyond the bookshelf where it may stare out, rarely taken down and consulted. There is no dust on the cover of a conversation that resounds on the walls of many rooms.

For it to be effective a conversation must go somewhere. Where does it all lead but to a greater understanding of things? Every generation takes up the challenge of unravelling the twisted thread of ideas that seek a place in the collective consciousness of the world as it is for us now at this time. The past may speak to us but we engage with the past on our terms. Nobody could write Burton’s Anatomy now as he wrote it those four centuries ago. That is not to dismiss it. An essayist today must be aware of those who have written long ago.

In some respects history is not a straight line heading towards infinity. History can be akin to a circular room. Pliny speaks across the chamber to Montaigne who speaks to Mary McCarthy. Everyone is in sight and within hearing range.

‘He is no true friend that loves not God's truth’, Robert Burton says. That may not be how many modern minds, honest minds, speak now. But a love of truth, and a need for truth, they bind all the thinkers of the ages in a common and creative understanding. It may seem banal to say so, for who would speak in favour of deceit? Yet these are times when truth is devalued by a perverse liberty of expression. (I can believe what I wish to believe.) Because this pseudo-liberty, this false consciousness, prevails then there is no further conversation. All we can hear is the chatter of baboons and the screeching of birds.

What is sought is a way of knowing the world better. There is a populist mood reacting against the idea of complexity. It seeks to make the world simple. It is easier to embrace simplicity. Why complicate life? Of course this view appeals to trite emotions, and is thereby powerful in the workings of social commentary.

To know the world is to engage with its many layers of understanding. The process of discovery is an enriching of both intellect and feeling. We are more alive the more we can make sense of the world. Surely this is obvious? Evidently not in the world of simplicities.

‘Why worry?’ is the question heard in the street. Is ours still the Age of Anxiety, or has Nirvana been reached? The melancholy anatomised so memorably is not simply aquestion of sadness. Think of Van Gogh, a depressive who took his life. But his art was intensely vivid with colours that exemplify life that is lived in the burning heat of passion for existence. The ladies in the vineyard with their parasols, are they not alive now as they were in 1888 in Arles when a visionary eye made them immortal?

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