It is a sad and beautiful (and funny) world

On the one hand, Gass in his introduction tells us that Burton's willingness to consider any report he's encountered regarding melancholy seems strange; on the other, he acknowledges that the rapid development and transformations he and we have witnessed in contemporary understandings of melancholy might make the very variety he surveys seem a useful reminder to open minds:

What the  present reader may find strange is Burton’s eager allowance of hearsay and  observation, myth and science, superstition and  common sense, to help him in his hunt for  causes, and provide more than cosmetic in the makeup of his explanations: not merely citing heredity, disease, dotage, and personal loss as sources of melancholy, while displaying a skepticism as ardent as his faith; but blaming God, evil angels as well as devils, a bad  balance among the four humors, the discoveries of chiromancy and physiognomy, indurate dishes and sharp sauces, unsuitable parents, odors of the  earth, even the stars themselves. 

What may strike one as quaint and unfashionable at one time may be the latest wisdom to  another. When I was first engaged to Robert Burton’s book (my copy’s flyleaf says Dec. 1944), the mother’s womb was sturdier and more insulated than it is believed to be now, so,  when I read that if the mother “be over-dull, heavy, angry, peevish, discontented, and melancholy, not only at the time of conception, but even all the while she carries the child in  her womb . . . her son will be so likewise affected,” I thought the risks overstated; for wasn’t the moat of amniotic fluid about the baby nearly unswimmable?—what else was it there for?—but I would not think so now—now everything, including noise, gets through, and, unless it is the music of Mozart, wreaks havoc.

And minds do change. When Gass wrote 11 years ago, the Mozart Effect had those up on the latest parenting advice buying classical CDs for every newborn; now it is far more hip to consider the entire matter an urban legend cooked up for marketing purposes.

But anyone who has endured depression and enjoyed varying levels of success in overcoming it -- no matter how impermanent -- is always on the lookout for new explanations and new strategies to adopt. Even what to call the condition -- and I feel certain Burton will discuss various forms and names -- might always be subject to reconsideration. It never occurred to me until well into adulthood that my periodic wish for death might even be depression. It took a particularly black time for me to try living as if it were, to accept help purposely directed to treat depression. I felt by then I had no choice. I would either kill myself or do that. I saw no other alternative.

At the time, I chose psychoanalysis, and I am grateful beyond words that I did. It not only saved my life, but also deepened it in ways I could not imagine now living without. Which isn't to say that I haven't ever since suffered some terrible times, that I haven't continued to this day to keep my senses tuned to any sign of any sort of help. It took 10 years of analysis before I was willing to try drugs; and it was an important 10 years, the period during which first Prozac and then other SSRIs hit the market. Now, depending on my particular emotional weather, I take one SSRI and sometimes one or 2 other drugs. Since I began this particular SSRI, there is an emotional baseline below which I haven't fallen. It is the first decade of my life I haven't seriously contemplated suicide.

So I am open to ideas, ready to see what Burton throws up against the wall to see if it sticks at all for me. I'm not going to start believing in evil angels and devils, but the the free association of psychoanalysis and the sensitivity it inculcated to the resonance in symbols of all sorts are perhaps the strongest motivations driving my (likely foolish) public effort here to make my way through this monstrous and obsolete tome.

But it's also supposed to be a very funny book:

Although it gave expression to the pains of the  people (always a kind of comfort), his  Anatomy recounted so many sorts of follies that most of them had  to  have  been  performed or be- lieved by others rather than ourselves; we could then happily send  a hearty guffaw  around the  common table like  a pitcher of  ale,  and  drink to  the  dunces who  had  so  deluded them- selves  as to think thus, do such. When the mind enters a madhouse, Burton shows, however sane it was when it went in, and however hard it struggles to remain sane while there, it can only make the ambient madness more monstrous, more absurd, more bizarrely laughable by its efforts to be rational.

And, finally, it's very vastness is appealing to me. One of the very most important strategies I have adopted is to revel in my curiosity, to find deep gratification in what I happily once found described as "a sad and beautiful world." Gass concludes:

Be prepared to proceed slowly and you will soon go swiftly enough. Read a member a day; it will chase gloom away. The late section on religious melancholy has been particularly ad- mired. I also have a special fondness for Burton’s pages on museums and libraries. But above all, it is the width of the world that can be seen from one college window that amazes me; what a love of all life can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair; and Robert Burton’s unashamed display of his lust for the word—his desire to name each thing, and find a song in which each thing can be sung—is a passion that we might emulate to our assuredly better health.