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Introduction Methinks he is either melancholick, or one of those academick asses —robert burton, Philosophaster The expostulation by Burton that serves as the epigraph for this introduction has often been leveled at me because of my interest in the subject of melancholy and boredom. It has been sometimes assumed that I am subject to the emotions myself or that I am the victim of a misplaced and pedantic obscurantism . I hope this book will demonstrate that neither assumption is necessarily correct. My main concern is to demonstrate that there took place in the first and second centuries of our era (and to a lesser extent in the early Hellenistic period) a shift in the presentation of the self and of self-consciousness in certain key works of the literature of antiquity. There is—or was—a marked change in the mode by which such affective states as melancholia, love, lovesickness, and boredom and such affective registers as time (I mean this seriously) and even leisure (my topics for this book) are presented.1 Increasingly, I will argue, they become a locus through which the self and self-consciousness gain vivid representation . There is, it appears to me, a thickening or a deepening of the manner by which these emotions and, flowing from this, the self are represented. The presentation, not just of self, but also of self-consciousness, is far more detailed and far more evident in these periods than it is in earlier literature.2 This is a sense of self (or self-consciousness or self-definition, but not self-knowledge in the Socratic sense) as constituted by inwardness. It is built upon an opposition of “inside-outside,” a partitioning off of the self from the world about us. (And so it is with the various emotions and psychological registers upon which I shall focus.) “Thoughts, ideas, or feelings . . . [are] ‘within’ us, while the objects in the world which these mental states bear on are ‘without,’” states Charles Taylor in a different context (1992, 111–12). He continues to observe that “[human] capacities or potentialities [are] ‘inner,’ awaiting the development which will manifest them or realize them in a public world.” So it is in this period, but at a cost. We tend to associate such a presentation of self with recent, post-Enlightenment literary and social experience (e.g., Porter 1997; Mascuch 1997). Part of the purpose of this book (as was the case for Golden and Toohey 1997) is to demonstrate the comparability of this novel experience between its ancient and modern literary representations. To this end I have adduced a number of parallels between the later ancient and modern depiction of emotions such as those already noted—melancholia, boredom, lovesickness, suicidal urges, and the experience of time. The modern parallels for these emotions and for the presentation of self through them are drawn from a promiscuous body of material: novels, nonfiction books, newspapers, art, and ethnological reports. I have used a very broad range of evidence both modern and ancient: Greek and Roman prose and verse authors, Greek and Roman painting, modern prose and painting , and modern newspapers, magazines, and television. As Robert Burton might have objected, the resultant effect may seem at times to produce a “rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dunghills.” Notwithstanding such colorful objections, the citation of such material seemed to me to be the best way to go about demonstrating sameness. The range of evidence is justified because I am trying to demonstrate the similarities between the ancient and modern depictions of the various registers of the sentiments or sentimental registers surveyed in this book. In this way I intend to illustrate that these conditions were not recent inventions of periods such as the Enlightenment. How better can one illustrate parallel responses to similar stimuli than by appeal to a wide range of modern parallels? To insist upon this sameness as it relates to the emergence and maintenance of human affectivities and psychological registers, as they are depicted in ancient and modern cultural and literary experience, is to insist these are not specific cultural or social artifacts. At any rate, I have demonstrated the common traits that are shared and exhibited by melancholia, boredom, lovesickness , monkish acedia, the perception and experiencing of time and leisure, and even the drive to do away with oneself. I have also looked briefly at a variety of contagious emotional states, such as the use of the evil eye, “boning...

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