If I believed I could free myself, by dying,
from amorous thoughts that bind me to the earth,
I would already have laid these troubled limbs
and their burden in the earth myself:

If my soul were in my hands, I would have released it.

I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.

When I was young and filled with folly, I fell in love with melancholy

And so being young
and dipped in folly,
I fell in love
with melancholy.

I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders.

I wonder how it would be if I let go and yielded myself to depravity.

May I free myself from the labyrinth of knowledge

I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

I have tried in my way to be free.

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
– SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It

The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions — nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.

With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.

I wanted to be free. I wanted to express desires on my own, to shape my own little life.

In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.