Posted on

Anatomy of Melancholy

I’ve been taking medication for bipolar disorder for over thirty years. In my case, medication has been useful. It has made it possible for me to pursue a moderately successful career and a life without too much destructive drama. Psychiatrists have prescribed for me nearly every anti-depressant and anti-manic drug available. Some have been more useful than others have and their efficacy has changed as I have aged and my circumstances have changed. What worked thirty years ago works today, but didn’t work for an intervening decade. I would never consider rejecting medication, but it also has never been the complete answer for me.

Over the years, I have collected a bag of tricks for dealing with depression and hypomania. None of them is a cure or guaranteed to work, but all of them have been helpful to me at various times. One of the strangest is a book written in the early seventeenth century Oxford don: The Anatomy of Melancholy. It is an odd book. Robert Burton, writing under the pen name Democritus Jr., undertook to describe melancholy and its cures, what we call depression today, in expansive detail. Since he was a scholastic, this included cataloging and analyzing every reference to melancholy in every fragment of preceding literature. Oxford had a large library and the Anatomy is a big book.

You might think this is a recipe for the most boring, depressing book ever written. Even Burton himself warned against reading it. I agreed until about fifteen years ago when I read an essay by Robertson Davies, the Canadian author, critic, and educator after hearing a tribute to Davies on the CBC and stumbling on a collection of his essays at Munro’s in Victoria. The essay I happened to read mentioned that Anatomy of Melancholy was a favorite of Samuel Johnson and sometimes called the greatest work of prose in the English language. That piqued my interest. I had picked up a library copy of the Anatomy long before, but could not make heads or tails of it and returned it to the shelves quickly. Now, I was ready to try again.

I ordered the New York Review of Books paperback edition. The fact that the Anatomy was among the small collection of books the NYRB published at the time hinted that the book is something special. When the book arrived, it was a brick, the equivalent of four or five typical paperbacks in a single binding, hard to open, and tricky to hold. I started reading from the beginning, but found no magic: lists of people I had never heard of, places that are no longer on maps, and words I had never seen before. But after reading for an hour or so, I felt strangely uplifted. Burton, I think, satirizes melancholy, mocks it, and renders it absurd. I say ‘I think’ because I am not sure. He uses so many words, so many allusions, it is hard for me to tell what he is talking about, but whatever it is, it can turn the black dog, as Winston Churchill called depression, into a puppy.

I carry a copy of the Anatomy with me at all times and dip into it when I notice the drab tones of depression seeping into my landscape. Sometimes it chases the black dog away, other times it only delays the dog’s arrival or blunts its tooth, but reading the Anatomy is always good for a little cheer in a dreary time.

My NYRB brick is gathering dust on the shelf because I have switched to an eBook version. The brick is too awkward and heavy to mess with, especially when you can get an electronic version free from the Gutenberg Project. The Anatomy is an example of the good qualities of eBooks—travelling with a brick is a pain and my arthritic hands cannot hold it comfortably for long but the eBook weighs nothing and it is easy to hold.

Since the Anatomy costs nothing from Project Gutenberg, does not require a prescription, and is wholly non-toxic, I suggest to anyone who is chronically depressed to try the Anatomy. Not a cure, no guarantees, but it can help.

Posted on

Libraries and Service Management

While recovering from a serious turkey and mashed potato overdose, I started thinking about my experience in computer software and libraries.

I’ve spent a good part of the last thirty years building service management applications for large enterprises, so I can’t help but think of any organization as a service management challenge. In my book, Cloud Standards, I begin by providing my definition of a service. Many of my technical friends think it is too lawyerlike and bureaucratic to be of any use to them, but I disagree. Here it is

A service is a consumer-provider relationship in which the provider delivers value to the consumer and the consumer avoids designated costs and risks that they would have incurred if they had delivered the value themselves.

That’s a mouthful but it applies to an organization like a library as well as to computer architecture. Consumers and providers can be software and hardware modules as well as people. Here’s a human service: when I wore a suit and tie to work, I had the oil changed in my truck by an oil changing service to avoid the cost and risk of ruining my suit. I was willing to pay for the service because the costs and risks out-weighed the fee the service charged for changing oil. (Especially with a coupon!) I won’t bore you with a technical example, but there are many.

Library patrons check out books to avoid the cost of buying the book themselves and the risk of being stuck with a book they don’t care for.

That’s not the only service a library provides, but I will venture it is the one most people think of first. I used to consult for large IT organizations, helping them improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their services. My first question always was “What services do you provide?” The answers, to say the least, were varied. Some groups flat out had no idea—they resorted to telling me about all the maintenance they did and how many servers and switches they were responsible for. That was the equivalent of an oil-changing guy telling me what size wrenches were in his toolbox when I asked him what else he could do for my truck.

Other organizations I consulted for had a clear idea of what they provided, but most lengthened their list after we discussed it. Many were surprised at the value they provided. Sometimes they decided to drop services that had less value than they had assumed.

It is important to differentiate between owning a wrench and changing the air filter. Your wrenches are only remotely connected to consumers, but the value you deliver affects them directly. The point is that unless you understand the value of the work you do, you can’t understand how to increase the value of your services.

I suspect that librarians understand their services to the community better than IT departments understand their role. It’s a good exercise for IT departments; I am curious how it might work for libraries.