Take my advice.

Your thoughts are so chained to your ego that it is difficult for them to escape for long. But are you ever melancholy when creating imaginatively a scene in a book? 

Could you be melancholy when figuring out the polar elevation of a planet, or computing one of those converse primary directions? 

 I see you smile. 

When you are engaged with figures you forget yourself. 

Now take my advice. 

When auto-suggestion is powerless to conquer melancholy, draw up an astrological figure at a low altitude with that table of oblique ascensions that I saw you using yesterday, and work out the converse primaries and the longitude of Vulcan. 

―The Judge [Last Letters from a Living Dead Man]