PhD Dropout / Master sounds better than Doctor anyhow, right? / Comics / Illustrated Read-alongs / Currently The Anatomy of Melancholy
We may justly tax our wrangling lawyers, they do consenescere in litibus [grow old over a lawsuit], are so litigious and busy here on earth, that I think they will plead their clients’ causes hereafter, some of them in hell. (84) For the record, some of my best friends are lawyers and do awesome things like advocate […]
This melancholy extends itself not to men only, but even to vegetals and sensibles.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD), Linguistics: First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or “innate facility” for acquiring […]
Shall I say thou art a man, that hast all the symptoms of a beast? How shall I know thee to be a man? By thy shape? That affrights me more, when I see a beast in likeness of a man. If the news this week has you feeling down, remember to look at photos […]
I was about to read my daily three to four pages, but then I read some headlines and drew this instead. Stupid humans. This post is part of a long, tedious, and illustrated read-along of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy – more info here and follow along on Facebook here.
We accuse others of madness, of folly, and are the veriest dizzards ourselves. When all are mad, where all are like opprest, Who can discern one madman from the rest? Can all the hellebore in the Anticyrae cure these men? No, sure, “an acre of hellebore will not do it.” In the olden days, helleborus […]
This week’s poem is by Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was a Romantic poet. Do you have a favorite Romantic poet? Sometimes I find myself asking people this at parties. Then I immediately think, ooooh that was a really stupid thing to ask someone at a party. This is why I am not very good at […]
To see the unhappy rivalry of our times, a man bend all his forces, means, time, fortunes, to be a favourite’s favourite’s favourite, etc., a parasite’s parasite’s parasite, that may scorn the servile world as having enough already. My daughter “helped” me with this one and asked for something pink. And it turns out that […]
And today, the world is… A vast chaos, a confusion of manners, as fickle as the air, domicilium insanorum [a madhouse], a turbulent troop full of impurities, a mart of walking spirits, goblins, the theatre of of hypocrisy, a shop of knavery, flattery, a nursery of villainy, the scene of babbling, the school of giddiness, […]
Vice, when successful, is called virtue. This post is part of a long, tedious, and illustrated read-along of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy – more info here and follow along on Facebook here.
Or had [Democritus] but observed the common people follow like so many sheep one of their fellows drawn by the horns over a gap, some for zeal, some for fear, quo se cunque rapit tempestas [wherever they are whirled along], to credit all, examine nothing, and yet ready to die before they will abjure any […]
If Democritus were alive now, he should see strange alterations, a new company of counterfeit vizards, whifflers, Cumane asses, maskers, mummers, painted puppets, outsides, fantastic shadows, gulls, monsters, giddy-heads, butterflies. And so many of them are indeed (if all be true that I have read). For when Jupiter and Juno’s wedding was solemnised of old, […]
Pretty much more of the same here, although Burton does give us some advice at last, speaking as “mad” Democritus: It were enough to make them wise, if they would but consider the mutability of this world, and how it wheels about, nothing being firm and sure… If men would attempt no more than what […]
Well, that was an easy one.