PhD Dropout / Master sounds better than Doctor anyhow, right? / Comics / Illustrated Read-alongs / Currently The Anatomy of Melancholy
“For I see no reason” (as [Aristotle] said) “why an epicure or idle drone, a rich glutton, a usurer, should live at ease, and do nothing, live in honour, in all manner of pleasures, and oppress others, when as in the meantime a poor labourer, a smith, a carpenter, an husbandman that hath spent his time […]
So it turns out that this whole public healthcare thing isn’t some new wackadoo idea dreamed up just yesterday by liberal ‘Merica. Burton’s utopia would have: Hospitals of all kinds, for children, orphans, old folks, sick men, mad men, soldiers, pest-houses, etc. not built precario, or by gouty benefactors, who, when by fraud and rapine […]
Let them be rude, stupid, ignorant, incult, lapis super lapidem sedeat, and as the apologist will, resp. tussi, et graveolentia laboret, mundus vitio, let them be barbarous as they are, let them tyrannise, epicurise, oppress, luxuriate, consume themselves with factions, superstitions, lawsuits, wars and contentions, live in riot, poverty, want, misery; rebel, wallow as so […]
This section was really pretty dull, to be honest. It was four pages of stuff like this: Some, saith Acosta, would have a passage cut from Panama to Nombre de Dios in America; but Thuanus and Serres the French historians speak of a famous aqueduct in France, intended in Henry the Fourth’s time, from the […]
Yet amongst many roses some thistles grow, some bad weeds and enormities, which much disturb the peace of this body politic, eclipse the honour and glory of it, fit to be rooted out, and with all speed to be reformed. (87-88) This post is part of a long, tedious, and illustrated read-along of Robert […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]