Happy melancholic Thanksgiving, 2020! I hope everyone is having the best possible weird and isolated holiday.
How happy might we be, and end our time with blessed days and sweet content, if we could contain ourselves, and, as we ought to do, put up injuries, learn humility, meekness, patience, forget and forgive.
Oh that sounds wonderful! However, if we know anything by now, it’s that Robert Burton is a realist. A grim, melancholic realist. To be realistic is to be melancholic, and vice versa? Hm. Will have to thing on that one.
Here is the Burton we know and love:
But being that we are so peevish and perverse, insolent and proud, so factious and seditious, so malicious and envious; we do invicem angariare, maul and vex one another, torture, disquiet, and precipitate ourselves into that gulf of woes and cares, aggravate our misery and melancholy, heap upon us hell and eternal damnation.
You know that one makes me think. Humans truly are inclined to “maul and vex one another” and especially so on holidays, so maybe it’s a bit of a relief to be on our own this year, eh?
This post is part of a long, tedious, and very illustrated read-along of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. More info here and follow along on Facebook here. Illustrations posted via devon_isadevon on Instagram.