Anatomy of melancholy

Also sorry 4 bully

I hate you. You're a girl inside!

And that is why I'll get published and you won't. But seriously, just looked at the Kindle thread and couldn't contain myself. This debate cracks me up like the virgin spine of a physical copy

Only girls prefer aestethics to substance.

Only brainlets don't believe aesthetics *is* substance

Not in this case, mate

It's not so much what the book is about that makes it great (although it is extremely interesting), but how it is written. It is the peak of English prose.

Burton essentially write about the human condition of melancholy in all its forms, complete with symptoms, prognostics and cures from all the history of the world (up to the 17th century). It is packed with history, medical science, anecdotes and whatever other tangent comes his mind.
If you don't know Latin make sure to get an edition with footnotes/translations as he quotes Latin authors on what feels like every page.

>Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden in Holland..."I no sooner" (saith he) "come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance, and melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich men that know not this happiness."

I mean, I like that kind of style, similar to Montaigne but maybe even more dense.

Good passage btw

>Also, anyone read this?
Nope, as crazy as it sounds this book was never read by anyone ever but everyone just assumes someone else has and doesn't bother to themselves.

Unironically yeah, 3D women are disgusting these days

kek

Does the NYRB edition lack such footnotes?
t. three years of latin a good long while ago

The nyrb usually has a translation in parentheses after the Latin, but it's a pretty free/loose translation.
iirc they don't always have translations though

I'm sold

>Without hesitation, I stretch out my arm and summon a carriage, and with an almost uncontrollable glee and superb force risen from some beyond unknown realm by the distant collective of scholars and intellectuals past I order the driver with my sweet vibrato tenor voice "The library, and get a move on!"

It has the original latin, the translated latin, and all of the (like 200ish pages worth altogether) latin endnotes after each partition.

If you're talking about the user who offered to cite some passages when he got up, that was me but I forgot in the morning and the thread died by night. This is one of my favorites that I've posted before. Here are some others:

>Forestus hath a story of two melancholy brethren that made away themselves, and for so foul a fact were accordingly censured to be infamously buuried…but upon farther examination of their misery and madness, the censure was revoked, and they were solemnly interred, as Saul was by David, and Seneca well adviseth, Irascere interfectori, sed miserere interfecti; be justly offended with him as he was a murderer, but pity him now as a dead man. Thus of their goods and bodies we can dispose; but what shall become of their souls, God alone can tell; his mercy may come inter pontem et fontem, inter gladium et jugulum, betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat. Quod cuiquam contigit, cuivis potest:Who knows how he may be tempted? It is his case, it may be thine: Quae sua sorshodie est, cras fore vestra potest. We ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures, as some are; charity will judge and hope the best: God be merciful unto us all!

>One day of grief is an hundred years...a plague of the soul, the cramp and convulsion of the soul, an epitome of hell, and if there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart.

>They had rather write their minds than speak, and above all things love solitariness. Are they so solitary for pleasure (one asks) or pain? for both; yet I rather think for fear and sorrow.

>[Melancholy is] "A cruel torture of the soul, a most inexplicable grief, poisoned worm, consuming body and soul and gnawing the very heart, a perpetual executioner, continual night, profound darkness, a whirlwind, a tempest, an ague not appearing, heating worse than any fire, and a battle that hath no end. It crucifies worse than any tyrant; no torture, no strappado, no bodily punishment like unto it." 'Tis the eagle without question which the poets feigned to gnaw Prometheus' heart, and "no heaviness is like unto the heaviness of the heart."

>Nature may justly complain of thee, that whereas she gave thee a good wholesome temperature, a sound body, and God hath given thee so divine and excellent a soul, so many good parts and profitable gifts, thou has not only contemned and rejected, but hast corrupted them, polluted them, overthrown their temperature, and perverted those gifts with riot, idleness, solitariness, and many other ways; thou art a traitor to God and nature, an enemy to thyself and to the world. Perditio tua ex te: thou hast lost thyself wilfully, cast away thyself, thou thyself art the efficient cause of thine own misery, by not resisting such vain cogitations, but giving way unto them.

1/2

Yes it was you! Thanks mate.

2/2

It's important to note that this is not a dispassionate academic treatise. You get the feeling throughout that Burton really knows depression, possibly because he himself may have been depressed. He covers a whole range of symptoms and cures in the sense that he sympathizes, admonishes, rebukes, comforts, and offers hope. He sees that sometimes people who are depressed need a shoulder to lean on and sometimes we need a kick in the ass. He's obviously christian: he quotes the Bible on almost every page right alongside the great pagans of antiquity, but there's a clear undercurrent dealing with the grace of God. Nevertheless he's very human; this isn't a priest regurgitating some bible verses at you, but someone who knows that sometimes even the faith doesn't feel like it's "enough," most interestingly (I think) coming out in his quiet empathetic sadness, rather than scathing condemnation, about suicides.

Haven't finished the third partition but I would definitely recommend it. It's made me cry a few times; I think it's the perfect synthesis of Christian grace, humanist understanding, and personal empathy for anyone depressed/suicidal.

>But no man hears us, we are most miserably dejected, the scum of the world. Vix habet in nobis iam nova plaga locum, our bodies have scarce room for a new stripe. We can get no relief, no comfort, no succour. We have tried all means, yet find no remedy: no man living can express the anguish and bitterness of our souls, but we that endure it; we are distressed, forsaken, in torture of body and mind, in another hell: and what shall we do?...The devil and the world persecute us, all good fortune hath forsaken us...Death alone we desire, death we seek, yet cannot have it, and what shall we do? Accustom thyself to it, and it will be tolerable at last. Yea, but I may not, I cannot, Fortune hath consumed all her arrows upon me...He that is on the ground can fall no farther; comfort thyself with this yet, thou art at the worst, and before long it will either overcome thee or thou it. If it be violent, it cannot endure: let the devil himself and all the plagues of Egypt come upon thee at once, be of good courage; misery is virtue's whetstone...Thou art vexed here in this world; but say to thyself: "Why art thou troubled, O my soul?" Is not God better to thee than all temporalities, and momentary pleasures of the world? be then pacified. And though thou beest now peradventure in extreme want, it may be 'tis for thy further good, to try thy patience, as it did Job's, and exercise thee in this life: trust in God, and rely upon Him, and thou shalt be crowned in the end. What's this life to eternity? The world hath forsaken thee, thy friends and fortunes are all gone: yet know this, that the very hairs of thine head are numbered, that God is a spectator of all thy miseries, He sees thy wrongs, woes, and wants.

>Dum spiras spera.
>While thou breathest, hope.

Read this book.

This is objectively false. All the girls and numale cucks that read love kindle and ebooks in general over physical books. There's something sublime and very appropriate about all the tactile sensations that go into reading a physical book from the feel of the pages to the slowly diminishing amount left in your one hand or even just the way words slightly curve as they get close to the inner spine of the book. Aesthetic is v important to reading and should only be sacrificed if an ebook offers substantial benefit not easily substituted in a physical copy (ease of acquiring, price, supplemental material, etc).

We are talking about take a 1000+ pages book with you on the train vs read it comfortably on kindle. This is the matter, and I think in this case kidle is to be preferred.

You sound like a huge numale hipster.

Sorry about your muscular dystrophy user, it must be very hard for you to do basic motor functions if a decently heavy book is so uncomfortable for you.

lol

It's simply comfort

...

>taking the train
>not having a bookslave
Take your poverty and $0.99 kindle copies elsewhere chap. If you need me I'll be fucking your wife in my library.

what the fuck is a bookslave

A human kindle with better construction and a longer battery life