Melancholy

In an old copy of the NYRB, a long, (intentionally) rambling review by Charles Rosen of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. That certain kind of melancholy corresponding to situations where ways of life have calcified/ grown old. Cites Mme du Deffand corresponding with Horace Walpole:

Yesterday evening I admired the numerous guests who were at my house; men and women like machines with springs who came and went, spoke and laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling; each one played his role through habit: Madame the Duchess of Aiguillon burst with laughter, Mme De Forcalquier showed her disdain for everything, Mme de la Valliere jabbered about everything. The men were no better, and as for myself, I was buried in the blackest reflections; I thought that I had passed my life in illusions; that I had hollowed out for myself all the abysses into which I had fallen; that all my judgements were false and rash and always too precipitate; and finally that I had never really known anyone, that I had never been known, that perhaps I did not know myself.