PASSAGES

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I therefore pluck from my desk the somewhat intimidating tome of Saturn and Melancholy, which I have a 'facsimile' edition of, flicking to page 123, and taking care not to lick my fingers for fear of a Name of the Rose scenario, I count carefully to the 5th sentence,  where I find the following 3 sentences:

For that reason he subjects his sensibilities to principles ... The man of melancholic disposition cares little for the opinions of others ... for that reason he relies solely on his own judgment.  Because impulses assume in him the nature of principles, he is not easily distracted; his constancy too sometimes turns to obstinacy ... friendship is sublime; he is therefore susceptible to it.

 Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl.  (1964).  Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art.  London : Thomas Nelson and Sons, p. 123 (ellipses in original)

In turn I tag: Luca Antara, Black Sun, Decoys, The Cloisters and Pruned.  Apologies if any of you have already done this, I think it has been circling the ether for a while!  (Maybe someone could gather all of these textual fragments together and stitch them into a whole ... maybe William S Burroughs might like that task...)

The poignancy of clowns involves a sense of irreality ... that they exist apart from us, yet everything is sufficiently familiar to feel real.  Like the Pierrot, the mannerisms and exaggeration of the clown's art are suffused with melancholy.  Marcel Marceau salvaged the Pierrot's white face in his Bip the Clown character. He shared the internally conflicted approach to humour - sadness that brings laughter - with Charlie Chaplin, and meeting him in 1967, Marceau found in him a kind of 'tristesse' ... a 'melancholy.'  Slapstick in particular is sisyphusian in its humour: the agonising repetitions, the always-apparent imminent disasters.  Inevitable impending tragedy in clowning creates a conundrum, as in Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or: A Fragment of Life.  He tells the story of a fire breaking out backstage in the theatre, and when “the clown came out to warn the public, they thought it was a joke and applauded.  He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater.”

Although it be controverted by some, whether love melancholy may be cured, because it is so irresistible and violent a passion; yet without question, if it be taken in time, it may be helped and by many good remedies amended.  The first rule to be observed in this stubborn and unbridled passion, is exercise and diet.  As an idle sedentary life, liberal feeding, are great causes of it, so the opposite, labour, slender and sparing diet, with continual business, are the best and most ordinary means to prevent it.  No better physic than to be always occupied, seriously intent. 

"Why, dost thou ask, poor folks are often free

And dainty places still molested be?"

Because poor people fare coarsely, work hard, go wolward and bare.  Guianerius therefore prescribes his patient, "go with hair-cloth next his skin, to go bare-footed, and bare-legged in cold weather, to whip himself now and then, as monks do, but above all to fast.  Not with sweet wine, mutton and pottage, as many of those tender-bellies do, howsoever they put on Lenten faces, and whatsoever they pretend, but from all manner of meat."  Fasting is an all-sufficient remedy of itself; for, as Jason Pratensis holds, the bodies of such persons that feed liberally and live at ease, "are full of bad spirits and devils and devilish thoughts; no better physic for such parties, than to fast."  Hildesheim to this of hunger, adds, "often baths, much exercise and sweat," but hunger and fasting he prescribes before the rest.  By this means thos Indian Brahmins kept themselves continent: they lay upon the ground covered with skins, as the red-shanks do on heather, and dieted themselves sparingly on one dish, which Guianerius would have all young men put in practice, and if that will not serve, Gordonius "would have them soundly whipped, or, to cool their courage, kept in prison," and there fed with bread and water until they acknowledge their error, and become of another mind.  If imprisonment and hunger will not take them down, according to the directions of that Theban Crates, "time must wear it out; if time will not, the last refuge is a halter."  But this, you will say, is comically spoken.

Robert Burton (1621) The Anatomy of Melancholy.