skopia
Wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness: six primitive passions from which Descartes builds every feeling you have, located in the body's machinery rather than condemned as sins the soul must defeat.
Grieving his mother, Barthes asks what a photograph is and answers with the punctum, the detail that wounds you. Photography criticism has argued in the vocabulary he invented here ever since.
Melancholy comes from everything, the Oxford scholar Robert Burton concludes, from diet and air to love and religion. A thousand pages of quotation follow, and his one prescription is not to be idle.