The Anatomy of Melancholy
1638 · 547 pages
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.
★ 7.2
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Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Camera Lucida
1980 · 119 pages
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.
★ 6.5
The Passions of the Soul
1649 · 165 pages
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.
★ 6.3