Word: melancholia
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Munch described his self-portrait as a self-examination. Its colors-red and green in the figure, violet and orange in the background-increase the emotional punch. Painted in 1906, when he was already famous, it reflects the melancholia that continually plagued him. Munch's girl had recently threatened suicide because he refused to marry her, and when he tried to disarm her, she had shot him in the finger. He was drinking more & more, and throwing his weight around when he did. He had exiled himself from Norway after almost killing a man in a drunken brawl...
...roses, and his memoir of his patron is, perhaps unwittingly, a murderous indictment of a spoiled and kittenish aesthete. Gathorne-Hardy was allowed plenty of free time, but Smith often made his life miserable with his whims and pouts, especially during his intermittent bouts of melancholia, which he called his "interlunaries." And his penchant for repeating anecdotes would drive Gathorne-Hardy to otherwise unmotivated trips to the washroom...
...smile about. More significant, however, the implications of National Smile Week are being ignored. It is obvious that, should sufficient cause for smiling be found, organized madness might soon grip the country. A popular old song informs us that "there are smiles that make us blue." A wave of melancholia caused by such smiling could easily start a wave of suicides. People obliged to smile through their tears would suffer deeprooted psychic conflicts, as well as possible internal drowning. Smiling during a cold snap could easily result in little-known maladies such as frozen teeth and gums...
...rather insensitive . . . beneath [whose] assured demeanor lay a torment .of apprehensiveness, doubt and misgivings . . ." His antics suggested St. Vitus' dance but were actually of psychic, not organic, origin. Obsessed with a sense of guilt and fears of insanity and death, Johnson prescribed his own remedy for fits of melancholia: busying himself with involved arithmetical problems...
...vicious flies, and as they talked, the star-studded African twilight fell and native drums kept up an insistent rhythm. Being wealthy and intense young New York intellectuals, Kit and Port Moresby glibly fell into lingo so appropriate that Noel Coward might have written it in a fit of melancholia...