#reading some Calvino this morning #[1]​

“This inextricable blend of melancholy and humor characterizes the voice of the Prince of Denmark, whose accent we have learned to recognize in all or nearly all of Shakespeare's plays, on the lips of Hamlet's many avatars. One of these, Jaques in As You Like It (IV, i), defines melancholy this way: "It is a melancholy of my own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness." It is not, then, a dense or opaque melancholy, but rather a veil of minuscule particles of humors and sensations, a dusting of atoms, like everything that constitutes the basic substance of the multiplicity of things.”

~Italo Calvino from “Lightness”