“It is now that we understand the great profundity of the old idea of the memento mori (remember that you will die). Meditative souls of the Middle Ages often adorned their tables with skulls or kept close by etching of skeletons engaged in the danse macabre. Later, during the early Renaissance, funeral art featured grim reapers or skull and bones. Even later large clocks had engraved upon them mottoes, such as ultima forsan (perhaps the last) or vulnerant omnes, ultima necat (they all wound, and the last kills) or, perhaps the best known, tempus fugit (time flies). Seen in the light of Keat’s linkage of melancholy, death and beauty, these motifs do not appear to be morbid but rather celebratory, vibrant gestures toward life’s ambrosial finitude.”

—Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.