Kafka strongly identified with his maternal ancestors because of their spirituality, intellectual distinction, piety, rabbinical learning, eccentricity, melancholy disposition, and delicate physical and mental constitution.
Even Vasari seemed to sense this when he wrote of a picture with "a laughing child, like a little angel, holding a book in his hand, who seems to laugh so naturally that he makes whoever sees him smile, so that not even a person of a melancholy disposition could fail to be cheered".
Those honourable ancestors who have preceded me in trading in fictitious futures have almost all had the melancholy Steppenwolf disposition, from Mary Shelley, through Edward Bulwer-Lytton, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Olaf Stapledon to George Orwell.
Melancholy may be part of his disposition, but one never counted on him for paranoia.
"Terriers" has a genetic disposition at once vaguely melancholy and eccentrically sprightly, but the good mood always seems to prevail.
However, in public dealings, Austin's nervous disposition, shaky health, tendency towards melancholy, and perfectionism combined to end quickly careers at the Bar, in academia, and in government service (Hamburger 1985, 1992).
His own disposition, from the outset, was solitary and melancholy.
I, a lesser writer, conceal my disposition, too; I like to keep my melancholy to myself.
With his melancholy humor, Lincoln had some of Hamlet's antic disposition, but his favorite passage in Shakespeare's play was the soliloquy spoken by Hamlet's usurping uncle, Claudius, when he tries to pray for forgiveness and fails: "O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven, / It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, / A brother's murder".
These songs revel in their own blitheness and, while they occasionally sound a melancholy note, they dare you to accuse them of having anything but the sunniest of dispositions.
