Browneian Reading All reads lead to Sir Thomas Browne

I often come across references to Sir Thomas Browne or his writing in books that I read. It seems his influence is wide and varied. This page documents these references as and when I come across them.

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
— The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Fifty years ago to the day, British newspapers reported that the city of Celle had been taken and that German forces were in headlong retreat from the Red Army, which was advancing up the Danube valley. And finally, Maundy Thursday, the 13th of April 1995, was also the day on which Clara’s father, shortly after being taken to hospital in Coburg, departed this life. Now, as I write, and think once more of our history, which is but a long account of calamities, it occurs to me that at one time the only acceptable expression of profound grief, for ladies of the upper classes, was to wear heavy robes of black silk taffeta or black crêpe de china. Thus at Queen Victoria’s funeral, for example, the Duchess of Teck allegedly made her appearance in what contemporary fashion magazines described as a breathtaking gown with billowing veils, all of black Mantua silk of which the Norwich silk weavers Willett & Nephew, just before the firm closed down for good, had created, uniquely for this occasion, and in order to demonstrate their unsurpassed skills in the manufacture of mourning silks, a length of some sixty paces. And Sir Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost forever.

¶ On curiosity. Consider the following inventory of questions and conjectures. What did John the Baptist wear? Were there rainbows before the Flood? Is it unlucky to sneeze between midnight and noon? How to account for the ‘strange and mystical transmigrations of silkworms’? Or the bizarre hirsutism — a condition know as ‘the Morgellons’ — that afflicts Provençal children? Did Jesus laugh? Did he lie down to eat? What are the diseases associated with the climate of Iceland? The likely outcome if you imprison a mole, a toad and a viper together, under glass? (As it happens, the mole prevails.) Now imagine a writer of such rigour, daring and erudition, so prodigiously equiped in style and powers of observation, a scholar so curious he could pass comfortably from such problems to reflections on magnetism, coral, crystallography, ballistics, porcelain and the human eyelid. Such and more was Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century physician whose voracious essayism trumped all in a period hardly lacking for literary and scientific experiment.

Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön’s rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already Tlön’s (conjectural) “primitive language” has filtered into our schools; already the teaching of Tlön’s harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has obliterated the history that governed my own childhood; already a fictitious past has supplanted in men’s memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain—not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology, and archaeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics are also awaiting their next avatar… A scattered dynasty of recluses has changed the face of the earth—and their work continues. If my projections are correct, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of The Second Encyclopoedia of Tlön.

At that, French and English and mere Spanish will disappear from the earth. The world will be Tlön. That makes very little difference to me; through my quiet days in this hotel in Adrogué, I go on revising (though I never intend to publish) an indecisive translation in the style of Quevedo of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall.
— Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a “word-killer”: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meaning, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.

When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nicknames, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had be swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.

Who would know ever again what a vigigraphe was, “a type of telegraph consisting of watchtowers communicating with each other”? And who could henceforth imagine there had existed for perhaps many generations a “block of wood on the end of a stick for flattening watercress in flooded ditches” and that the block had been called a schuèle (shü-ell)?…

Cinoc began to dally on the banks of the Seine, rummaging through the open-air bookstalls, leafing through penny dreadfuls, out-of-date essays, obsolete traveller’s guides, old textbooks on physiology, mechanics, or moral instruction, or superseded maps in which Italy still figured as a multicoloured patchwork of little kingdoms. Later on he went to borrow books from the municipal library of the XVIIth arrondissement, in Rue Jacques-Binjen, having them bring down from the attic dusty old folios, ancient users’ manuals, volumes from the Library of Miracles, and old dictionaries: Lachâtre, Vicarius, Bescherelle aîné, Larrive, Fleury, the Dictionary of Conversation compiled by a Society of Men and Letters, Graves and d’Esbigné, Bouillet, Onions, Dezobry, and Bachelet. Finally, when he had exhausted the resources of his local library, he grew bolder and enrolled at Sainte-Geneviève, where he started to read the authors whose names he saw as he went in, carved on the stone façade.

He read Aristotle, Pliny, Aldrovandy, Sir Thomas Browne, Gesner, Ray, Linnaeus, Brisson, Cuvier, Bonneterre, Owen, Scoresby, Bennett, Aronnax, Omstead, Pierre-Joseph Macquart, Sterne, Eugénie Guérin, Gastripheres, Phutatorius, Somnolentius, Triptolemy, Argalastes, Kysarchius, Egnatius, Sigonius, Bossius, Ticinenses, Baysius, Bodoeus, Salmasius, Lipsius, Lazius, Isaac Casaubon, Joseph Scaliger, and even the De re vestiaria veterum by Rubenius (1655, quarto), which gave him a full & satisfactory account of the Toga, or loose gown, the Chlamys, the Ephod, the Tunica or jacket, the Synthesis, the Paenula, the Lacema with its Cucullus, the Paladamentum, and Praetexta, the Sagum or soldier’s jerkin, and the Trabea: of which, according to the Suetonius, there were three kinds.

Cinoc read slowly and copied down rare words; gradually his plan began to take shape, and he decided to compile a great dictionary of forgotten words, not in order to perpetuate the memory of the Akka, a black-skinned pygmy people of Central Africa, or of Jean Gigoux, a historical painter, or of Henri Romagnesi, a composer of romances, 1781–1851, nor to prolong the life of the scolecobrot, a tetramerous coleopter of the longicorn family, Cerambycid branch, but so as to rescue simple words which still appealed to him. In ten years he gathered more than eight thousand of them, which contain, obscurely, the trace of a story it has now become almost impossible to hand on…

When Leo Feldman, Stanley Elkin’s awesome merchant, enters his department store and is at once assailed by ‘perfumes and facepowders, the mascaras, and polishes bright as sodas,’ will we enter? only if his language enters us the way God’s did Adam at whose bare word, as Sir Thomas Browne reminds us, ‘were the rest of creatures made.’ Then the language fills the mouth as it were meant to. We feel the need to speak it.

Finally, changing his idiom to a burlesque of Sir Thomas Browne, Stephen rounds off his homily with reflections on the circular rhythm of life from cradle to grave.

As something too small to mourn; the very word was archaic and superstitious, of the age of Browne, or Hervey; yet Donne was right, her death detracted, would for ever detract, from my own life. Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

And to quote the words of Sir Thomas Browne directly:

When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction was over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations.

But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whether they are to be scattered? The Reliques of many lie like the ruines of Pompeys, in all parts of the earth; And when they arrive at your hands, theses may seem to have wandred far, who in a direct and Meridian Travell, have but few miles of known Earth between your self and the Pole.