'An Attitude Toward the World, an Enigma'

If my goal is to be the middleman, the broker or matchmaker, between books and readers, I’ve been an unambiguous failure. Rarely do I hear of someone who has taken up one of my suggestions, acquired the book, read it and shared my enthusiasm. An exception occurred on Sunday when a reader whose name was not familiar said he was reading Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). It’s among the most entertaining volumes in the language but not exactly Fifty Shades of Gray. To best appreciate it, one must love the medium – that is, words – as few readers and writers do today. My reader even shared a favorite passage:

“In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, &c., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another . . .”

A graduate student might note that the passage itself is “a maze, a labyrinth,” but most of Burton’s sentences are like that, stretching grammar to the limits and beyond, and full of wonderful catalogs. In his brief life of Burton, Desmond MacCarthy (Portraits, 1931) writes of the Anatomy: “It is a book for dippers. Full of fantastic digressions, fantastic stories, vigorous images, racy, quaint and grand in style, it is the richest curiosity shop in English literature.” I’ve read it both ways – straight through and by way of bibliomancy. To return to the book with some regularity across a lifetime, to follow Burton’s allusions to their sources and learn your way around its eccentric geography is the truest form of adult education. Later in the chapter quoted above, Burton documents a peculiarly contemporary note of grievance:

“One complains of want, a second of servitude, another of a secret or incurable disease; of some deformity of body, of some loss, danger, death of friends, shipwreck, persecution, imprisonment, disgrace, repulse, contumely, calumny, abuse, injury, contempt, ingratitude, unkindness, scoffs, flouts, unfortunate marriage, single life, too many children, no children, false servants, unhappy children, barrenness, banishment, oppression, frustrate hopes and ill-success, &c.”

With Burton, style is the man. He is our waywardly learned, word-drunk guide who never met a digression he couldn’t make even more convoluted. Guy Davenport writes in “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981):

“Style, ‘the man,’ remains unexplained, like different handwritings. It is imitation that has progressed into individuality; it is a psychological symptom kin to tone of voice and personality. It is a skill, an extension of character, an attitude toward the world, an enigma.”