'No News Here'

“No news here; that which I have is stolen, from others . . .”

Every writer, if he is honest, will find truth in such an admission. We pass along what others have thought, sometimes consciously, often in ignorance. There’s nothing shameful about this. At our best we are respectful borrowers and refiners. We concur, reluctantly or otherwise, with Kohelet. The sentence quoted above is from Burton’s “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. No writer has so forthrightly, or at such great length, acknowledged his indebtedness to others. He completes the sentence:

“. . . Dicitque mihi mea pagina fur es [My page cries out to me, you are a thief]. If that severe doom of Synesius be true, ‘it is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labours, than their clothes,’ what shall become of most writers? I hold up my hand at the bar among others, and am guilty of felony in this kind, habes confitentem reum [the defendant pleads guilty], I am content to be pressed with the rest. ’Tis most true, tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes [Many are possessed with an incurable itch for writing], and there is no end of writing of books, as the wiseman found of old.”

We write out of vanity, Burton reminds us, “in this scribbling age,” and who can argue with that? Who is moved by humility to write? Writing is presumption. Every man, “out of an itching humour,” he writes, “hath to show himself, desirous of fame and honour.”

The one book I have returned to consistently since the start of the lockdown, reading it not sequentially but as a form of bibliomancy, as divination, is Burton’s Anatomy. Few writers so seamlessly mingle learning, wisdom and humor:

“[Writers] lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. Ineruditi fures [unlettered thieves], &c. A fault that every writer finds, as I do now, and yet faulty themselves, trium literarum homines [men of three letters; i.e., fur, meaning “thief”] all thieves; they pilfer out of old writers to stuff up their new comments, scrape Ennius’ dunghills [Virgil is reputed to have been reading a volume by Quintus Ennius. Asked why, Virgil said he was “plucking pearls from Ennius’ dunghill”], and out of Democritus' pit, as I have done. By which means it comes to pass, that not only libraries and shops are full of our putrid papers, but every close-stool and jakes, Scribunt carmina quae legunt cacantes [They write books which people read while shitting].”