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].”
There’s a letter by a young C. S. Lewis in which he says he meant to spend the morning (I think it was the morning) on a reading task he needed to apply himself to; but he got “snared” by Burton’s Anatomy.
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