'The Absurdity Which Is the Shadow of Sublimity'

When I was young and credulous I took the postwar generation of American novelists rather seriously, even Mailer and Vidal. Along with them came another highly touted name, William Styron. I suspect his books are seldom much read anymore but I owe him an oblique debt for his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Styron took his title from a passage in Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658): 

“And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even pagans could doubt whether thus to live were to die. Since our longest sun sets at right descensions and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes.”

 

That’s how I first learned of Browne’s admirably purple prose. Among the writers most often cited by the OED, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited 788 times for the first appearance of words in English. This is the man who gave us mucous and prostate. A young reader has asked where he should start with Browne (and other seventeenth-century writers of prose). I suggest Religio Medici (1643). He’ll find much comedy in Browne, not something you’ll be alerted to in the classroom. Browne married Dorothy Mileham in 1641, and the couple had twelve children in eighteen years. In Religio Medici he writes:

 

“I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.”

 

In his chapter devoted to Browne in the first volume of Hours in a Library (1892), Leslie Stephen (yes, Virginia Woolf’s father) writes:

 

“Sir Thomas Browne seems to be held back from abandoning himself to the ecstasies of abstract meditation, chiefly by his peculiar sense of humour. There is a closer connection than we are always willing to admit between humour and profanity. Humour is the faculty which always keeps us in mind of the absurdity which is the shadow of sublimity. It is naturally allied to intellectual scepticism, as in Rabelais or Montaigne; and Sir Thomas shared the tendency sufficiently to be called atheist by some wiseacres.”

 

I owe to my professor of eighteenth-century English literature, Donna Fricke, my gift for finding humor, intentional or otherwise, in literary texts. She remains the only reader I have known who discerned comedy in Jean-Paul Sartre – specifically, the chapter devoted to holes in Being and Nothingness.