'To Yield Myself to Tombstones and Oblivion'

Today’s AI-driven writing, even when composed by a verifiable human being, has little in common with the baroque extravagance of Sir Thomas Browne’s prose. He is a non-utilitarian word-lover’s delight, without writing nonsense. Among writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks sixty-ninth. He is cited almost eight-hundred times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things, approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian. 

And yet, Browne’s prose can be plain and straightforward. Take the epigraph Joseph Conrad gave his 1913 novel Chance, from section eighteen of Religio Medici: “Those that hold that all things are governed by fortune had not erred, had they not persisted there.” But consider the subsequent sentences, a lexical romp through Christian apologetics:

 

“The Romans that erected a Temple to Fortune, acknowledged therein, though in a blinder way, somewhat of Divinity; for in a wise supputation all things begin and end in the Almighty. There is a neerer way to heaven than Homers chaine; an easie Logick may conjoyne heaven and earth in one argument, and with lesse than a Sorites resolve all things into God. For though wee Christen effects by their most sensible and nearest causes, yet is God the true and infallible cause of all, whose concourse though it be generall, yet doth it subdivide it selfe into the particular actions of every thing, and is that spirit, by which each singular essence not onely subsists, but performes its operation.”

 

The OED cites Browne for supputation and gives this definition: “the action or process of calculating or computing.” Sorites is a little more complicated, though the Dictionary again cites Browne: “A series of propositions, in which the predicate of each is the subject of the next, the conclusion being formed of the first subject and the last predicate.”

 

English prose reached its linguistic apex in the seventeenth century. Besides Browne we revel in the King James Bible, Robert Burton, Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, John Milton, Charles Cotton’s Montaigne, Izaak Walton and Thomas Hobbes, among others. Jorge Luis Borges published “Religio Medici, 1643” in The Gold of the Tigers (trans. Alastair Reid, 1972):

 

“Save me, O Lord. (That I use a name for you

does not imply a Being. It’s just a word

from that vocabulary the tenuous use,

and that I use now, in an evening of panic.)

Save me from myself. Others have asked the same—

Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, an unknown Spaniard.

Something remains in me of these golden visions

that my fading eyesight can still recognize.

Save me, O Lord, from that impatient urge:

to yield myself to tombstones and oblivion.

Save me from facing all that I have been,

that person I have been irreparably.

Not from the sword-thrust or the bloodstained lance.

Save me, at least from all those golden fictions.”

 

Borges recalls a well-known passage in Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall (1658), from which William Styron borrowed the title of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951):

 

“Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man. . . . The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every houre addes unto that current Arithmetique, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt whether thus to live, were to dye. Since our longest Sunne sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darknesse, and have our lights in ashes. Since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying memento’s, and time that grows old it self, bids us hope no long duration: Diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.”