This is the last post about the introductions; I've finally moved on to Democritus Junior's text. I already wish that I knew some Latin; it looks like a third of the Latin in the book remains entirely untranslated. I like Jackson's assessment of the book as a whole (I can only imagine Dan Green plugging his ears, squeezing his eyes shut and singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" at the top of his voice):

The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of those books which possess something like human character and behaviour, the kind of book which seems to have grown. Few books are more definitively or more curiously imbued with their authorship. The Anatomy is Burton, and Burton the Anatomy. To read it is to read him: to read him is to talk with him, to know him as we know the great persons of fiction, or those few writers who have so projected themselves into their works as to have achieved for their own personalities what the great novelists and dramatists have achieved for the characters of their stories and plays. Burton, like Montaigne, Pepys, and Lamb, has made a fiction of himself, stranger and more interesting than fact. (p. XXV)

There's also a great bit in which Jackson describes The Anatomy as "a mine for the creative," and then goes on to place people who turn to it in one of the following three categories: "a plagiarist, legitimately predatory, or an adventurous reader" (p. XVII). I love "legitimately predatory;" it's spectacularly clever, and is a perfect description of the writerly reader.

Speaking of clever, this passage on lawyers from Burton's own introductory poem is wonderfully so:

Should crafty lawyer trespass on our ground,
Caitiffs avaunt! disturbing tribe away!
Unless (white crow) an honest one be found:
He'll better, wiser go for what we say.
(p. 5-6)

Some things really are timeless. The "white crow" remark is pretty good, but "disturbing tribe" is a genuine moment of genius.

There was a lot of controversy when both Zadie Smith and Marisha Pessl received a great deal of coverage that centred on their appearance rather than their considerable talent. Bloggers and columnists were raising such a fuss over the fact that people were calling Smith and Pessl pretty; imagine if they had been discussed with the kind of attention to detail that Holbrook Jackson paid to Robert Burton in his introduction to the 1932 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, or even worse, drew the same sort of conclusions. Observe:

We know how he looked from his portraits, of which there are three [...] From these sources we may compose a portrait of our English Democritus among his books in the agreeable setting of a famous and already venerable college: a thick-set, plumpish man, with dark brown beard of formal cut; there is a satiric glint in the large eyes, and intelligence and memory are revealed in the monumental forehead; his nose is enterprising and he has the snap mouth of the well-opinioned, corrected by an indulgent nether lip. It is the face of a character such as England often produced in those days and sometimes even now: a competent, thoughtful, self-sufficient face, with a hint of shyness which might indicate a preference for a sheltered life rather than a life of adventure, unless it were adventures among books. And from this composite presentment we may safely infer a genial yet reclusive, diffident yet self-opinionated man, who might be friendly but not demonstrative, tolerant yet irascible, and who would suffer fools sadly rather than gladly. (p. XX)

I wonder if you'd say that Marisha Pessl has an indulgent nether lip?

I'm inaugurating a new reading project for vestige.org. It will be independent of Reading 2008 and subsequent related projects. It's called The Long Read. There are a number of books in my stack that I've wanted to read for years, but have put off because they are daunting either intellectually or by virtue of their extreme length (or both). There aren't many of these books, but they could take months or perhaps even a full year to read and therefore don't fit well into my Reading 2008 project, nor my policy of reading only one book at a time. I'm talking about books like The Anatomy of Melancholy or In Search of Lost Time. What I propose is this: alongside my regular reading, I will read one of these long, daunting books. Rather than posting a single review after reading the book, I will post periodic reports, including interesting quotations and my thoughts on the process of trying to engage with such heavy reading material and how, or even if, the extended duration of that engagement might affect my thoughts and feelings about the material. If that sounded convoluted, I suppose you might just say that I'll be blogging about a big, difficult book alongside my regular reading list.

The first book I've chosen for The Long Read is Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. I've been interested in this book since taking a class in 1999 with Canadian author Eric McCormack (The Dutch Wife, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, The Mysterium, etc), in which he spoke extensively about writing his thesis on The Anatomy. I picked up the NYRB edition in 2001, and it's been sitting on my shelf ever since, glanced at but never opened seriously. With one or two exceptions, I've never been a fan of pre-Victorian prose, so I don't anticipate a smooth ride with Mr. Burton. I'm hoping that my natural affinity for the topic will sustain me. These lines from William H. Gass' introduction give me some hope:

The analytical outline should not daunt. Burton pays as much attention to his own schematisms as he pays to the syntax of his sentences. Imposing indeed are his interconnections, but it is rather as if a net had been flung down on top of fish who continue to roil and flop freely about beneath it.

So here's hoping this works out. I don't think I've ever been so intimidated by a book in all my life.