After reading Bryan Alexander’s blog on dental horrors and Poe’s uber-creepy story “Berenice,”
I was seized by the imp of the perverse and decided to do something really out there for my third podcast. That’s why I’ve read section 11 from Part 2 of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (“The Religion of a Physician”). This book, written in the 1630s and first published in an authorized edition in 1643, is one of my favorites. Strange, long sentences roll by, stuffed with allusions and paradoxes and circular singularities but ending more often than not with either a joke or a moment of poetic wonder. The book was intended as a private amusement, Browne tells us, and circulated among some friends, but in 1642 it appeared as a bootleg. (Sound familiar?) The authorized edition appeared the next year, with Browne’s corrections.

In the introductory letter to the reader, Browne warns us that his musings in this book are “the sense of my conceptions at the time, not an immutable law unto my advancing judgment at all times,” and further cautions us that “there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.” Something like a song, or a poem, or even a soft and flexible blog?

The passage I read stands on its own pretty well and needs fewer footnotes than some of the other sections. It has some good jokes. It has some sublimity. I’m not sure I made enough sense of it in my reading, but I am sure that no one writes like Browne, even though some of us are content to try and fail.

“But why fly in the face of facts? Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.” Virginia Woolf

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