What Can A 17th-century English Doctor Teach Us About Embracing Uncertainty?

I’ve been reference Sir Thomas Browne again. It happens each fewer years. There must beryllium immoderate underlying intelligence upwind shape present that I haven’t rather cottoned connected to. Life is cruising along—sure location are nan accustomed issues but thing really acute to kick about—and past 1 time I spell and propulsion down my large yellowish transcript of nan collected useful and commencement paging backmost done Pseudodoxia aliases Hydriotaphia. I don’t cognize what my problem is.

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Reasonable group don’t do this. Browne, a 17th-century Norwich doctor, is legendarily excruciating to read. His prose is dense, ornate, disorienting, nan syntax truthful convoluted, nan spellings and conjugations truthful old-timey, nan footnotes truthful profuse, nan wont of flowering allusion truthful insistent that nan scholar often has nan sensation that each guardant advancement has been arrested; they are nary longer moving done nan text, alternatively it’s nan matter that is passing, inching, done them.

It feels astatine times arsenic if an full assemblage program had been boiled down and concentrated into each paragraph, for illustration immoderate literate analog of Vegemite. It’s not evidently pleasant, successful different words, successful nan accustomed ways we deliberation of pleasant. I erstwhile tried to really thatch a information of Hydriotaphia to an undergraduate imaginative penning class. They were truthful smart and sweet, and until nan time I assigned that reading, they believed successful me. They thought I was personification they could trust.

Each of Browne’s useful has its ain tests and treasures, from The Gardens of Cyrus, a monograph connected nan style of nan missive X, to Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a takedown of then-popular superstitions, but inevitably it’s Hydriotaphia I return to. The premise of nan book is simple—a fewer ancient urnes person been digged up successful Norfolk, and Browne is going to constitute a little sermon connected them—but what he really does is acold vaster successful scope. He uses nan juncture to see really group crossed each known quality history person approached nan disposition of dormant bodies, whether they buried aliases burned them and how, what rites they executed, what decorations aliases attitudes they affected. (It’s not conscionable his style that gets readers going, you see, it’s his taxable matter, too.)

If you tin support your bearings agelong capable to make it done nan opening epistle, nan first point you announcement is Browne’s expertise to move a phrase. Like immoderate Mesopotamian mound, his activity is strewn pinch fragments of different and arresting beauty. Take this conception from nan first section connected nan comparative shallowness of galore graves:

…few person returned their bones farre little past they mightiness person them; not affecting nan graves of Giants, nether hilly and dense coverings, but contented pinch little past their ain depthe, person wished their bones mightiness dishonesty soft, and nan world beryllium ray upon them.

It isn’t conscionable nan delicacy of his touch here, nan bones lying soft and nan world light, it’s his expertise to formed facts successful improbable and illuminating terms. We do not hide nan dormant six feet deep, we contented ourselves pinch little than our ain depth, a style of measurement that suggests acold much astir nan psychology of funeral than six feet ever could.

But there’s more. Pulling back, we spot nan paragraphs, too, execute thing unusual and unkempt. His knowledge is encyclopedic, but Browne’s magic doesn’t dishonesty successful nan recitation of sundries. Rather, it’s his wont of loading you pinch information, attenuating your attraction pinch tangles of subordinate clauses and neologistic legerdemain, only to dump you, often pinch small ceremony, into immoderate startling philosophical suggestion, arsenic erstwhile a paragraph astir nan folly of burying nan dormant pinch riches ends pinch a defense of sedate robbing: nary man is wronged wherever nary man is possessor.

Or see a paragraph, 1 of many, connected nan taxable of cremation:

Some bones make champion Skeletons, immoderate bodies speedy and speediest ashes: Who would expect a speedy occurrence from Hydropicall Heraclitus? The poisoned Souldier erstwhile his Belly brake, put retired 2 pyres successful Plutarch. But successful nan plague of Athens, 1 backstage pyre served 2 aliases 3 Intruders; and nan Saracens burnt successful ample heaps, by nan King of Castile, shewed really small Fuell sufficeth. Though nan ceremonial pyre of Patroclus took up an 100 foot, a peece of an aged vessel burnt Pompey; and if nan burthen of Isaac were capable for an holocaust, a man whitethorn transportation his owne pyre.

It’s only a paragraph debating nan flammability of a quality body. He seems to beryllium piling his facts arsenic haphazardly arsenic 1 chucks logs onto a fire, but look much closely. See really he carries america done quality history, from Heraclitus, nan weeping philosopher, to nan extremity of Athenian democracy, from nan taste cleansing of nan Reconquista to nan person of Alexander nan Great and nan faltering of nan Roman republic, until he deposits america finally, without warning, astatine nan apical of a elevation successful nan Old Testament, pinch nan recognition—premonition, I almost want to say—that really it takes very little, some physically and philosophically, to pain a quality being.

But moreover this still isn’t Browne’s greatness. You person to measurement backmost yet further earlier you tin statesman to spot what makes Sir Thomas Browne truthful invaluable, possibly particularly successful this time and age. Like Michel de Montaigne, nan different skeptical leader of that era, what keeps Browne caller and captious is his liking successful what he doesn’t know. Montaigne, who wore astir his cervix a medallion engraved pinch nan words What do I know, was peculiarly focused connected nan limits of his ain abilities. “I would task to dainty immoderate matter thoroughly, if I knew myself little well,” he wrote. “Of a 100 members and faces that each point has, I return one, sometimes only to lick it.” And Browne, likewise, is perpetually angling for nan territories of his ain ignorance: “I emotion to fulfill my aforesaid successful a mystery.”

Czeslaw Milosz, successful his 1983 Norton lectures, noting nan trouble of being a kid successful today’s world, touched connected nan value of enigma to writing. So overmuch was known, truthful overmuch had been established, he felt, that nan territories of uncertainty and wonderment had each but vanished. What was childhood, what was nan perpetual puerility of poetry, successful an era of answers? The conception seems laughably quaint successful 2025, erstwhile nan world feels astatine times arsenic if it’s been reduced to a bid of linked and nested YouTube how-tos and TikTok life hacks, and each speech ends pinch personification looking thing up connected Wikipedia.

More than a fewer person noted lately a inclination successful some readers and writers toward a neatly proscribed morality. Garth Greenwell makes an argument for nan necessity of Roth’s filth, for example, while Yiyun Li defends Tolstoy, and by sly hold Munro. The points they make are, I believe, important and necessary, but I person a emotion that Li and Greenwell person taken clasp present only of a area of nan problem. We aren’t suffering simply from a deficiency of tolerance for risqué worldly aliases an insistence connected culling from nan canon each but nan astir saintly of writers. It isn’t only civilized certainty that’s troubling, it’s certainty itself. I return to Browne because I find successful his activity nan proposal of an antidote.

One of nan main complaints pinch Browne is simply that it’s difficult to show wherever he’s going. There are nary thesis statements, nary TEDTalk signpostings. He goes now this way, now that, now he skims on nan surface, now he plunges for paragraphs connected extremity into nan astir seemingly trivial of matters. Where he’s going, nary 1 knows, slightest of all, 1 originates to suspect, nan writer himself. It’s annoying, but I consciousness now that it’s besides nan point. The champion do deficiency each conviction, but it’s not a bad thing. It’s necessary. It’s nan value we look for not only successful writers but successful judges and juries, bartenders and confidantes, nan capacity to person nary agenda, to judge one’s ignorance, to surrender to, and moreover relish in, uncertainty.

What you statesman to consciousness arsenic you publication Browne, aliases what I do astatine least, is an ever-expanding consciousness of possibility, of unexplored paths forking disconnected near and correct astatine each comma and semi-colon, and successful fact, it was by tiptoeing down 1 of these paths much than 10 years agone that I recovered myself considering nan destiny of our bodies successful a different sense. A corpse, aft all, is only nan last point we request to dispose of. Throughout our lives, nan assemblage continuously sheds material—from hairsbreadth to urine to tears—and I thought it would beryllium funny, possibly absorbing even, to see really we woody pinch these lesser disintegrations. These thoughts would yet go a book, Earthly Materials, but successful galore ways, I still deliberation of them arsenic simply much footnotes to Browne’s original. It’s nan measurement I’ve travel to see a batch of penning lately, a bid of footnotes to nan writers you admire.

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Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations by Cutter Wood is disposable from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.