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.”

Philip Larkin, famously childless, first drafted “Take One Home for the Kiddies” in 1954. Then it was titled “Pets.” He completed the retitled poem on this date, August 13, in 1960, and included it in The Whitsun Weddings (1964):  “On shallow straw, in shadeless glass, Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep: No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass - Mam, get us one of them to keep.   “Living toys are something novel, But it soon wears off somehow. Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel -- Mam, we’re playing funerals now.”   Kids can be fickle, lazy and easily bored. So can adults. Parents will buy a pet for their children as a way to teach them responsibility and sometimes the theory works. In the sixties we had a Siamese cat named Ming Tai, a beautiful creature. We attached her leash to the clothesline in the back yard so she could enjoy the outdoors without escaping. We were told never to leave her unsupervised. One day my brother wandered off, the cat climbed the apple tree and hanged herself. A little later, my maternal grandmother gave me a caiman, a scaled-down alligator, mostly to irritate my parents, I suspect. I kept her in a shallow glass container, a sort of a casserole dish, and fed her raw ground beef. One summer day I left her on the picnic table in the backyard. When I returned, she was gone, probably to the creek that flowed at the bottom of the hill behind our house.   At the conclusion of his great essay “On Being Conservative” (Rationalism in Politics, 1962), Michael Oakeshott writes:   “Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires.”   Oakeshott’s point is that childhood, depending on our perspective, is at the same time paradise and, potentially, hell. Kids aren’t born with responsibility and good judgment. For most, those are learned virtues, though the myth of childhood innocence persists. We cherish memories of the freedom and sense of promise we knew as kids. Then it’s time to grow up – sadly but necessarily. We know the disasters childish adults can conjure. Oakeshott continues:   “The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands -- unless it be a cricket bat [!]. We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable.”

“Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.”  Donald Justice often skirts sentimentality in his poems, teetering at the lip of a cheap conceit, but preserves his integrity with craft and an intelligent capacity for nostalgia coupled with the gift of self-skepticism. Justice never raises his voice, parades his sensitivity or pleads for sympathy. The sentence above is the concluding line of “Invitation to a Ghost” (New and Selected Poems, 1995), dedicated to the poet Henri Coulette (1927-88). In 1990, Justice and poet Robert Mezey co-edited The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette (University of Arkansas Press). In their introduction they say, “. . . we have been struck once more by how splendid a writer our friend was and how badly neglected.” The same can be said of Justice and his work.     Four years before Justice’s death in 2004, the English publisher Philip Hoy conducted a lengthy interview with the poet and in 2001 published the edited interview as a book by Between the Lines. Hoy quotes from a notebook kept by Justice and excerpted in Oblivion: On Writers & Writing (Storyline, 1998), a selection of the poet’s prose: “A copy of Chekhov’s stories lying open on a table. I realized as at once how glad I was that this man had lived. And that I did right to be glad. Of what writers now could that honestly and simply be said?” Clearly, senses an affinity with the Russian story writer who never wrote a poem in his life. To which Justice responds: “I hold Chekhov in very high esteem, yes, even when he is not quite at his best. One learns to like everything certain writers write. Well, almost everything.” The poem dedicated to Coulette begins like this:   “I ask you to come back now as you were in youth, Confident, eager, and the silver brushed from your temples. Let it be as though a man could go backwards through death, Erasing the years that did not much count, Or that added up perhaps to no more than a single brilliant forenoon.”   A common, harmless fantasy. We wish the cherished dead to return, restored to health and promise. Think of the writers we would revive, “perhaps to no more than a single brilliant forenoon.” To some writers, my allegiance is absolute. Even their minor or mediocre work, their juvenilia, is dear. This attitude, of course, is uncritical or pre-critical, and it’s nothing I would even attempt to defend in print, except to say that the existence of such writers gives me pleasure and a sense of reassurance. I can’t get enough of them – Chekhov and Henry James, for instance, and Donald Justice. And here is one of his curious observations, based on his 1982 return to Florida, the state where he was born. It sounds like the germ of a Justice poem:   “I have a distinct memory of walking out onto the golf course behind our house late one night, walking our dog, and standing there looking up at the moon as it flooded the fairway with light. Very nice. I felt touched by an emotion I must have been inventing.”   As though to dispel the impression that he is a poet only of twilit nostalgia, Justice then assaults the literary theorists who helped destroy English departments, literacy and the love of literature:   “I disliked practically everything about them: their jargon and their grammar, their vast intellectual pretensions, their easy disdain for things they knew little or nothing about and had no interest in, their lousy taste in literature and the other arts, their nasty politicking, their hatred of the past and the tradition in favor of the fashionable and the perfectly silly. . . . But please don’t get me wound up. It’s been years and I still tremble with passion.”   Justice was born one-hundred years ago today, on August 12, 1925, and died in 2004 at age seventy-eight.

Like most family history, it started as a rumor, a titillating story without context, myth-like. My mother had four brothers, three of whom were older. The oldest were Kenneth and Clifford. We never met the latter. Uncle Ken lived in Tampa, Fla., and we visited him in 1968, annus horribilis.  He often went shirtless and we noticed the scars on his throat and upper chest but asked no questions. A fragment of story said they were the result of an accident involving a gun – a detail sure to grab a boy’s attention.   A decade ago my brother found a brown newspaper clipping from one of the Cleveland papers, dated around 1926. Ken and Clifford got their hands on a shotgun somewhere. They would have been in their early twenties, not children. They loaded the barrel with nails and scraps of metal. Clifford held the gun to his shoulder and fired, and the gun exploded, killing him outright and scarring Ken for life. I wish I had taken a photograph of the clipping. Perhaps it’s still in the boxes my brother left after his death last year.  Time is a corrosive. It dissolves memory. The clipping confirmed an old family rumor but I may have lost it forever. Now my mother and all her brothers are dead. Maryann Corbett’s poem “Late Night Thoughts While Watching the History Channel” was published in Literary Imagination in 2017 and collected in The O in the Air (Colosseum Books/Franciscan University Press, 2023):    “Is it by God’s mercy      that children are born not knowing      the long reach of old pain?    “That the five-year-old, led by the hand     past the graffiti, cannot fathom     his mother’s tightening grip,   “or why, when a box of nails     clatters to the tile like gunfire,     his father’s face contorts?    “So slow is the knitting of reasons,     the small mind’s patching of meaning from such ravel    “as a cousin’s offhand story,     or a yellowed clipping whose old news     flutters from a bottom drawer,    “or some bloodless snippet of history     dully intoned as you doze off, in the recliner—    “so slow that only now, in my seventh decade,     do I turn from these sepia stills,     this baritone voiceover, chanting     the pain of immigrant forebears,     my thought impaled on a memory:    “my twelve-year-old self, weeping     on Sundays fifty years ago     when my father drove us to mass     but stood outside, puffing his Chesterfields,    “doing what his father had done,      and his father’s father before him,      wordless to tell me why.”    Corbett outlines exactly the mysteries in which children are raised and the intractable corrosion of time.