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.”

“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.

“I was the sort of boy who always connected life and art, mixing them up, feeling the way art lives in time and out of it, just like the human mind and imagination.”  Spend enough time reading enough books and you will encounter a strangely familiar character: a funhouse mirror reflection of yourself. He is not identical but close enough, like the image fashioned by a forensic sketch artist. It’s more than mere agreement in tastes. It’s affinity, a brotherly sense of kinship with an author when it comes to language and literature. The American poet David Mason and I share literary sympathies – Yeats, for instance, and Montaigne. Like me, Mason’s approach to books is less unacademic than anti-academic: How does this book touch me? What can I learn from it? Why does thinking about it feel so right? Because the book resonates with an absence in us, not necessarily solving a problem but reassuring us we are not alone. With such writers we feel a metaphysical solidarity.      The sentence at the top is from a lecture-turned-essay “At Home in the Imaginal” collected in Mason’s prose collection Incarnation & Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? (Paul Dry Books, 2023). One is tempted when reading his essays and reviews to transcribe or underline something on every page. This is taken from his introduction, in which Mason defends what he calls the “thisness” of literary works:   “Insisting that literary works toe anyone’s political line is not freedom, nor is attacking the human beings who made them. The rush to judgement must be resisted. Literature asks us to slow down, take pleasure in the words that make us who we are, and hopefully be more aware of the planet on which we’re privileged to live.”   Another writer with celebrative instincts, one who like Mason (and me) prefers reading and writing about good authors, the grateful, articulate ones who honor the language, is the late Clive James. In “Two Poet-Critics,” Mason takes on James and John Burnside. I have read nothing by the latter but James is an instructive model for anyone writing about books. Mason begins:   “Here’s a thought: literary criticism ought to entertain as well as illuminate. That puts most critics out of business on two fronts. So much of our exegesis reads like the minutes of a country club meeting in which we are all agreed on the value of this and that, so little of it chases the vitality literature itself is devoted to. Readers easily offended ought to toughen up and face the world in all its bloodiness. No one has permission to do anything in this life, so you might as well see what you can see, say what you can say, and do so as beautifully as possible.”   Entertainment is a dirty word among certain critics and readers, especially academics. Stridency and humorlessness do literature (and readers, especially young readers) no favors. I suspect many dislike James out of envy over his learning, prolific output and quasi-bestseller-dom. They are snobs. With V.S. Pritchett (and now Mason) he is the model for anyone writing a review that will actually be read. I bought James’ Cultural Amnesia in 2007 when it was published and return to it often. In his essay on Eugenio Montale, he writes:    “In any kind of bad art, it is when the gift is gone that the experiment really does take over – the eternally cold experiment that promises to make gold out of lead, and bricks without straw. Leaving coldness aside (and we should leave it aside, because barren artistic experimentation can also be done in a white-hot frenzy), it might be useful to mention that Montale, in another essay, came up with the perfect term for a work of art that had no other subject except its own technique. He called it the seasoning without the roast.”   I’m not critic but I do write about books. Mason quotes a well-known line from James that suggests why I miss him: “A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”