I just started C.S. Lewis’s A Preface To Paradise Lost and what should I find but a quote from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici in the epigraph:
How so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysicks, and destroy the ladder and scale creatures.
Browne, Rel. Med. I, XXX.
...we all labour against our owne cure, for death is the cure of all diseases. There is no Catholicon or universall remedy I know but this, which thogh nauseous to queasie stomachs, yet to prepared appetites is Nectar and a pleasant potion of immortality.
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Part II:10
Immediately this brings to mind scenes from George MacDonald's Lilith—the sexton’s house, where sleep is more than sleep, a blessèd balm, the rest of the soul for healing. In that work I experienced a deep longing, a salve, and I felt somehow like I had the innocence and lightness of childhood upon me.
I won’t promise this to be short. I don’t expect it to be long. As I type this, my head feels plagued by a sticky, snotty Beelzebub, and my lungs are wracked by infernal flames.
The imperial “We” have read Book I of Paradise Lost—hence the chthonic body imagery—as well as several more sections of Religio Medici and part of the first chapter of A Map of Misreading.
Just a brief update today as I’m not feeling well, but want to keep up with the record of my reading, consisting of:
Coleridge on Sir Thomas Browne:
…he is a quiet and sublime Enthusiast with a strong tinge of the Fantast, the Humorist constantly mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his Head, which is all the more interesting for a little Twist in the Brains.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Letter on Browne,” March 10, 1804
I found this in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, C.A. Patrides (Editor). You can find the full letter on Wikisource.
