"Besides, I dwell not in this study, Non hic sulcos ducimus, non hoc pulvere desudamus / I am not driving a furrow here, this is not my field of labour/, I am but a smatterer, I confess, a stranger, here and there I pulled a flower; I do easily grant, if a rigid censurer should criticize on this which I have writ, he should not find three sole faults, as Scaliger in Terence, but three hundred. So many as he hath done in Cardan's Subtleties, as many notable errors as Gul. Laurembergius, a late professor of Rostock, discovers in that Anatomy of Laurentius, or Barociius the Venetian in Sacroboscus ..." (p33, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621-).

Typing this out you physically feel the distance ... I have no Latin & thus each word is doubly foreign (to the mind and the fingers) and Burton's predilection for ever-unfolding clauses means reading is a form of map reading (a point he himself makes: "And if you vouchsafe to read this treatise, it shall seem no otherwise to thee than the way to an ordinary traveller, sometimes fair, sometimes foul; here champaign there enclosed; barren in one place, better soil in another: by woods, groves, hills, dales, plains, etc. ..."p32). So who, in their right mind, reads this stuff anymore? Anthony Burgess and Borges have gone ... George Steiner perhaps? And so why do I - at approximately 4:45 pm - have the urge to tackle all 1,132 pages of the NYRB paperback edition. A calculated act of absurdity? A deliberate hankering for the recondite? A last desperate flailing of independence of mind before the shades of the prison house begin to close upon the middle-aged boy? Or a thirst for something truly toothsome against the pap of quotidian twitter?

And yet, despite the near on 500 year gap, how immediate much of it feels: Burton's concerns at the decay of learning, the loss of originality, accusations of plagiarism, the flood of second-rate publications, the impossibility of reading even a fraction of what is 'out there' ... sounds familiar? What about that lovely moment of self-deprecation "a smatterer" from someone who's launching a volume of such stupendous proportions and which implies so many hours reading - or, to use his phrase, "breathing libraries". Or did he say that? So many are the citations and attributions you start suffering from a kind of biblio-vertigo - how many of his own words are faint echoes of illustrious predecessors? And who now - or even then - would have the textual mastery to know? Which, I suppose, is the point I am leading up to: the constant litany I hear within contemporary education about turning kids on to the vast data base 'out there' (where exactly? ... good question ... and who does it belong to? ... even better question). As if education was suddenly transformed by the internet and all that Information. As Burton's Anatomy makes clear it was always thus - certainly from the printing press on.  Read in a certain way and you realise Burton is already writing in HTML - put your colophonic finger on any citation, name, simply a word and see where it takes you. However, what does Burton do with this vast array of texts? What does it mean to read Burton - certainly more than those Read-A-Book-In-A-Day techniques of page-scanning and skimming for 'sense'?

So I'm going to persevere ... at 50 pages a day it should take me most of January especially if I cut back on the frittered hours e-grazing (but don't be surprised if the project gets hi-jacked by something else).