'Our Whole Life Is an Irish Sea'

Because of something I wrote, an old friend tells me he is reading at last, in his seventies, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton’s prose compendium of marvels. There’s a category of books with little in common except their uncommon eccentricity – Montaigne, Browne, Sterne, Boswell, Landor and Doughty wrote them too. They’re not for everyone, not even every ambitious reader, but for some sensibilities, those that relish a lifetime of autodidactically acquired knowledge, they stand among the great rewards of the reading life. Burton is scholarly but never blandly academic. After four centuries, a person could build a respectable education around The Anatomy. It was fifty-six years ago next month, as a university freshman, that I discovered Burton on the library shelf. I don’t know what attracted me to this fat volume dense with interpolated quotations, many in Latin. I don’t think I had ever heard its title or author’s name. Soon I had to buy a copy of my own. It's the…