
Thomas Browne, who coined “hallucination” and “suicide” - okfine
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/doubting-thomas
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benbreen
Just came across Thomas Browne's "Fragment on Mummies" the other day. It's
wonderfully strange and beautiful - like the author of this article says, it
almost sounds like the type of language you'd find in the King James Bible. I
recommend reading the whole thing (it's just a few paragraphs) but this is a
favorite part:

"Death, that fatal necessity which so many would overlook, or blinkingly
survey, the old Egyptians held continually before their eyes...

Yet in those huge structures and pyramidal immensities, of the builders
whereof so little is known, they seemed not so much to raise sepulchres or
temples to death, as to contemn and disdain it, astonishing heaven with their
audacities, and looking forward with delight to their interment in those
eternal piles. Of their living habitations they made little account,
conceiving of them but as hospitia, or inns, while they adorned the sepulchres
of the dead, and planted them on lasting bases, defying the crumbling touches
of time and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet all were but Babel
vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant, and sitteth
upon a sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and Thebes, while his sister Oblivion
reclineth semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of
Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh
beneath her cloud. The traveller as he paceth amazedly through those deserts
asketh of her, who buildeth them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is
he heareth not."

[http://penelope.uchicago.edu/misctracts/mummies.html](http://penelope.uchicago.edu/misctracts/mummies.html)

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kenko
It's a shame that NYRB published Urn Burial separately from The Garden of
Cyrus, since the two pieces were conceived by Browne as going together. You
can get them both (along with Religio Medici and several more) from Penguin in
The Major Works of Thomas Browne.

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stephen-mw
> he simply introduced new words into the still-inchoate English language when
> none seemed to do the trick; Browne is responsible for “hallucination” and
> “suicide,” along with about a hundred other neologisms.

I'm having a hard time believing there wasn't a translation of the word
"suicide" until 1600s. Wasn't suicide all over classical mythology? Wasn't it
well known that Cato committed suicide rather than submit to Caesar? How did
they describe such things?

~~~
nulldata
They'd just say: "He would rather kill himself than..."

~~~
copperx
And here, "kill himself" sounds better than "commit suicide".

------
egroat
> The pervasive uncertainty of Browne’s writing offers a respite from the
> stifling certainties of today. We have religious zealots, just as the
> seventeenth century did—but we also have zealots of so many more varieties.
> We have had the end of history and the death of faith. Civilizations
> clashed, everything is post-something. Cassandras say we are digital drones;
> Panglosses say the Internet is freedom. We believe in St. Paul Krugman or
> St. Paul Gigot. Anyone who says we are a society lacking belief is not
> paying attention. If anything, we are lacking doubt.

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939)

This is the summary of the article and an smbc comic I was exposed to today,
the combination of which have brought me back to my repeated question of how
exactly have we improved the communication of important ideas over the last
few centuries? Have we improved it at all?

Or perhaps I should be asking what the important ideas are.

