Urn Burial (New Directions Pearls)

Thomas Browne, W. G. Sebald (Introduction by)

$10.45

Publication Date: October 26th, 2010

Publisher:

New Directions

ISBN:

9780811218924

Pages:

Description

Urn Burial, one of the most influential essays in Western literature, is now available as a New Directions Pearl.

Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, is one of the pinnacles of Renaissance scholarship and without doubt one of the great essays in English literature. Beginning with observations on the recent discovery of Roman antiquities in the form of burial urns, Browne’s associative mind wanders to elephant graveyards, to pre-Christian cremation ceremonies, and finally to the idea of Christian burial. Browne then explores, with a more melancholic meditation, man’s struggles with mortality and the uncertainty of his fate and fame in the living world. This edition includes a magisterial discourse on Sir Thomas Browne taken from the first chapter of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

About the Author

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English Renaissance author and physician. He wrote extensively about medicine, geography, philosophy, and Christian spirituality.

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted and Campo Santo.

Praise for Urn Burial (New Directions Pearls)

The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be

forgotten. These are the circles Browne’s thought’s describe.
— W. G. Sebald, author of The Rings of Saturn

Browne is a cracked archangel.
— Herman Melville

I translated Browne into seventeenth-century Spanish and it worked very

well. I love him.
— Jorge Luis Borges

Browne’s is the voice of a strange preacher, of a man filled with doubts

and subtleties and suddenly swept away by surprising imaginations.
— Virginia Woolf

No archaeologist ever took such care to construct such luxurious lines for his readership. Browne, on the level of language as well as inquiry, is not that strict, exacting, stereotypically staunch fusspot of science…Browne presents himself as more of an interlocutor, a foil reflecting the given light of the sun so others may feel a little less dark in their darkness.
— Greg Gerke - The Millions