February 2026
motes and beams
11 February 2026, around 4.30.
When I was a child, I wanted to live in a pine forest. Or, to be more accurate, a pine plantation. […] The tight ranks of conifer trees, planted so close together that most of their branches die for lack of light, and which acidify the soil for miles around, are hated by ecologists, landscape lovers and most local wildlife, which barely ventures into them. Perhaps that’s what I liked about them. There seemed to be some kind of dark, mossy mystery in that maze of pillarlike trunks.
The quincunxial confines of a tree plantation, with the precarious balance of artifice and nature, have always struck me as unheimlich (although not, at certain moments, entirely lacking in aesthetic appeal). Yet even as a child I knew that the desire to walk off into the woods (whether planted by nature or planted by humans) should be indulged with caution: the forest is lovely, dark and deep – but folks who go to the woods to live deliberately usually have a fairly robust support network.
Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine is a book of anxiety, and it is sad to see the effects that anxiety can have on the abilities of a human being to face the world with compassion and clarity. There is much that is sympathetic in the early chapters, with their hand-wringing about the decline of west, and it is odd to find mentions of books that I have read with interest (Small Is Beautiful or The Art of Not Being Governed) or pleasure (Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots) embedded in an overall argument that ultimately seems facile and a bit mean-spirited.1 But I cannot tell if he is leaning into hysterical emotionality/enthousiasmos (with a veneer of argumentation) as a way of deliberately pushing back against Enlightenment modes of ratiocination (Hamann, Horkheimer, and Adorno did it better), or if, despite his reading of the Jungian Bly, he is avoiding the shadow-work that he seems to think we (the West? the world? Orthodox Englishmen living in Ireland?) so sorely need.
I don’t know. I find it confusing. I suppose that’s why I’m typing away about it here, trying to make sense of it – both my own confusion, and my dissatisfaction with a book that, based on the thought-provoking exploration of creativity and writing in Savage Gods, I had been looking forward to. It is perhaps the undercurrent of hypocrisy that bothers me.2 He does not like cars, yet has a car rather than doing without or choosing to live where a car wouldn’t be necessary.3 Trans people make him uncomfortable,4 but rather than questioning his discomfort (the only thing, perhaps, over which he has some control), he gripes about medical interventions – and yet one suspects that, if he had pneumonia, he would seek antibiotics, and if he cut off a limb with his scythe, he would wish to consult a surgeon.5 Perhaps this is a result of conversion, a turning away from the rede ‘an harm it none’ to his new (old) faith. I don’t know. I can only close the book and walk in the woods.
Then go back to Burton and Spinoza.
- Why get your knickers in a twist because the monks of Mount Athos have smart phones?[↩]
- See, I can look at my shadow.[↩]
- Same here, but I generally don’t complain about it publicly and I’m also not setting myself up as a casual sage pointing a path to civilizational betterment; I can barely keep my own house in order.[↩]
- I suspect that people make him uncomfortable, but he does not fully explore that possibility, as it might make his crankiness more apparent. A young man shaking his fist at the injustices of the world has its (limited) charm, but there is nothing charming about a middle-aged man shaking his fist at someone, a stranger, who is trying simply to exist, to be themselves in the world, in the best way they can. But what do I know?[↩]
- There is some privilege that could use some checking, in other words.[↩]
in the weeds
20 February 2026, around 4.47.
Excerpt from Gilbert Jackson’s portrait of Robert Burton, ca. 1635
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a book that invites background reading, both in terms of books that Burton himself might have encountered and supplemental reading to loosen the knots an unsuspecting reader might tangle themselves when reading unforewarned. Obviously, the best thing to do to read Burton is to read Burton, but sometimes one just wants to know a bit more, and the books below are a decent start. They are also evidence of my long-standing passion for interlibrary loan, because – with the exception of Jackson’s book and the DSM-5-TR – all were books I borrowed through the local library via interlibrary loan. Praise be to interlibrary loan – long may it prosper.
- The reader who is only generally interested in Burton will find Mary Ann Lund’s A User’s Guide to Melancholy (Cambridge: CUP, 2021) and Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge: CUP, 2010) to be very user-friendly introductions to a somewhat tangled text. The former is perhaps a bit popular in spirit, but is clear about its limitations; the latter is particularly interesting on the notion of engagement with the Anatomy as a therapeutic experience.
- Angus Gowland’s The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: CUP, 2006) provides a very clear overview of Burton’s context, primarily in the political and intellectual sense. The reference list is also helpful, although the citations are not.
- I’ve found two books particularly helpful about clinical approaches to melancholy: Stanley W. Jackson’s Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1986) and Jennifer Radden’s Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression (Oxford: OUP, 2009). Jackson’s book, though a bit out of date at this point (there are have been a lot of developments in medication that, obviously, aren’t covered), is a great historical overview of melancholia, depression, manic-depression, and nosology in general. If there is one book that provides essential grounding for just jumping into Burton’s text, Jackson’s book would be it. Radden’s collection of essays is also quite interesting and helps to bring things a bit more up to date; there are good sections on Burton and Freud that might be more amusing than actually fruitful for reading Burton, but, well, they are amusing, which is sometimes all one can ask of melancholy. 1
- Finally, The History of the University of Oxford: Volume IV – Seventeenth-Century Oxford, edited by Nicholas Tyacke, provides some useful context to the reading of Burton, notably in terms of academic politics and practices, as well as developments (structural, social, financial, architectural) within the university. The chapter on ‘Medicine’ by Robert G. Frank was particularly helpful for situating Burton within the broader development of medicine as a discipline during the period. 2
I am also finding that reading the DSM-5-TR is illuminating for understanding Burton, not least because Burton would include so many of the diagnostic criteria for a wide range of mood disorders under the heading of melancholy. In many ways, the two books share quite a similar ethos – the desire to categorize and delimit the boundaries of well and ill mental functioning – although they take somewhat distinct (but perhaps not ultimately dissimilar) approaches. Certainly Burton includes more citations.
- Her book that focuses more particularly on Burton is one I hope to get to soon-ish.[↩]
- I look forward to reading Frank’s book on Harvey and Boyle at some future date – probably when I’ve cleared out my interlibrary loan queue.[↩]
Adversaria (35)
28 February 2026, around 4.24.
‘Vagueness may be used as a vehicle for the exercise of control or for the evasion of control’ —Donald A Schön (The Reflective Practitioner, p. 305)
‘Some words cause on to behave in a certain way. Then too he likes these words because they have no synonyms, and they are able to combine technical precision with a certain amount of suggestion, eliminating everything in between’ —Daniele Del Giudice (A Fictional Inquiry, trans. Anne Milano Appel, 33%)
‘Cynics found virtue in unexpected places’ —Christopher B. Zeichmann (Radical Antiquity, p. 92)
‘…you can free yourself of characters only by telling their story, and maybe not even then’ —Daniele Del Giudice (A Fictional Inquiry, trans. Anne Milano Appel, 50%)
There were fears that they would make friends too readily with youths of insufficient social standing, or consort with those who did little or no studying and whose conduct would distract them from their studies and tempt them with a dissolute lifestyle which they would be unable to resist. This would nullify their previous upbringing at home and at school and also increase the costs of their stay at Oxford. Drunkenness, whoring, and gambling were seen at the chief threats in this respect, with the numerous alehouses and, later, coffee houses the means whereby young students were corrupted.
‘Self-education [in medicine] began in earnest when the notebook-keeper began to supplement family and college recipes with prescriptions from published collections’ —Robert G. Frank (‘Medicine’ in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, p. 535)
‘Presented with the wide distribution of the relevant source material, Fell was forced to rein in his religious prejudices and moderate his customary xenophobia in the pursuit of scholarship’ —R. A. Beddard (‘Tory Oxford’, in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, p. 875)
To become a public legend a man must have simple outlines. To be a tragic hero everything about him must be pared away, leaving him silhouetted against the horizon in the quintessential posture of his role, as Don Quixote is against his windmills, and the gunfighters of the mythical West are, solitary in the white sunlight of their empty midday streets.