¿Cómo ser un bibliófilo? Un evento memorable en la 27ma. edición del Festival Literario de Oxford. Tres autores hablan de sus respectivas historias de amor por determinados libros, experiencias que entremezclan arte, letras, vida propia, vidas ajenas. De Thomas Browne, médico y autor, entre “luces color esmeralda y misterio azul”; del otro James, William, hermano de Henry, padre fundador de la psicología y escritor de la Filosofía como esperanza. Por último, Colette, entre amor, deseo, sexualidad, sutileza en Novela con mayúscula.

The Oxford Literary Festival 2024: What is it like to love a book? Three panelists, three rules of thumb, three authors in the series My Reading, published by Oxford University Press.

Gavin Francis, doctor and documentarian, begins our odyssey. What is it to wonder of that balance point between the old and the new? Consider the 17th Century, where an older alchemical worldview and the new Copernican method (science) rode side by side. Their meandering was captured by that great polymath and doctor Sir Thomas Browne.

In reading Sir Thomas, the bibliophile meets enduring beauty says Gavin. His style woos Virginia Wolfe, to name one prominent example. So why not us? There are Emerald lights and blue mystery. Life is to be that which we ponder. Life is a pure flame. We live by a Sun in us. We live in wonder. We are Celestial beings.

Browne revels in the ambiguous – in paradox and contradiction – yet can be as exact as a scalpel. How startling to consider Browne as a Shakespeare, as an equal inventor of thousands of words we still use – medical and hallucination to name just two. He is that twin of Curiosity – the one at ease with wonder, widely read; embracing biology as Vitality, not happenstance. He is an embodiment of greatness, mystery and service. As a country doctor (GP) he never moved from Norfolk, and served all his life and wholeheartedly, his regional kin.

Brilliant earnest paradox. This country GP had many from the newborn Royal Society who came to seek his counsel. His insightful essay On Mortality (brim full of the sage) was occasioned by excavating antique burial urns. He savoured pointing out how the Emperor Hadrian’s remains had lost their tomb markings, but his favourite horse’s had not: “Time has spared the epitaph of Hadrian’s Horse”.

The mellow last years of Thomas’s life felt full and sweet. Gavin’s image of travel books and Tasman’s voyages were a sparkle to our imagination. With Browne we too can share in such literature – the literature of time travel, of visiting the past, lies burnished and waiting.

How To Be a Bibliophile