My first book for this summer (and I do hope I it won’t be the last book I get through before fall!) is Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
I’m at currently at base camp, so to speak, having just — moments ago — finished with the editor’s introduction — itself an essay of nearly 100 pages. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to begin the actual ascent, conditions permitting.
David Womersly’s introduction certainly did its job for me, sharpening my expectations and whetting my appetite for what lies ahead. I’d always heard that one couldn’t count oneself truly educated until one had read Gibbon (I know, anyway, I learned as much from some anonymous writer for the Economist at some time or other). Without directly claiming as much, Womersley’s intro makes clear how this old challenge might be understood. Gibbon, we are told, toiled in the great tradition of philosophical history, an Enlightement mode with clear debts to antiquity. And this is just to speak in terms of his method or style – an ironic style, but not so ironic as to preclude its author (a Montesquieu, a Hume, or a Tacitus, perhaps) from offering incisive judgments grounded in genuinely held (though always properly nuanced and relatively flexible) moral commitments. Gibbon’s substance too, the vast subject of his philosophical gaze, a detailed look at some 1,300 years of civilizational history (Rome’s decline was apparently very slow and drawn out!), Wormersley tells us, bridges antiquity and modernity in a way that simultaneously draws upon and extends the reader’s cultural knowledge.
In other words, reading Gibbon promises to both test and inform my learning. And so I’ve decided to begin the ascent as part of my never-ending (though, sadly, often interrupted) effort to become truly and liberally educated.
With this reading I’m finally delving in earnest into the Allen Lane/Penguin Press hardcover boxed-set 1994 edition, that I’d been using more for its brute weight, and almost as a piece of furniture - a sometime bookend, sometime pedestal holding a cheap plastic bust of Mozart draped since last Mardi Gras with a whole bunch of colorful plastic beads. If nothing else, it’s good to finally be using it for the purpose for which it was designed: reading.
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