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Amateur - a word that has its etymology in love. Simon Barnes
This has been a labour of love. Amateur.
Twenty years ago I bought the Penguin Classic edition of Donnes Selected Prose (edited by Neil Rhodes). I had been looking for one ever since, 20 years before that, I had discovered that the No Man is an Island quote does not appear in the Penguin Complete Poems.
I was bowled over by the full Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, but you couldnt call them an easy read, not for a 20th Century reader relatively unused to this kind of prose. I bashed out a lightly edited version ( mostly just modernised spelling & punctuation) on my Amstrad laptop, just to give me something I could read more easily. Even with such limited aims, I learned how hard is the job of an editor.
Fortunately the disks proved easy to translate to Word, so they have stayed with me until I thought to post them on a Blog. For this I have edited some more & laid it out with a lot more space. Chopped up the sentences. Introduced the occasional anachronism (scientist, statistics).
It is amazingly timeless, even though he is using the literature, the theories of government, the science (& theology) & politics of his day to try & make sense of questions of life & death. Not to mention some bizarre medical treatments.
I wonder what, in 400 years time, will be our equivalent of applying pigeons to the feet?
When I first read it, the Aids panic was at its height in this country. So the description of the doctors fear & the patients sense of isolation had particualr force. I still think that I should like to see Donne on the curriculum of every medical school.
Re-reading it now, I am struck by what could be seen as a forecast of global warming in Meditation 10!
Much became clear to Donne as a result of his own serious illness & brush with death from relapsing fever. Imagine him in his shadowy (& probably smelly) chamber. Still weak. Anxious to put it all down on paper. Writing with a quill pen by the light of candles & rush lamps. Or did he have an amanuensis?
And in such beautiful, sonorous language, of which I have tried to keep at least a flavour.
I have left out almost all the prayers & expostulations but kept all the more secular Meditations
It would be a very blinkered brain indeed that did not see the power & the force of Donnes intellect in these meditations on fundamental questions. Even if (like me) you do not believe that God holds the place ascribed to him by Donne. Or would rather say 'consciousness' than 'soul'
For the record, this version is nearly 2500 words shorter than my original edited version, though the number of sentences has increased by 50%. The grade score for reading has come down to 7, from 11
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A full version of the original is available at http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC15642092&id=NdYMAAAAIAAJ&pg=PP7&lpg=PP7#PPT18,M1
