If you were a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of more or less regular means and habits, your typical day went something like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page treatise on the nonexistence of purgatory, you fought a duel, you composed a sonnet, you went to watch a Jesuit get publicly disemboweled, you invented a scientific instrument, you composed another sonnet, you attended the premiere of As You Like It, you romanced someone else's wife, and then you caught the bubonic plague and died.
They packed a lot in, the Elizabethans, is my point. Maybe posterity, considering our own age, will judge that are packing a lot in, with the fascism and the COVID and the melting glaciers. Maybe. But there was a peculiar paradoxical ugly-beautiful density to life as the Elizabethans lived it. The Reformation was just behind them; the civil war was coming; Elizabeth, the virgin queen, may have been semi-celestial, but her subjects lived in a police state. They had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. They oscillated madly between the abstract and the corporeal. And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne.
Donne was made of contradiction, or of transformation. Born an outsider, a Catholic at a time when being Catholic in England was illegal-his uncle and then his brother went to prison for their faith, and his brother would die there-Donne worked his way in, into the inside, shifting and shedding as he went.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 2022 من The Atlantic.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 2022 من The Atlantic.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
JOE ROGAN IS THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA NOW
What happens when the outsiders seize the microphone?
MARAUDING NATION
In Trumps second term, the U.S. could become a global bully.
BOLEY RIDES AGAIN
America’s oldest Black rodeo is back.
THE GENDER WAR IS HERE
What women learned in 2024
THE END OF DEMOCRATIC DELUSIONS
The Trump Reaction and what comes next
The Longevity Revolution
We need to radically rethink what it means to be old.
Bob Dylan's Carnival Act
His identity was a performance. His writing was sleight of hand. He bamboozled his own audience.
I'm a Pizza Sicko
My quest to make the perfect pie
What Happens When You Lose Your Country?
In 1893, a U.S.-backed coup destroyed Hawai'i's sovereign government. Some Hawaiians want their nation back.
The Fraudulent Science of Success
Business schools are in the grips of a scandal that threatens to undermine their most influential research-and the credibility of an entire field.