This past weekend I processed some rolls of film and wrote maybe ten pages longhand, but I haven’t been sleeping well, and I also managed to read about a third of the way through Kevin Kileen’s The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable. In this 2023 book, Killeen looks at thinkers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who reacted to the growth of empirical thought as part of the so-called Scientific Revolution. Jacob Boehme, Thomas Browne, and John Milton are some of the writers Kileen examined. This is a very rough summary, but basically they did not believe that science alone could describe all of reality. At the same time, as part of the Reformation, they were wary of revelations claimed outside scriptures. There had been a history of misuse, for example, with relics claimed to be bones of apostles or people deemed saints placed in churches to encourage people to come to venerate. But how in their writing to talk about meaning beyond the scientific, how to describe that part of experience that seemed unknowable? It’s thoughtful reading.

For the past few weeks, I’ve also been reading some in the Anglican priest Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations (from the seventeenth century but not published until 1908), which sort of pairs well with Kileen's study. Here is a short excerpt from one of Traherne's meditations: “He thought it a vain thing to see glorious principles lie buried in books, unless he did remove them for his understanding, and a vain thing to remove them unless he did revive them, and raise them up by continual exercise.” I can see in this meditation about being somewhere between two worlds a hint of the later Romantic poets or even Gabriel García Márquez.