“I write because I read. I imagine many of us are this way, bewildered in the tangle of these co-creative activities: writing to understand how better to read, reading to understand how better to write. I seek out—both for inspiration and comfort—those writers who seem to share, and to illuminate, that confounding sense of wonder. Dearest to my heart over the past few years is Sir Thomas Browne. Every book he writes—Urne-Buriall, Religio Medici, The Garden of Cyrus—reveals to me again and again what thinking beauty a mind of true curiosity can create. He is one of those writers who, on any page randomly opened to, has placed a sentence that feels as if it contains some whole secret to the living of life itself. For one example, ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.’ Maybe that is the light we read by, that sun within us. At least, it can feel so, reading Browne’s pages, and so learning to think as he worked to think, and to see by his good light.”
—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017)