(Augustine also refers here to the mind’s contents as thesauri, “treasures,” and compares his memory to a “huge temple” and a “spacious palace” and, with a little more neurological justification, to a place with ineffabiles sinus—ineffable sinuses, or secret recesses, folds, fastnesses, or deep pockets in the financial sense.) The first version of Johnson’s Rambler essay, which has “the remoter repositories of the mind”3 rather than the (better) singular “some remote repository,” further points up the Augustinian source, which is plural.
There is another figure behind Johnson’s and Coleridge’s rooms full of neglected memory-lumber, as well. In Locke’s “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” a work posthumously published in 1706 and probably intended as a coda to the much better-known but less interesting and human (and lumberless) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke writes that “General Observations drawn from Particulars, are the Jewels of Knowledge, comprehending great Store in a little Room; but they are therefore to be made with the greater Care and Caution,” since, Locke warns, we are always in peril of overdoing our jewel-storage, making
the Head a Magazine of Materials, which can hardly be call’d Knowledge, or at least ’tis but like a Collection of Lumber not reduc’d to Use or Order; and he that makes every thing an Observation, has the same useless Plenty and much more falsehood mixed with it.
Some pages later, Locke (who was in the habit of using metaphors to point out the dangers of metaphor) says that he who has not a mind to represent to himself an author’s sense “divested of the false lights and deceitful ornaments of speech,” will make
his understanding only the warehouse of other men’s lumber; I mean false and unconcluding reasonings, rather than a repository of truth for his own use, which will prove substantial, and stand him in stead, when he has occasion for it.
4
This is a form of the great scholarly worry — a worry which hydroptically book-thirsty poets like Donne, Johnson, Gray, Southey, and Coleridge all felt at times — the fear that too much learning will eventually turn even an original mind into a large, putty-colored regional storage facility of mislabeled and leaking chemical drums. Locke wasn’t much of a poetry reader,5 so it isn’t likely that he got his lumber from Butler or Dryden. But he might have had Charles Cotton’s translation of Montaigne in mind. I know I do now, as I retype Locke. One of the first places I looked for lumber was in Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays, figuring that Florio would have given it to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare would have passed it on to everyone else (via The Tempest, say), since that was one of vocabulary’s known spice-routes — but vexingly I didn’t find it in Book 1, Chapter XXIV, “Of Pedantisme,” where it should have been, and the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare was able to cough up only the one unremunerative Lumbert Street address from Henry IV, Part II. So I set Florio’s Montaigne aside, in one of my floor-piles, as a false lead — regretfully, since E. J. Trechmann, one of Montaigne’s later translators, likens the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Florio’s version to “the finding of a valuable piece of old furniture.”6 But then I discovered, working my way through some of the screens from the Library of the Future CD-ROM, that Charles Cotton (1630–1687) found a way to put lumber into his 1685 translation of the Essays. (It was Cotton’s version, not Florio’s, that Pope and Emerson read.) “Some one may say of me,” Cotton has Montaigne say (in the late essay called “Of Physiognomy”), “that I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them.”7 Montaigne has a thousand quote-crammed volumes ranged about him in his circular library as he writes, and he can borrow, if he wants to, “from a dozen such scrap-gatherers, people about whom I do not much trouble myself, wherewith to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy.” But he will try to resist, since
These lumber pies of common-places, wherewith so many furnish their studies, are of little use but to common subjects, and serve but to show us, and not to direct us.…
Lumber pies? What are these succulent-sounding baked goods that Cotton serves us, in his version of Montaigne’s unusual phrase “pastissages de lieux communs”? Florio’s translation kneejerks here with “rapsodies of common places,” a cliché; modern versions by J. M. Cohen and Donald Frame offer the relatively vague “concoctions of commonplaces.” Yet a pastissage is, according to Godefroy’s Dictionnaire de l’Ancienne Langue Française, a “making, or baking of pies, or pastmeats,” or figuratively, a mélange. Possibly Donald Frame would object that Cotton erred on the side of overspecificity. But Cotton seems to be aware of the range of metaphorical meaning that pastissage can have, since he translates the only other use of the word in the Essays, in “Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers,” less colorfully: “we call the piling up [pastissage] of the first laws that fall into our hands, justice.”8 Trechmann translates pastissage as “pasties” and M. A. Screech, most recently, substitutes “meat pies.” But to my nose, Cotton’s translation retains more of the steamy savoriness of the original, a lumber pie being, depending on the dictionary you consult, a “highly seasoned meat-pie, made either of veal or lamb” (lumbard-pie in Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century, 10th ed., 1881), or “A pie in which balls of minced meat or fish are baked with butter and eggs” (Webster’s Second; definition omitted in Webster’s Third), or even possibly an uncle or nephew of the numble, umble, or humble pie, a pie made from the lombles (cf. loins and lumbar-organs) or “certain inward parts” of the deer, according to Dr. Ernest Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Elsevier, 1966–67), whose dedication pages made me cry furtively and without warning at the copying machine of the Berkeley Public Library. Volume I of Klein’s dictionary is
DEDICATED TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF THE BEST PARENTS
MY DEAR
MOTHER
WHO AFTER A LIFE OF SELF-SACRIFICE DIED IN SZATMAR IN 1940
AND MY DEAR
FATHER
,
THE WORLD-RENOWNED RABBI AND SCHOLAR
RABBI IGNAZ (ISAAC) KLEIN OF SZATMAR
,
WHO DIED A MARTYR OF HIS FAITH IN AUSCHWITZ IN 1944;
AND TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF MY
WIFE
AND OF MY ONLY
CHILD JOSEPH (HAYYIM ISRAEL)