How to Read It

The Centuries were written to be read slowly, and they punish haste. Each meditation is a unit, from a sentence to a page or two, and most are best taken one at a time, read once for the drift and again for the turns, with a pause before the next one begins. Two or three a day make a good pace. A Century at a sitting is too much.

The First Century begins with its warmest pages, the gift of the book and the promise to the friend (I.1-6), and then slows. From I.7 to I.24 Traherne builds his case with proofs, lists and repetitions, and a reader may feel that one point is being made in several ways, as indeed it is, for the repetition is deliberate and the point is worth having. The prose lifts at I.25. There a refrain begins, “Your enjoyment of the World is never right”, and it returns through the next dozen meditations. At I.62 argument turns into prayer, a long sequence addressed to Christ on the Cross that runs, with pauses, nearly to the end of the Century, and those prayers should be read as prayers, aloud if possible.

The Second Century is the most philosophical, and early on it runs a series of thought experiments on the sun, imagined away, halted, doubled and made infinite (II.7-11), which are among the easiest and most delightful pages in the book. The hardest follow. They concern the atonement, and whether an angel could have redeemed mankind (II.31-38), and then love and the Trinity (II.39-47), and they are close arguments in the manner of the schools. They can be read quickly the first time, with the notes to hand, since nothing later depends on following every step.

The Third Century changes its voice, turning to the author’s own childhood, then to poems and later to the Psalms, and it opens at III.1 with a question, “WILL you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness?” Readers who have found the argument heavy usually find their way in here, and readers who came for the argument should not skip it. The Fourth Century sets out principles for living, many of them brief, and includes Traherne’s English version of part of Pico’s Oration (IV.74-77), while the Fifth is short, ten meditations only, and unfinished.

Within a meditation, watch the first sentence and the last. Traherne often opens with a claim or a question and closes by turning it, so that the end of one meditation sets up the next and the numbering hides a continuous line of thought. He repeats himself on purpose, as a composer returns to a theme. A phrase that seems to be said again is usually said with a difference, and his Scripture is woven so closely into his own sentences that the notes must often point it out.

The page also carries a few marks of the manuscript, which the Note on the Text explains in full and which need only a word here. Words struck through, like this, are words Traherne crossed out and Dobell printed, in some forty places. Most are small, a word replaced or a phrase tightened, and they are best read past the first time and returned to later, to see what the second thought changed. Words in square brackets were supplied by Dobell. The notes at the foot of the page identify Scripture and sources, explain names and the older senses of words, translate Latin and Greek, and point to the Key Words. They are there to be used when wanted, and a reader who would rather meet the prose alone can save them for a second reading. None of them looks ahead.

A few questions are worth carrying through a first reading, and each is worth answering for oneself before the book gives its own answer in its own time. Why should a book like this be written for one friend, in a notebook she gave, and what does the author expect her to write in return? What can it mean to be told that the world is yours, when millions of others are told the same? How can a soul that lives in a body be called infinite? When the book moves from argument to prayer, and from prayer to memory, what changes and what stays the same? And after a Century or two, what looks different in the common things of an ordinary day?