The Book Was Empty When He Got It

Why does one of the best-loved devotional books in English begin by talking about the paper it is written on? Because the paper was a gift, and the book is Traherne's reply. Someone he loved gave him an empty notebook, and the first thing he wrote in it was what an empty notebook is:

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders. And since Love made you put it into my hands I will fill it with those Truths you love without knowing them: with those things which, if it be possible, shall shew my Love; to you in communicating most enriching Truths: to Truth in exalting her beauties in such a Soul. ¹

The sentence about Love making "you put it into my hands" gives us a glimpse of how the Centuries began. The manuscript also bears a dedication to "the friend of my best friend," but it does not name its intended reader.

The Man With the Notebook

Thomas Traherne was born in Hereford, on the Welsh border, in about 1637, the son of a shoemaker. He went to Oxford, was ordained, and served as parish priest of Credenhill, a village a few miles from Hereford, after his appointment as rector in 1657. He later became private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, one of the great lawyers of the Restoration, at Teddington outside London. He died in Teddington in 1674, not yet forty. ² In his lifetime he published one book, a work of controversy against Rome; a second appeared the year after his death. Most of his poetry and meditations remained unpublished for more than two centuries. ²

The Centuries are so called because they are arranged in hundreds: four sets of a hundred numbered paragraphs each, and a fifth set that stops after ten. The paragraphs run from a sentence to a page, and the whole is addressed throughout to a single "you," never named. Susanna Hopton, a devotional writer connected with Traherne's family, has been proposed as the recipient. The manuscript itself addresses an unnamed woman, so her identity remains uncertain. ³

What He Promised Her

Read the opening again as a promise, which is what it is. He will fill the book, and he will fill it with a particular kind of thing: "those Truths you love without knowing them." The second meditation explains the paradox:

Do not wonder that I promise to fill it with those Truths you love but know not; for though it be a maxim in the schools that there is no Love of a thing unknown, yet I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the centre of the earth unseen violently attract it. We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us. ¹

"A maxim in the schools" means a rule of the university philosophers, in this case the scholastic principle that you cannot desire what you have never encountered. Traherne says his experience contradicts it: things one has never been told can already be pulling at one. "We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us." His task is therefore not simply to teach his reader something new but to name what she already loves.

The third meditation gives that promise its larger scope:

I will open my mouth in Parables, I will utter things that have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. Things strange yet common, incredible, yet known; most high, yet plain; infinitely profitable, but not esteemed. Is it not a great thing that you should be Heir of the World? ¹

Every pair has the same shape, strange yet common, incredible yet known, high yet plain: the truths are hidden and familiar at once, like the first day of the world if one could remember it. The question about being "Heir of the World" points toward the claim the rest of the book will unfold.

The fourth meditation says how he means to go about it, and it is the passage a reader should take as the key to his manner:

I will not by the noise of bloody wars and the dethroning of kings advance you to glory: but by the gentle ways of peace and love. As a deep friendship meditates and intends the deepest designs for the advancement of its objects, so doth it shew itself in choosing the sweetest and most delightful methods, whereby not to weary but please the person it desireth to advance. Where Love administers physic, its tenderness is expressed in balms and cordials. It hateth corrosives, and is rich in its administrations. Even so, God designing to show His Love in exalting you hath chosen the ways of ease and repose by which you should ascend. ¹

"Physic" is medicine; "corrosives" are the harsh remedies of seventeenth-century practice, and "balms and cordials" the soothing ones. The comparison is doing serious work. Traherne wrote in the decade after a civil war and a king's execution, and "bloody wars and the dethroning of kings" were not figures of speech to him. He promises the friend that her instruction will not be like that. Whatever the notebook contains, it will be administered gently. And it is: the Centuries are famous for having almost no threat in them.

What the Notebook Became

He kept the promise for four hundred and ten paragraphs, some of which are among the most quoted sentences in the language: "You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars." The surviving manuscript ends after the tenth meditation of the fifth Century; why he stopped there is unknown. ³

What happened to the notebook after it left Traherne is not fully known. In April 1897, the collector William T. Brooke found two manuscripts on separate occasions at London bookstalls, one in Farringdon Road and the other in Whitechapel. Their authorship was initially mistaken for Henry Vaughan's. The bookseller and scholar Bertram Dobell established that they were Traherne's and published his poems in 1903 and the Centuries in 1908. ³ The notebook, written for one reader, reached a public audience more than two centuries later.

The Opening, Read Back

Knowing this, the first paragraph changes character. "It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing" was written about a blank book and an infant's soul, and it turned out also to describe the book's fate: capable of a great deal, and for generations, as far as the reading public knew, containing nothing.

But the more interesting thing is the smallness of the original intention. We cannot know what future readers he imagined. What the opening shows is a writer setting out to fill a friend's notebook with what he thought she already loved, by "the gentle ways of peace and love," so as "not to weary but please." Most people who have ever written anything for one particular person, a letter, a set of notes, an explanation of something they cared about, know the difference between that and writing for the public: the sentences come out plainer and warmer, and the writer is less afraid. The Centuries have that quality on every page, and the opening tells you why. The book begins at the scale of one friendship, and that intimacy is part of what has lasted.