Inessentials: The Blog

I’ve begun my fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. I’m mostly working on early 18th century British books and pamphlets that are relevant to my dissertation. It’s been pretty wonderful so far. I go to the library each morning, sit in a quiet room guarded by video cameras and security people. I fill out a request for some very rare book, and a friendly research librarian brings it to me 15 minutes later. (The Beinecke is a “closed stacks” library, which means no browsing. Only library staff can go get books.)

The hardest part so far has been trying to figure out how not to leave Panther home by herself for eight hours every day. That’s why I’m at home this morning blogging; I’ll head to the library after lunch because Nicole will be home late from work tonight.

While there are certainly a few things that I definitely need to look at while I’m at the Beinecke, I’ve been able to spend time following “rabbit trails” – those interesting little references that I find, which I can than trace to another book, where I find a new argument, that makes mention of another tract, and so on. It’s the sort of research that makes for the most rewarding work and also the most startling discoveries, but it’s not the kind of research that someone like me is usually able to do. Typically, demands of teaching and writing mean cutting off those potential avenues; in the short run, it helps you get more done, but in the long run it costs you in terms of what you can discover and write about. It will take some work to get the balance of short-term and long-term rewards right. But it’s all very fun.

Yesterday, for instance, I had a rather remarkable moment. I was reading Philosophical Essays Concerning Various Subjects by Isaac Watts, who is best known today as a hymn writer, penning “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun,” “Joy to the World,” “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” among others. In the early and mid-eighteenth century, he was a well-known poet, theologian, and preacher who also wrote widely on subjects in education, literature, and philosophy. When I noticed that he had written on the nature of space at around the same time as the figures who are central to my dissertation (Clarke, Leibniz, Newton), I thought I would take a look. It turns out he had some rather interesting comments on Clarke’s arguments about space, and a rather surprising view of his own, that will probably find a way into my dissertation somehow. The remarkable moment came when I was reading the Oxford National Dictionary of Biography entry on Watts so I could get a better sense of who he was. The article mentioned a particular copy of the 1733 edition of Philosophical Essays, a copy that he had given to Yale and which contained an interesting handwritten comment. Sure enough, the copy of Philosophical Essays that I was looking at had a bookplate that read “From the author.” It made my head swim to think that I was looking at the very copy of this work that was mentioned in the article I was reading.

The closest such experience I had previously had was driving home one night after doing a closing shift at the bookstore that I worked at while in Bozeman, where I also was an adjunct instructor at Montana State University. BBC World was on the radio, and they were discussing a discovery made by two researchers at MSU. Here I was, in Bozeman, listening to a broadcast from England, where they were interviewing a professor from my small ski town of 30,000 people. The Watts book was even more unlikely, though, especially since (even in the small world of academic research) it is rare to reference a particular copy of a book that was widely published, rather than a particular edition.