I like the idea that something about futility is written so splendidly that it’s worth reading before you give up on all human pretensions.   If I get around to it, I’ll review it here.

‘My favourite piece of prose is Sir Thomas Browne’s magnificently resigned and gloomy Urne-Burial, one of the wonders of the 17th century, in which Browne meditates on the futility of all human monuments in a language of suffocating and dusty richness.’

Source: Simon Winder, Germania (London, Picador, 2011), p. 296