일요일 아침 스타벅스에서 J. Epstein 이 들려준 얘기

 

"오늘날 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 를

어떻게 읽느냐구? 최근 다섯 달 동안 대강 하루 20페이지꼴로 이른 아침에

읽었지. 다 읽고 나니 아쉬웠다는 게 그 책에 대한 나의 가장 큰 찬사지."

 

그러면서 Joseph Epstein 이 들려준  Edward Gibbon 과 그의 3300-페이지

역사 책 이야기 중에서  몇 구절만 옮긴다.

 

More than two centuries after Gibbon wrote it, the entertainment

value of his history is as great as it was when it appeared in

three volumes between 1776 and 1788, its standing in literature

as firmly fixed.

 

Outwardly an account of the defeat of the Roman ideals, the

true subject of The  History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire is human nature, and, in Gibbon's recounting, it is far

from pretty picture.

 

[H]e admired civic virtue, freedom ("the first step to curiosity

and knowledge"), honor, and rationality.

 

As to the kind of Christian Constantine was, Gibbon notes that

his conversion hadn't the least effect on his cruel conduct; on

matters of religious doctrine, "his incapacity and his ignorance

were equal to his presumption."

 

[T]he hypocrisy of popes and priests stimulated Gibbon's

irony, an irony he claimed to have learned from Pascal's

Provincial Letters."

 

He produced such biographies through his erudition but did

so concisely through his unparalleled powers of formulation.

Pope Boniface VIII "entered [his holy office] like a fox,

reigned like a lion, and dead like a dog."

 

Above all, there is the pleasure of Gibbon's prose. As a

stylist, he was unsurpassed in all of 18th-century English

literature.

 

His diction was flawless and often charming; the music of

his paragraph came from his alternation of long and short

sentences.

 

The history's final sentence reads:

 

It was among the ruin of the Capital that I first

conceived the idea of work which has amused

and exercised next twenty years of my life, and

which, however inadequate to my own wishes,

I finally deliver to the curiosity and the candor

of the public.

 

He was 47 years old. His immense satisfaction in the

accomplishment is beyond imagining.

 

Even better was the letter to Gibbon from David Hume ...:

 

Whether I consider the dignity of your style, the

depth of matter, or the extensiveness of your

learning, I must regard the work as equally the

object of esteem.

 

Through 20 years of solitary labor, this chubby little man

also proved that the first, if not the sole, criterion for a

great historian is to be a great writer.

 

Joseph Epstein(1937-)이 그가 78세 때 발표한 "Edward Gibbon"

(에세이집 The Ideal of Culture 에)을 통해서 내게 들려준 얘기다.