I’m in complete agreement with the sentiment of this quote, taken from Germania, a too-clever-by-half but fun examination of German culture and history:

[P]art of me would love to share that very narrow, ignorant but questing and excited seventeenth-century world, with its dense allegories of skulls, mirrors and soap bubbles, its strange blend of obsession with the classical world and a wish to heave its way out of the merely antiquary: where a small group of savants in a dark, barely candle-lit room could handle a mutant lemon and mull over its properties (perhaps accompanied by some sensationally introvert piece of music). Of course the problem with all such reveries remains that the reverer1 assumes he would be one of those savants, when in practice the chances are that he would be in quite some other part of town dying of glanders or some other grotesque horse-handling-related illness.

–Simon Winder, Germania.

Notes:

  1. Aside: to me this word only means “one who reveres”; I wonder if Winder is being too clever here? [↪]