The Lord Chandos Letter
Von Hofmannsthal, Hugo / Banville, John / Rotenberg, Joel
In The Lord Chandos Letter, the author conjures a figure from the English Renaissance in order to write about a peculiarly modern crisis of the spirit. In this cryptic, haunting, at times hallucinated document, a young lord writes for the last time to his patron, Sir Francis Bacon, the founding father of modern scientific empiricism. The lord describes a mysterious affliction which has left him entirely bereft of words: the abstractions "which...