Thomas Browne at the Mini-mall
Homage to Sir Thomas Browne by Anne and Patrick Poirier. Photograph from Literary Norfolk
Today, Norwich, where Browne lived for much of his life, commemorates its most famous resident with a sculpture of his brain near the place of Browne’s internment. A pamphlet about the sculpture cheerily notes that Browne “was very ‘brainy’” and that “his house was approximately where the café Pret a Manger is now.” I like the idea of Browne’s brain presiding over an unremarkable commercial domain—Shoe Zone Limited, McDonald’s—because mundanities excited his curiosity as if he were a child. He would have spent hours in the nearby Body Shop, inquiring about the provenance of its salves, lecturing bored clerks on what marvels the ancient Romans had achieved with fennel.
—Alexander Nazaryan writes about Thomas Browne in the 21st century at The New Yorker’s Page Turner blog
