LM Montgomery read the entire 3-volume thing 3 or 4 times in her life. She loved it. I read it, because she read it. I’m nuts. But it is extraordinary indeed.
“I am on my third volume of him now … I read one volume, then I plunge into the most frivolous novel I can find … He is so big and massive that he seems to suck one’s individuality clean out of one — swallow one up like a huge placid slowly-moving river. As I march with his stately procession of forgotten heroes and forgotten fools I get the uncomfortable feeling that I am as insignificant as a grain of dust amid so many centuries of ‘baffled millions who have gone before’. And I know I am — but it is an abominable feeling and one not to be tolerated.”
That’s great.
I know that response to good history (and Gibbon’s history is unparalleled). It seems the more you read it, the more that you realize that the pleasures and passions and pains of those so long dead still motivate the living. Its eerie.
Sometime, long ago in my youth, when writing somewhere about something I said that it seemed as if each life was a grain of sand passing through the hourglass, time piling soul upon soul in an ever-widening heap of history. Sounded lame then, and it sounds lame now. But that image has stayed with me. As a grain of sand, I know her better now.