Nate Meyvis

Reading notes: 'Sartor Resartus'

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of Custom: but of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. [...] Am I to view the Stupendous with stupid indifference, because I have seen it twice, or two hundred, or two million times?

Some notes on Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle's "Satirical Extravaganza on Things in General:"1

  1. I loved it and eagerly recommend it to anyone who might be on the fence.
  2. I can't imagine many people are on the fence, though. Most people probably think of Sartor Resartus as extremely famous (and are mostly done deliberating about reading it) or aren't familiar with it. I was in the latter group until recently.
  3. If you don't have a strong background in the intellectual culture Carlyle was working in, consider working from edition with extensive annotations. Early modern philosophy is particularly important.
  4. But Sartor Resartus is lively, fun, and fresh. Reading it seemed to require more than usual focus and effort, but the urgency and humor really carried me along. (There were one or two passages I muddled through, but probably only because I was missing some important background.)
  5. The whole idea of satire (in the older sense operative in Carlyle) is not easy for a 2026 reader to understand. We often think of satire as, roughly, making fun of something while enacting aspects of it. This is not that. Even trying to keep this in mind, I still underestimated how serious and original a work this is (and not just as a commentary on previous work).
  6. This book has the best early critique of consumerism (the "Soul as Stomach") I've ever read.2 Carlyle's connections of this to utilitarianism and Malthusian thought are particularly striking.
  7. ...and note that Carlyle does answer the rhetorical question in the passage above:

...There is no reason in Nature or Art why I should: unless, indeed, I am a mere Work-Machine, for whom the divine gift of Thought were no other than the terrestrial gift of Steam is to the Steam-engine; a power whereby Cotton might be spun, and money and money's worth realized.

  1. See Carlyle's May 1833 letter to James Fraser.↩

  2. 19th-century England is great in general for understanding the generative AI world by thinking about an earlier, but intellectually accessible, world with analogous anxieties. But that's another post.↩

#reading notes