The Lord Chandos Letter: and Other Writings

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 the tongue must enlist . . . have disintegrated in my mouth." The book evokes a state of final internal exile, of death in life.