To set about writing my own Life would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me? Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of Eternity swallow me; for my share of it, that, verily, is the handsomest, or one handsome way, of settling my poor account with the canaille of mankind extant and to come.Volume I here.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
16 September 2013
Dignified Oblivion
Thomas Carlyle, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (January 27, 1867), in The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. II (Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1888) p. 339: