Reading THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY--things you are reminded of when you are very old

I've had my good eye out for my copy of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY for several weeks and today realized it was where it should be but with a spine so faded it could have been any number of other books.

I read MOBY-DICK in eleven afternoons in 1957 when I had to lie down to let pneumo-peritoneum settle into crevices in my stomach. In August 1958 when I was night telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad in Port Arthur, Texas, something possessed me to order the Tudor MELANCHOLY and I read it, marking it in red pencil. It was not for any class--I just thought I wanted to read it, and did read it, and kept the book. After all, I had to stay in the freight office till four in the morning.

Now I see notes in it: "How strange--to have bought this to read on my own then decades later to have written about Melville's reading it, & to see myself quoted on the use it served for Melville in writing Moby-Dick, which I first read in 1957. --"

Then below: "In 1958 (one note is August 1958) in Port Arthur--then in 2006 John Gross quotes me in The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes as saying this book served Melville as a 'sonorous textbook on morbid psychology.'"

I made that memo 18 October 2006, saying "48 years on." Now in 2022 it's still longer than 48 years. And I still have the book. And I can look up John Gross in a second or two to verify what he said.