Lately I've been driving through the neighborhoods around my Chicago suburb, taking in all varieties of the little Las-Vegas-style productions of ghoulishness and do-it-yourself-in-your-own-front-yard Halloween displays. When it comes to graphic lawn ornaments and professional-level stage properties, these days we are provided with many options, many aids by which to celebrate the dead and direful. As with most holidays, Halloween makes us as a culture behave curiously. We revel with our children in the diabolical, the undead, the sociopathic, and many other things from which we would typically seek to shield them. It is a form of carnival, or saturnalia. Personally I've got nothing against it, and it may even be good for us in some deep way, but it bemuses me all the same. All Souls' and All Saints' days extend this fascination across centuries of tradition, and set it within a framework of fellowship and ultimate resurrection. Yet even so, there remains a similar fascination with our—with everyone's—pending physical extinction, the possible world to come, and our relationships with those already there.

If your own interest in these grave and gravely mortal matters hasn't already been sated, then do I have a book for you. New Directions has recently reprinted in its Pearl series a short little study by Sir Thomas Browne: Hydriotaphia Urne-Buriall, or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urns Lately Found in Norfolk (1658). It's slender at fewer than a hundred pages, but also reasonable at less than ten bucks. It's about the size of a Moleskine notebook or a meter maid's ticket pad. In Urn Burial, you will find all sorts of fascinating tidbits on dying, death, ceremony, burial, preservation (or not), hopes and fears about the afterlife, and other "after considerations."

A 17th-century English physician, Browne was a great prose writer in an age of great English prose. He studied medicine in Europe's best schools (Padua, Montpelier, Vienna, Leiden), and his early modern scientific expertise and habit of conducting experiments continually inform his writing. What's more, he has an enchanting, unflagging curiosity, be it toward antiquity, mysteries of nature and the body, or metaphysical complexities. He can be counted on to pursue these interests through his writing in ways unflinching if often digressive, and it is not unusual to encounter a passage like this: "Why the Female Ghosts appear unto Ulysses, before the Heroes and masculine spirits? Why the Psyche or soul of Tiresias is of the masculine gender …. Why the Funerall Suppers consisted of Eggs, Beans, Smallage, and Lettuce …? it cannot escape some doubt." Elsewhere he will inform you that liquids in funeral monuments are typically "incrassated into gellies." A consideration of varying postures for burial leads him to accept the tradition that Christ faced the west during his crucifixion, but to chastise painters who would make his cross larger than the others, on no good authority. Browne was also a person of faith of an easygoing sort (honest, eclectic), and he writes with a transparency that brings to mind his great fellow essayist, Montaigne.

He is intimidatingly erudite, and one must be prepared to read and enjoy his book without being particularly well acquainted with Frotho the Great, Ringo (not that one), Minucius, Sidonius, Pomponius, the "Learned Physician Wormius," and other historical personages whose stories Browne tells or from whose books he finds his stories. He rarely uses one word when a string of beauties will due, and so instead of calling the urns "round" he says they "most imitate a circular figure, in a sphericall and round composure," which he in macabre fashion compares with wombs, the "Urnes of our Nativity," our first bed like our last. Yet for all of his learned eloquence and startling analogies, there is something intoxicating and childlike (if those words ever can or should go together) in his ranging mind and penchant for compiling, and trusting in, ancient sources. If Plutarch says that Theseus' bones were brought back to Athens, then so be it.

Browne begins with the two "soberest" means of rest following "corporall dissolution"— burial (or "simple inhumation") and burning. Those who preferred cremation followed Heraclitus in finding fire to be the most natural element, and they also "declined a visible degeneration into worms" and malice of enemies against their bodies. On the other hand, Christians in particular preferred to return "not unto ashes but unto dust againe," conforming to the patriarchs, Christ (Browne imagines the "little bones" in his hands and feet), and the apostles and martyrs. He next turns to the forty or fifty urns, black in color, then only recently recovered from a "field of old Walsingham." A half-gallon to a gallon in capacity, they contained skulls, ribs, thigh-bones, as well as combs, brass instruments, and pieces of small boxes. Some had no covers so that the earth pressed into them: "some long roots of Quich, or Dogs-grass wreathed about the bones." Later he marvels at the survival of these objects, "not a yard deep" under the plow. "Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments."

After some consideration of English history, Browne determines the remains to belong to Romans or Romanized British, probably from around AD 300. He surveys the accessories for tombs and their symbolic valences, including bay leaves, cypress, olive, myrtle, and England's own moor logs and fir trees. Some ancient urns, he tells us, were decorated with flowers or ribbons. A Christian version might feature images or symbols of a future hope, and thereby it "sweetens our habitations in the Land of Moles and Pismires." Browne is also master name-dropper when it comes to odd character traits or positions held: Nero, he says, did not fear death in general but dreaded specifically decapitation or his body not being fully consumed by flame, while the Stoics thought the souls of wise men resided about the moon.

Browne repeatedly turns his investigation of these recovered urns into a figure for humankind's own limitation of knowledge, and its transience besides: "That great Antiquity America lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us." He recognizes that our own ignorance can sometimes be a blessing: "Were the happinesse of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdome to live." Best to be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of those endured. Yet he does his best to shed light on many a fact. Teeth, bones, and hair most defy corruption. Pyres do not have to be large, he concludes, since the "burthen of Isaac were sufficient for an holocaust," and a piece of an old boat burnt Pompey. Nor are a pyre's remains very great. "How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of bones and ashes," he remarks, "may seem strange unto any who considers not its constitution[.]" It is the brain, that "Metropolis of humidity," that seems most resistant to burning. Browne takes special pleasure in deducing and explaining. Despite his tireless curiosity, as a good Anglican he does become testy sometimes about superstitions surrounding burial or the "vain apprehension" that some buried objects will be useful in another life.

What would Browne make of our holiday observances and deathly mockeries today? Antiquity too could hold "too light thoughts from Objects of mortality," and he describes how "Juglers shewed tricks with Skeletons." Another jester attends funeral services and imitates the deceased, but is deemed "too light for such solemnities." I suspect that Browne would easily appreciate today's blinking, shrieking, spooky paraphernalia, since he himself acknowledges our tendency to have "artificial memento's, or coffins by our bed side, to minde us of our graves."

For all his intellectual whimsy, Browne takes matters of burial quite seriously. "He that hath the ashes of his friend, hath an everlasting treasure," he declares, and there is something both weird and touching about his report of ancients who "suck'd in the last breath of their expiring friends," likely a Pythagorean influence. Nor does he ever describe death flippantly, but to the contrary: our long habit of living makes dying harder, and "It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature." Browne's Christian outlook comes increasingly to the fore in the book's final chapter. Since our thoughts go naturally to the next world, we are less inclined to ponder duration, or the great passing of time, "which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment." According to Browne, over the long haul, most of our names will be forgotten. We know Hadrian's horse's epitaph, but not that of his master. Yet a name's oblivion is not necessarily a bad thing: "who had not rather have been the good theef, then Pilate?" And for Christians, "humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity," there is another consolation, further recovery: "The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not the record of man."

My single gripe with this new, reader-friendly edition of Urn Burial involves the preface, or rather the claim that the preface is by the late great W. G. Sebald. Hearing this, I keenly expected to find an introduction by Sebald unknown to me before, with much attention dedicated to the work at hand. Instead, nineteen pages are reprinted from Sebald's novel The Rings of Saturn (also a New Directions title) in which the speaker memorably describes his residence in the Norfolk & Norwich hospital where the skull of Browne supposedly was kept. The narrator recounts the vagaries of Browne's own remains, and their multiple interments, which give special resonance to a passage later in Urn Burial: "To be knav'd out of our graves, to have our sculls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into Pipes, to delight and sport our Enemies, are Tragicall Abominations."

Make no mistake: Sebald's novelistic treatment of Browne, epistemology, and the "eye of the outsider" is brilliant and will be enjoyed, but its service as an introduction to this particular book is limited at best. The narrator identifies Urn Burial on page 2, treating it for six lines, and not again till page 17 and on the two closing pages that follow. In between, we find a shrewd reading of Rembrandt's painting The Anatomy Lesson and description of what transpires in the novel's hospital setting. That said, anything by Sebald, however fictional or not (his novels are famously part story, part documentary), stands as a fitting presence here. He is perhaps the modern writer Browne himself, with his restless mind and spirit, would have favored most. Both authors point to the fantastical that truly exists—in history, in the natural world—taking up a little space under our costume-donning, face-painted bodies.

Brett Foster's writing has lately appeared in Image, Kenyon Review, Poetry East, and Raritan, and his first poetry collection, The Garbage Eater, will be published by Northwestern University Press early in 2011. He is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College.

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