Preface Anyone who decides to live on the continent (as only the British refer to it) has to expect to live part of the time in the subjunctive— the verbal mood for anything that’s hypothetical or contingent. You can’t hope to get by as a competent speaker of French or German (where it is called Konjunktif ) unless you know how to enter the parallel world of things that demand someone else’s participation or consent, or the special time or set of circumstances to be agreed upon before a possibility can swell into the indicative. Verbs of wishing, fearing, expressing judgement and emotion all take the subjunctive mood. The subjunctive is for people who like parentheses and extrapolations. The great Austrian novelist Robert Musil wrote an entire novel set in the subjunctive, and never emerged in the indicative to finish it. The subjunctive exists in English too, but its presence is vestigial and barely observed. Instead we have The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne’s seriously funny tribute to the zigzag. His novel was once described as a congeries of ‘unconnected rhapsody, rambling digression, eccentric humour, peculiar wit, petulance, pruriency and ostentation of learning’; it exhibits all those qualities, and it has also been one of the most influential European novels ever. It mocks what it loves, not least the encyclopaedic impulse; Tristram’s father has a system of education ‘collecting first for that purpose his own scattered thoughts, counsels, and notions, and binding them together.’ This is his TRISTRA-paedia. I took a leaf from Tristram’s father’s system by arranging these twenty-six essays as an abecedary of concept-terms, which is about as much order as I could give to my life. Two of these headings are not even English in origin, which is appropriate enough, and ‘Posture’ has a wider purchase in French, where ‘être en mauvaise posture’ is to be in a tricky situation. My Book of Patience includes magical and not so magical bodies, eyes and ears, nose and teeth, old-style livers and the latest pills, happiness quotients and fake doctors, Chekhov and Roget, mining towns and poison trees, Swiss sanatoria and penal colonies, and bacteria almost everywhere. Some of the concept-terms could, conceivably, have been quite different: Happiness, for instance, displaced another article Preface  ix