The mirror

For years I have been entertainingly preoccupied with the life of John Aubrey, the 17th century antiquary and biographer.

Over those years I have acquired pretty much everything he wrote, including much material published after his death in 1697. I have the two huge facsimile books of his Monumenta Brittanica - dozens of large drawings of ancient sites all over the British Isles. Charles the Second commissioned him to make this tome, having been taken on a tour of Avebury Henge by Aubrey on the way to take the waters in Bath. Sadly, he did not provide the funding to spend several years travelling up and down the land, taking measurements and making drawings.

The more I discovered about Aubrey, the more I identified with him. His interests, the places he frequented, his butterfly mind, his fascination with the minute and intimately human details of the habits and traits of others, his curiosity about the past, his financial worries and - above all - his complete inability to focus, leading to perpetual procrastination.

I first became aware of Aubrey at around the same age as he began to write, so in a way we have grown up in tandem, albeit over 300 years apart. We both had a good start in life, but never built on it, preferring to live in the present with childish optimism about what the future would bring.

I am just coming to the end of Ruth Scurr's wonderful compilation of his words, written as a diary in chronological order. He is now over 60 years old, and starting to consider his mortality for what seems to be the first real time in his life.

He is preoccupied with finishing the dozens of manuscripts he began years before, but is realistic enough to know that he does not have the time left to do so, so sets himself the target of completing one large volume which he hopes he will leave in a fit state for publication after his death. He never finished it.

Throughout his diary, he chronicles the deaths of many fellow scholars and founder members of The Royal Society, and strives to collect and save their manuscripts and papers before they are used by cooks to line the bases of pies, or stuffed down the barrels of guns as wadding. In those days, paper was worth more than the words written on it to the ignorant or illiterate.

In his last months and weeks, he became preoccupied with his legacy. He understood that the only thing he had to leave to posterity was his papers - great piles of random scribbling on both sides of the page and up in the margins, with crossings-out and writing over, stacked in no particular order and waiting for someone from the future to spend years making sense of them - if they survived.

You can hear the anxiety in his voice as he speculates on the safest place to store his manuscripts after his death. There seems to be no perfect home for them - one place would see them destroyed from pure jealousy, another by incompetent neglect. In the tumultuous political atmosphere of the time, manuscripts were also just as likely to be deemed Papist as they were to be not Catholic enough.  He desperately wanted some tangible evidence of his intellect to survive him. His ego would, he thought, transcend death itself. He wanted to be remembered - or rather never forgotten.

One of his last drawings was a design for his own funerary monument. A tablet of white marble with his coat of arms, his name in latin (Johannes) and the obit date. It was never made and he now lies in an unmarked pauper's grave at Oxford, the family home near Malmesbury having been sold off to pay debts years before.

As I get to the end of the book, I feel a quiet and mounting dread that I picked the wrong hero - again.