You have to understand, I'm the guy who read The Anatomy of Melancholy while I was a senior in high school. I also check eBay occasionally to see if a full multivolume edition of The Golden Bough is up for auction. Immediately after reading Sunday's negative review in the New York Times of William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down, then, I knew that I had to get my hands on a copy of this book. So I scraped together a hundred dollars and bought a copy from Coliseum Books on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. Lugging the seven boxed volumes home on the subway, I felt like John Turturro at the end of Barton Fink, carrying around a box that may or may not contain a human head. I was also reminded of that movie's final exchange: "What's in the box?" "I don't know." "Is it yours?" "I don't know."

By chance, the seven volumes of Rising Up and Rising Down are just about exactly the size of a human head, although much heavier. And I plan to keep them on my desk at home, for the same reason that a Renaissance philosopher might have kept a human skull on his desk as a memento mori. To explain: Rising Up and Rising Down is a 3,300 page treatise that attempts to answer the question "When is violence justified?" More importantly, it's a living, bleeding example of what an artist can produce, even today, when he assumes the overwhelming importance of his own soul, along with a fair amount of unhealthy obsession. It shames me. Not only does Vollman write huge, unreadable novels, he also puts his life on the line by reporting from the world's worst places. Apparently it's possible to be Pynchon and Mailer at the same time.

You can read more about this book at McSweeney's. You can also come by my apartment to look at it, if you like. I'm buying this book as a public service. There don't seem to be many copies in New York, not even in the library system, and it's worth just browsing through, even if you don't plan to read it. I'm not sure I'm going to read it this year, or even this decade, but like Gibbon, it's nice to have Volmann on the shelf, in reserve, ready for some imaginary intellectual holiday that will last forever. Like the Codex Seraphinianus, Rising Up and Rising Down, with its thousands of pages of obsessive diagrams and photographs and charts and moral corollaries, is like a book rescued from a dream. It's hard to believe that it actually exists, but it does.