Gibbons tied up in the ribbons of my memory

This is a book that adorned the bookshelves of a majority of book-loving, a bit of Anglicized, Indians, especially Bengalis.

It probably lay in my father's bookcase as well, but I never got a chance to read Edward Gibbon's famous seven volumes on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (I just checked, it's now available in WalMart, indicating not only a decline and fall in the value of such books in contemporary America, but a total eclipse of it as well).

I carry with me an impression of the book as a "male" book, the product of male cogitation, i.e. greatly worried about things tangential to the minutiae of daily living in Victorian England.

Nonetheless, I am moved by what Gibbons said after he finished writing the book:

I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober, melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken away everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.