Why read?

Reading must often feel a useless indulgence. Unless you are part of the society of authors and scholars, you will rarely have the satisfaction and improved understanding that come from dissecting a work in conversation. Nor does reading bring any significant amount of praise or even recognition, since with so few now reading, you will meet hardly anyone who knows how Rasselas differs from Tuesdays with Morrie, or that one book even can differ in any meaningful way from another. Nearly all think of reading as nothing but a hobby, increasingly rare and in its more serious form simply eccentric. Worse, what little recognition there is for reading belongs to those who read, or at least flatter with the pretense of reading, the latest profitless works of trendy literature or radical politics. When someone says he is a reader, hide your own reading or risk having to fight your way out of the conversation when he starts to praise some House of Sand and Fog or Hegemony or Survival. It is even more depressing when the reader turns out to read only books on personal finances (men) or self-help (women); they look on books as mere stuff to line their material lives, not readers but paper wasps.

As it happens, reading good books is of private advantage; it is difficult to prove to doubters why this should be, but once acquired a well-stocked mind reconciles a man to life. By contrast, Theodore Dalrymple described the self-destroying pain of those who reach their 30s without internal resource, just as the delusory significance of youth fades. Still I would like to believe that these strange electrical whorls, that for the moment fill my mind but soon enough will uncoil and go dark, have some kind of purpose outside myself. Johnson's essay in the Adventurer, issue 85, gives no proofs, but offers wonderful reassurance.

An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.

Astounding that at the very dawn of the modern age, Rousseau's foolishness had already spread generally. Johnson might as well be responding to a modern pedagogical statement on the value of critical thinking over "rote learning." His next argument has by now been made often, but it is delightful to hear how he says it:

If reason has the power ascribed to it by its advocates, if so much is to be discovered by attention and meditation, it is hard to believe, that so many millions, equally participating of the bounties of nature with ourselves, have been for ages upon ages meditating in vain: if the wits of the present time expect the regard of posterity, which will then inherit the reason which is now thought superior to instruction, surely they may allow themselves to be instructed by the reason of former generations. When, therefore, an author declares, that he has been able to learn nothing from the writings of his predecessors, and such a declaration has been lately made, nothing but a degree of arrogance unpardonable in the greatest human understanding, can hinder him from perceiving that he is raising prejudices against his own performance; for with what hopes of success can he attempt that in which greater abilities have hitherto miscarried? or with what peculiar force does he suppose himself invigorated, that difficulties hitherto invincible should give way before him?

Johnson comes now to the part that, even if I can see how the sentence I italicized is only assertion, still warms me with reassurance:

Of those whom Providence has qualified to make any additions to human knowledge, the number is extremely small; and what can be added by each single mind, even of this superior class, is very little: the greatest part of mankind must owe all their knowledge, and all must owe far the larger part of it, to the information of others. To understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and he is by no means to be accounted useless or idle, who has stored his mind with acquired knowledge, and can detail it occasionally to others who have less leisure or weaker abilities.

I wonder though, what Johnson would say to those of us whose minds fall between the discoverers of new knowledge and the common intellects, in an age when the common intellects are little interested in new knowledge and wholly uninterested in anything old. To live in an age of ignorance has the selfish advantage of making even modest minds seem great, to themselves, for merely attempting what was once required of young students. It is not a very satisfying feeling though.

If I have dwelt on the unhappiness of having no public benefit in reading, still Johnson goes on to say much the same thing:

Persius has justly observed, that knowledge is nothing to him who is not known by others to possess it [Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter: your knowledge is nothing, unless another knows of your knowledge.]: to the scholar himself it is nothing with respect either to honor or advantage, for the world cannot reward those qualities which are concealed from it; with respect to others it is nothing, because it affords no help to ignorance or errour.

He goes on to recommend that scholars cultivate skill in conversation, to make their knowledge of public use and honor, and to practice writing, so that their scholarship and their conversation are both made more exact. What, though, would Johnson say is to be done, when there is not conversation to be had, nor many readers to be found for writing?

To write a blog, praise myself, and take another swig from the bitter cup of learning, I expect.

The well-deserved death of poetry

Why do editors permit such idiocy as this?

Although Plato didn't quite sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets — Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others — lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have derided their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.

That is both cliched and ignorant. Plato may have banned poets in his ideal society, but he did so because the status of Greek poets in reality was very high; he would not have bothered to ban today's poets. Just off the top of my head, poets have been the "most welcome guests at the table of society" in these periods: Greece, 8th century BC - 15th century AD; Rome, 1st century BC - 5th century AD; England, 16th - 19th century. Similar ranges could be produced for Italy, France, Russia, Japan, China, and India, though I would have to look up the dates. The truth is, poets and poetry have been highly welcome "guests at the table of society" in almost every place and time, except for our godforsaken wasteland. What a damned insulting fool Parini is.

Anyone whose world of poetry starts with Shelley and Byron, counts T.S. Eliot highly, and explains itself through Emerson, is himself the best explanation for poetry's death. Parini also quotes from Hopkins exactly the kind of line I despise: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed." No-man-fathomed. Parini's supposed lamentation of poetry's decline from popularity is really that disgusting oleaginous genre of self-congratulation that runs, "O! Alas, we are such bold thinkers and so deep, that few can value what we do!"

Modern poetry

I hate it so much. But to start with, something I somewhat like. Last night I read some more poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is clearly an important person because he always goes by all three names. I think I admire at most one in three so far and like maybe half of those. His frequent hyphenated phrases drive me nuts, and priest or not it is a little ridiculous how he can scarcely keep his poems from claiming to find Christ in something. Or as he might say, his happy-hyphen-harbor sparking-pains the gray-grim inward am of holy Christ. That is, it hurts me. I mean this sort of thing, this hallmarkian opening line:

CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Yuck. This one is worse yet, if you can stand to look. I also am not bowled over by "sprung rhythm," which is altogether too close to the modern idea that poetry is text arranged in a strange fashion by someone who names himself a poet. Still, his good poems are such pleasure they make me read and re-read them out loud. There is a poem of quintessence, a borderline gnostic poem, and my favorite so far, grief over the self's autumn.

So that is praise, more or less; by comparison, I hate Billy Collins' poetry. Apparently he was our poet laureate for a couple of years, confirming my impression that poet laureate means "wretched affliction on the language." His WSJ article from Saturday has several examples of his work. I think I would like him personally, since he seems unaffected and, if not actually funny, at least humorous. It would no doubt wear on him, however, when I started and closed every conversation with "Please stop writing poems."

I did read more of the Life of Johnson this weekend, as well as the Adventurer 85, an essay on reading that I really want to talk about. But I was out of town at my uncle's memorial so I will have to work out the backlog today and tomorrow.

Life of Johnson: Americans

Johnson bitterly hated America and was violent on the subject of the tax protests, even before the revolution. He wrote a long pamphlet against the tax protests, called Taxation No Tyranny, which Boswell, who favored the American complaints, said was largely bluster and sophistries. From my first read, it seems he had a theory of apostolic succession in government, so that once a proper government was formed, all subsequent alterations and branches derived their authority from the original, or else had no authority at all. I have never heard that before, so I want to think about it more.

Otherwise, he has not made many interesting arguments. He wastes time on the straw man that Americans were opposed to taxation itself, though he admits they granted the theoretical right of taxation. Much later he addresses the real question, of taxation without representation, making the expected argument that the colonists are included in parliamentary representation as much as all the other groups of people who have no direct vote. He does not appear to realize that those other groups might well deserve representation as well. He even uses the existence of rotten boroughs, unrepresented cities, and the small electorate as arguments against the idea that every region deserves representation. In a way, the thread of his thought does resemble what later happened, with America splitting away, then the formation of legislatures in Canada in 1791, the reform of rotten boroughs in 1831 and again in 1867, the grant of representation to cities founded in modern times in 1832, and the extension of suffrage in 1832.

He adds that the original colonists had the potential (though few the actual ability) to vote before they left England, so their departure was a voluntary abandonment of the right to vote. I suppose that is true, though it seems more likely that they abandoned voting on practical rather than theoretical grounds. In any case, why would that original choice to abandon the vote descend from those few original settlers to the three million Americans of 1778, in their large(ish) cities governed by assemblies? They had no practical ability to move to England, and the original condition of the settlers, of small armed camps in the wild, with little need for representation in England, did not resemble the young commercial states, with their frequent and complex interaction with England.

He did suggest that the "planters," which I hope does not mean only the Southern plantation owners whose slave-owning he elsewhere condemned, could have bought large estates in England, which would have given them the vote and potentially seats in parliament. That idea was not very practical, given the danger and distance that had prevented trans-Atlantic land holding for two centuries, and again revealed how little he cared whether representation was distributed unevenly. That method would have made a small group of self-selected wealthy men the sole representatives of the colonies, without recourse for the rest of the colonists.

He argues that royal charters to the colonies can be amended at will by the king or parliament, without appeal by the colonies, while the colonies are not allowed to point to long-standing usage to prove their rights. In a way, that grants the colonists' argument, that parliament and the king were beginning to strip the colonies of their traditional rights, and that to grant the power of taxation without representation was to put all freedoms at the whim of the king. He does not mention it, but the colonists were also greatly exercised by the thought that religious restrictions would follow on taxation, with the appointment of bishops from England and the enforcement of Anglicanism as the state religion.

The pamphlet was written in 1775; it is surprising how little Johnson mentions the war afterward, even in 1778. Since he and Boswell fight so bitterly on the subject that they stop seeing each other for a while, more than once, perhaps his lack of comment is only tact on his or Boswell's part. Still, he does not mention the war in letters to others. Only with Gen. Burgoyne's defeat does war news in the ordinary sense break in.

Life of Johnson: More wine

Boswell says that Johnson could only abstain completely or drink (or eat) too much, though when he drank too much it was in private. His explanation for drinking to excess in private is all too understandable:

Johnson: I require wine, only when I am alone. I have then often wished for it, and often taken it.
Spottiswoode: What, by way of a companion, sir?
Johnson: To get rid of myself, to send myself away.

He adds that "wine makes a man better pleased with himself," though often less pleasing to others, and adds a reason that explains why, if I have to go to a party, I go straight for a beer:

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what has been locked up in frost.

He adds, "this may be good, or it may be bad," but when the alternative is a frosty lack of ease, I am willing to risk the bad. Boswell in this sense acted on Johnson like wine, prompting him to talk freely, even posing inane questions just to stir Johnson into action. Another friend said of Johnson that he was like a ghost, only speaking when spoken to. I did not know that ghosts were like that, but it shows how generally silent Johnson was without the influence of wine or Boswell. When Johnson said, "A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence and readiness without wine, which wine gives," I think it is a worthy sentiment that nevertheless represents Johnson's hope for himself, not his actual behavior. He was a great one for resolutions, even long into old age, despite recognizing that men achieved little with resolutions. If Johnson's astoundingly cultivated mind could not break the ice dam without help, regardless of his resolutions, I think that disability must be intrinsic to certain minds. In much company, too, the ability to take equal part in conversation decreases with greater cultivation.

Though it does not mean much, it is funny that when he was a "water-drinker," Johnson "supposed every body who drank wine to be elevated," that is, plastered. I would also like to know whether "wine" in all these discussions means only wine, or includes spirits and beer, since they go unmentioned. The details (cellars, vintages, bumpers) are all of wine, but it is odd not to hear anything at all about the others, especially since one of Johnson's great friends, Mr. Thrale, was a wealthy brewer.

Life of Johnson: Wine

Without thinking about it, I started drinking late, have only drunk too much a handful of times, and on the whole prefer not drinking, nor has any stronger drug tempted me, even when offered. When people find out, usually while swapping drug stories, they hardly believe it is not from some excess of religion. I rarely explain, because it is somehow embarrassing to admit the sole reason, that thinking clearly makes me happy, and thinking muddily makes me unhappy, which is what Johnson, who for a few years drank too much, felt too:

[I left off drinking wine] because it is so much better for a man to be sure that he is never to be intoxicated, never to lose the power over himself. I shall not begin to drink wine again, till I grow old, and want it... It is a diminution of pleasure, to be sure; but I do not say a diminution of happiness. There is more happiness in being rational... Supposing we could have pleasure always, an intellectual man would not compound for it. The greatest part of men would compound, because the greatest part of men are gross.

(He was 69 when he said that; "till I grow old" must mean very great age. Also "to compound for" means "to settle for," so to exchange happiness for pleasure.) It is probably relevant that Johnson had a painful fear of madness, which I share; that fear is the fear of "losing the power over himself." He also greatly feared annihilation: "No rational man can die without uneasy apprehension" and "It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists." It does not create happiness, to pull the shades and dim the lights when daylight is so brief, twilight so gray, and night so empty.

Rev. Dodd

The case of William Dodd is very strange. He lived in the absurd style called maccaroni, even though he was a clergyman, and even more oddly achieved great popularity for his preaching, which I would have thought at odds with his unpopular fashion. His luxurious life far exceeded his real means, and in time he forged a note for the enormous sum of 4,200 pounds, which at a minimum would be $400,000 in present money. He was gently punished by public hanging.

Johnson tried hard to have Dodd's sentence commuted to transportation, even going so far as to write Dodd's final address to be delivered in Dodd's name. Dodd showed the same thoughtless, self-centered character to the very end, not bothering to let the world know what papers Johnson had written for him, even after it could no longer harm his cause to let it be known; that selfish omission very much bothered Johnson later. The ludicrous reverend did at least write Johnson a letter of thanks, though crammed with emphases (italics in print, maybe underlining in the original?) and exclamation points, far beyond what mere impending death could justify. (When writing the night before being hanged, the number of exclamation points granted is double that of the next highest allotment, the announcement of the birth of one's first child, so, two per page. But a good man will not abuse that license.) Had Dodd lived in the age of email, his final note would have been scarcely visible through the crowd of upset faces. Apart from his regrettable style, though hanging is a brutal punishment for forgery, Dodd comes across as a very creepy and hypocritical man, whose absence would have to improve the world. Johnson in fact only argues that Dodd be made to disappear by transportation to the most distant colony available.

Johnson, in his final letter to Dodd, makes a surprisingly callous argument:

Be comforted: your crime, morally or religiously considered, has no very deep dye of turpitude. It corrupted no man's principles; it attacked no man's life. It involved only a temporary and reparable injury.

But this was in an age when arrest and imprisonment for debt was so routine that Johnson himself once was saved from arrest only by an immediate payment from a friend. The sum of money was so large that the man who paid out on the forged bond must have risked bankruptcy, since Dodd squandered the money and the nobleman whose name had been forged preferred to prosecute Dodd rather than pay. Bankruptcy then did not mean several years of unpleasantness and some embarrassment, but utter collapse of life and probably imprisonment, during which the man's wife and children would have no protection except for the meager help afforded to paupers. The saintly Dodd may well have done less harm just to stab a man and take his purse, though a common mugging may not have commanded such public support. To be fair to Johnson, it is of course possible that the bond purchaser was so extraordinarily rich that he could absorb even so large a loss; neither Boswell nor wikipedia describe the purchaser.

Johnson was not opposed to trade and famously said "a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is getting money," but he also said, of a man who had shot a Scottish nobleman in self-defense but was convicted anyway, that a commoner has no honor to defend. Clergy were often noble, and bishops were honorary lords; Johnson seems to treat all clergy as honorary minor gentry at least. A banker or money-lender would not have that distinction, even though Johnson would have no special prejudice against them. It is hard to follow the thought of a man who could be passionately against slavery, when that position was still uncommon, but just as passionately for the subservience of nearly all men to a few.

Life of Johnson: Death

Johnson had a peculiarly intense fear of dying. If Boswell brought up the subject of death, he grew agitated and if pressed farther was hardly able to speak and was physically affected as well. It was not very kind of Boswell to upset Johnson so more than once; he admits it himself. Still, the experience let Boswell give this wonderful description of Johnson's fears:

His mind resembled the vast amphitheater, the Coliseum at Rome. In the center stood his judgment, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After the conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.

I wish I had learned earlier that, though different people have different wild beasts of the mind, it is true for everyone that most of the beasts can never be killed; only in the last few years did I realize, to continue the metaphor, that the nearest thing to victory is to learn the special tricks to send each beast crawling back to its den with the least combat.

On another occasion (like the first, provoked by Hume's carelessness of death), Johnson says that "he never had a moment in which death was not terrible to him." He adds, "The better a man is, the more afraid he is of death, having a clearer view of infinite purity." I think he means, a better man knows better how far he falls short of perfection, and so knows better how he deserves damnation. Boswell elsewhere does say he thought Johnson's fear to be not of dying, but of what came after. Still, it was talk of death that upset Johnson, not talk of the afterlife.

When Boswell asks, "Is not the fear of death natural to man?" Johnson answers, "So much so that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it." He feared for his conduct on his deathbed and wondered, "I know not whether I should wish to have a friend by me, or have it all between God and myself." As with his drinking, even in the greatest pain he wished no one to see him fail in right conduct. I recently experienced this ranking of shame above pain when I went in for some neurological testing related to a long illness. The tests, which return immediate results, had a significant chance of finding that I had a progressive illness that would soon cripple and in a decade or two kill me. A sweet-natured friend wanted very much to drive for me, and I found myself asking a question much like Johnson's. In the end I asked my brother to come, since someone had to and there is less shame in going to pieces in front of a brother. As it happens, the tests returned good results, but I would make the same choice again. The experience of keeping composure under considerable strain makes me more easily believe Johnson's observation that "scarce any man dies in public, but with apparent resolution; from that desire of praise which never quits us." Of course that was the last century of frequent public executions in England, so the observation would not be merely speculative.

By the way, I am not giving page numbers because if you search for any phrase from a quotation (you may have to convert it back to British spelling) you will turn up the right page on books.google.com. Also, the page numbers on the Google books editions are not at all similar.

Life of Johnson: Economics

Johnson's economic beliefs are interesting. For instance, when Boswell asks, "Would it be for the advantage of a country that all its lands were sold at once?" Johnson responds, "So far as money produces good, it would be an advantage; for then that country would have as much money circulating in it as it is worth." On the one hand, he recognizes the value of a ready supply of capital, but on the other, he clearly believed in the land theory of value. Smith himself believed in the labor theory of value; the idea that value means nothing but the value assigned by men came much later.

Johnson later makes a statement that would please an economist of the Austrian school: defending a wealthy woman who made a show of her highly effective charity, he said "I have seen no beings who do as much good from benevolence, as she does, from whatever motive... To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive." Of course they go farther; my economics professor would have put it, "Human benevolence is inseparable from vanity, interest, or some other motive." But he would have agreed with Johnson's conclusion: the effect is still good and deserves praise.

I am not sure what to make of this quotation: "As to mere wealth, that is to say, money, it is clear that one nation or one individual cannot increase its store but by making another poorer: but trade procures what is more valuable, the reciprocation of the peculiar advantages of different countries." It may mean that Johnson thought all economic growth was zero-sum, or that hard money, being inherently limited in supply, must move around rather than increase or decrease. That would imply deflation and inflation as real economic worth changed. I think he does mean that the sizes of economies are zero-sum, but his recognition of competitive advantage, which he sees increases real wealth independently of currency supply, makes it unclear.

Nearing page 800. Boswell is suddenly taking multiple pages per day; he says at the start that he wishes he met Johnson earlier, but would anyone have ever read the 15,000 page book that would have resulted?

Life of Johnson: Happiness is forgetting

"That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment."

So Johnson does mean, when he says men are never happy in the present, that they are never happy because of the present. Also, I was going to write today about the ephemeral happiness of high spirits, which he did not seem to allow in yesterday's quotation, but he says enough with that description of relief from unhappiness as self-forgetting.

Though he went through long periods of abstinence from drink (in a very sodden age), he says that when not abstaining, he often drank wine by the bottle to raise his spirits. He drank alone, though, in order not to embarrass himself. I understand it, but the deliberateness of his self-erasure is very sad.

The Plausibility of Life

The Plausibility of Life makes the exciting argument that phenotypic plasticity, both in development and in adult life, greatly facilitates evolution. When trying to explain it, the easiest example for me is the change resulting from moving a population to high altitudes. The red blood cell count and breathing rate increase to compensate for the lower oxygen content; those changes are phenotypic variation, without genetic change. Those changes create other stresses on the organism, though, so the population undergoes selection for genetic changes that relieve the stress. The result is that a population can colonize a new habitat without having to wait for fortunate mutations, and once in the new habitat can evolve to fit better, with the existing plasticity of phenotypic expression facilitating rapid evolution.

This article exactly matches the example, and there are two other interesting aspects. First, the mutation described has clearly happened in three separate populations. Even assuming direct descent, the Andean founding population would be separated from the Tibetan population by at least several thousand years, during which time the high altitude adaptation would have been unneeded. Random mutation soon wrecks anything not selected for, so it seems much more likely to have evolved separately several times. Second, the speed of evolution is astounding. The ability to achieve very pronounced changes in the phenotype by altering the degree to which a gene is expressed (also part of The Plausibility of Life's argument) makes evolution very rapid in cases like this. Even assuming humans have lived in the Andes for 10,000 years with a generation every 20 years, that is still only 500 generations in which to achieve a remarkable adaptation. It is interesting though that the adaptation has not completely swept through the population. I know too little about population biology to guess why that might be.

Life of Johnson: Happiness and laughter

Everything Johnson says about happiness and depression convinces me, almost painfully. I am reading his Life now because I read his Rasselas last year. It is an almost classical form of philosophy, an investigation of happiness through a dialogue, and beautifully lucid.

Pope's Essay on Man is also wonderful, though I scarcely remember anything more than that. Boswell has Johnson commenting on Pope's line,

[Hope springs eternal in the human breast:]
Man never is, but always to be blest.

Boswell writes, "[Johnson] asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope." Further, that man is happy in the moment, "Never, but when he is drunk." In one of his prefaces, Boswell says he thinks Johnson underestimated man's potential for happiness because of his melancholy. With charming guilelessness, Boswell says he is sure he has had more happiness out of life than Johnson did; Boswell was something of a wencher and a wine-bibber. Johnson must be overstating in any case, or Boswell misunderstanding, because the first assertion means that men are sometimes happy in the present, though that happiness properly belongs to their future self, whose state is the cause of the happiness.

Hope is happiness and despair, not a lack of pleasant feelings, is the opposite of happiness. I wonder what Johnson would think of the idea that there is a second happiness, also not in the present. When long-held hopes are worked towards and then achieved, they leave happy memories, even if at the time there was no real happiness. So people are happy in the memory of rearing children, in remembering that they have acted rightly, in having been to school, in having achieved a career, in short in all kinds of things that while still in progress cause too much strain and work to produce a sensation of happiness.

Recent attempts to develop a scientific understanding of happiness have emphasized that our minds can only dimly imagine the future and more imagine than remember the past. We therefore choose paths unlikely to take us to happiness. There is some science to it, but it is mostly a rhetorical trick. The argument is that remembered happiness, being inaccurate, does not count, or counts for much less; with remembered happiness not counting, it is easy enough to show that gaining some hoped-for state brings much less happiness than expected, and thus that the hope itself was mistaken. But why should remembered happiness not count? It is hardly relevant that my memories are not a bald factual account; they are the only sort of memories available to me. Neither can I implant wholly delusional memories as a shortcut to happiness. If I had the mind of a computer, I would be irrational to have the hopes I do, for they have such difficulties in them that to remember every detail would be intolerable. Having the mind of a man, I have every reason to expect that some of the great satisfactions of mankind will be mine as well. But I think the new science of happiness does successfully describe why pursuing happiness through new toys and entertainments is delusional.

Johnson was not as gloomy as it might seem; even while depressed he was good-natured and enjoyed wit and conversation. Sometimes, when the depression lifted, he would be in a "humour for jocularity and merriment," and would laugh often, "a kind of good humoured growl." Boswell quotes another's description of it: "He laughs like a rhinoceros." A good laugh is such a delight. I have a great-uncle whose sweet-natured, quiet, almost rumbling chuckle, which makes the skin under his chin wobble, is one of the great pleasures of knowing him. Strange but wonderful laughs seem to run on that side of the family; my grandmother, his sister, has a sweet, girlish laugh even in her seventies. Her son, my uncle, had a short, odd laugh that was very endearing, especially with the motion of his prodigious gray eyebrows emphasizing his pleasure. He died a year ago, and even though there was much more about him to miss, how sad it is that while the good he did may be remembered, no one will ever hear his laugh again, and in time it will be forgotten.

I first wrote that this would be divine vandalism, if there were divinity, but that makes little sense and is probably pose. If there are two archons battling across creation, one making, one destroying, then it makes sense to call one a vandal, or maybe it just drowns nonsense in a sea of absurdity. If there is a god as described in Bible, in either Testament, then this sort of thing is merely unintelligible, the actions of a creator who labors over small delights but soon smashes them. Paul says,

Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Rom. 9:20-21)

The potter may make and smash as he wills. If the Bible did not say it, no one would ever have guessed that so capricious a creator could be said to love what he treats so lightly.

Life of Johnson: Germs, happiness, the Scots

Still in a dull-ish part, but here are some quotations I would like to remember.

Kenneth Macaulay (great-uncle of Thomas Macaulay, the Whig historian who so savaged Croker) wrote a history of St. Kilda, a very isolated island, in which he included a "wonderful story that upon the approach of a stranger all the inhabitants catch cold." Someone told him to leave it out; Johnson praised him for leaving it in: "To leave things out of a book, merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is meanness. Macaulay acted with more magnanimity." It has been a given for centuries that a man should tell the truth even when he will be attacked for it, which helps encourage honest men to do just that, but I at least had never thought how especially hard it can be to tell the truth when the reaction will simply be disbelief. I like the contrast of meanness and magnanimity, which says that a great-souled man knows the world to be so large that its oddities will exceed his own knowledge and that it is timidity to conceal them. The story was also likely true; it is explained elsewhere that the islanders rarely had ships visit, so for someone who knows about germ theory, it is easy to believe that each visit was a new exposure to diseases from the mainland.

Johnson, who persevered through life-long depression, said this about climate, which seemed directed towards me and my complaints about Seattle's gloom: "What is climate to happiness? Place me in the heart of Asia, should I not be exiled? What proportion does climate bear to the complex system of human life? You may advise me to go to live at Bologna to eat sausages. The sausages there are the best in the world; they lose much by being carried." Still, there is no denying that one of Seattle's rare sunny days lifts my spirits.

Johnson did not think much of the Scots, or at least he had some prejudice that he enjoyed using to tease Boswell. Johnson's critical acumen led him to reject the supposedly ancient Scottish poem Fingal, which had in fact been largely forged. In a letter to Boswell, speaking of the discoverer/forger's claim to have manuscripts (which he never produced), Johnson said, "If old manuscripts should now be mentioned, I should, unless there were more evidence than can be easily had, supposed them another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood. Do not censure the expression; you know it to be true." I happened to see a book (The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History) on the same topic, in the Telegraph I think, just last week; I would like to read it. Anyway, it is not a peculiar vice of the Scots, but a common disease of weak and resentful nations. Germany, Russia, Japan, Ireland, and most recently Mexico have all succumbed to it. I suppose multiculturalism prohibits the observation that men often lie to further a common delusion and that few delusions are as gripping as mystical nationalism.

Life of Johnson, I

Though as I start this blog I am 600 pages through Boswell's Life of Johnson, and the great man is already 66, there are still about 700 pages to go, so no harm done. Also I have just been reading the years around the trip to Scotland, which are very boring, the interesting parts all having been written into Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, so this post will not even be about the Life.

Before starting the book, I read Macaulay's review of Croker's edition. It is not much of an encouragement to read the book, but it is pretty funny. Macaulay starts off softly, with the first sentence: "This work has greatly disappointed us." From there he goes into a little warm-up routine. "This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed." A little farther on: "The tomes absolutely swarm with misstatements into which the editor never would have fallen, if he had taken the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions, or if he had even been well acquainted with the book on which he undertook to comment." He accuses Croker of gross ignorance and negligence akin to medical malpractice, compares Croker to schoolgirls to his disadvantage and repeatedly fantasizes about lashing him as a schoolmaster would a pig-headed little boy.

Having now warmed up, Macaulay goes for a touch directly on Croker's class: "A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the editor boasts of having added... remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annotations which are pencilled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries; 'How beautiful!' 'Cursed prosy!' 'I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at all.' 'I think Pelham is a sad dandy.'"

Croker does sound like an idiot, and only a very small number of his comments survive in the 1953 OUP edition I have, and all of his ill-advised omissions and additions to the text have been reverted. Still, it is hard to believe any man could be as much of a jackass as Macaulay portrays him. Macaulay wholly justifies himself, however, when he complains that in Croker's comments, "We have 'fallacy' used as synonymous with 'falsehood.'" It warms my thistle-ish heart to hear someone who commits that gross solecism so savagely abused.

Macaulay animadverts against Boswell and Johnson as well. After saying that Boswell is the foremost biographer of all time, he strangely continues by calling Boswell the worst of men:

"We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect... Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame... Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London... Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof he never could have produced so excellent a book."

Having read about halfway through, I think I can defend Boswell. Perhaps he becomes especially stupid later, but so far he seems like a guileless man of moderately good intelligence and much better education. His views on literature, where they differ from Johnson's, largely amount to agreeing with the dominant opinion of his time regarding each author, but he occasionally makes a good point. He does seem to have driven Johnson and others crazy at times, but he was pretty clearly a kind and good-natured man and only a little given to sycophancy. I was going to say that Macaulay might have been misled by the lack of celebrities and celebrity hangers-on in his day, but surely there are no worse sycophants than courtiers. The explanation for Macaulay's intense hatred of Boswell and considerable abuse of Johnson, is hinted at in these lines and explained in the Life. Macaulay says, "Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples."

And that is it. Macaulay was a fervent Whig, so a republican, an abolitionist, a hater of the old aristocracy, and in short the bitter enemy of Boswell (who was, after all, a Scottish nobleman) and of Johnson's politics, if not of Johnson himself. Both Boswell and Johnson often say things that would be intolerable if said now, and sometimes that were poorly reasoned, but it would be very foolish to judge what kind of men they were, by looking at what kind of men in the 19th or 21st century hold some opinions similar to theirs. A man who believes in the unmoving Earth in 1500 is not (without further evidence) the same sort of man as one who holds the same belief today.

It explains Everything.

My reading has been increasing lately, and finding I have more to say than any one person has time or patience to hear, I mean this blog to absorb the excess. Much of the pleasure in reading is in discussion afterwards, and for me at least it helps fix what was read more firmly to discuss it or at least to write about it.

The advantages of a blog over a private literary journal are that someone might read a post and be interested enough to comment, so I could have both writing and discussion, and failing that, I can at least nurture that false hope, where with a journal I would have to leave it accidentally and enticingly open when guests were over, to have any hope of notice. Since any self-respecting journal contains embarrassing admissions and a great deal of sex, intense frustration would be bound to drive away forever whatever readership I briefly gained. Also, I will save a bundle, not having to buy quite so much purple ink and green paper.

The Latin is from Winnie Ille Pu and is taken from chapter four, the introduction of Eeyore. Ior, auritulus cinereus is Eeyore, a little grey donkey. In silvae angulo carduoso is in a quiet thistle-filled spot in the forest. Gustatus carduorum is a taste for thistles. As Eeyore says of his missing tail, "That accounts for a Good Deal. It explains Everything. No Wonder... How Like Them."