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.