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My favorite class in college was with Professor Stephen Fix, called “Samuel Johnson and the Literary tradition.” Samuel Johnson wrote the first dictionary of the English language by defining 40,000 words and illustrating them with examples of usage from literature. It’s basically the original Oxford English Dictionary. Johnson was also an essayist who wrote about human morality, as well as the sharpest literary critic in English history and a bon vivant conversationalist. We know about him because there was a fellow named James Boswell who followed him around and composed a 1,200 page biography titled The Life of Johnson. His house was the first place I ventured to after visiting London for the first time.
I thought therefore to share with you some character-related highlights from my reading adventure with The Club.
“It has been the endeavor of all those whom the world has reverenced for superior wisdom, to persuade man to be acquainted with himself, to learn his own powers and his own weakness, to observe by what evils he is most dangerously beset, and by what temptations most easily overcome.
This counsel has been often given with serious dignity, and often received with appearance of convictions; but, as very few can search deep into their own minds without meeting what they wish to hide from themselves, scarce any man persists in cultivating such disagreeable acquaintance, but draws the veil again between his eyes and his heart, leaves his passions and appetites as he found them, and advises others to look into themselves.” ~ The Idler No. 27, Samuel Johnson, Saturday, October 21st, October 1758
What Boswell wanted above all was to establish a consistent character, reliably the same at all times, and to be admired for his stability. “I have discovered,” he wrote hopefully soon after arriving in London, “that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose.” But as he had to admit a few years later, “I am truly a composition of many opposite qualities.” “I was, in short, a character very different from what God intended me and I myself chose.” ~ The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
The conscience is that part of the psyche which is soluble in alcohol. ~ Boswell’s clap and other essays: Medical analyses of Literary Men’s Afflictions
“In Johnson he had the father figure he really needed: highly moral and capable of criticism, but nonjudgmental and loving.” ~ The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
“You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried in my time to be a philosopher; but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” ~ The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
"When I look back on resolutions of improvement and amendment which have year after year been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption, or morbid infirmity; when I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try because reformation is necessary and despair is criminal. I try in humble hope of the help of God." ~ The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age