“Boswel[l],
with some of his troublesome kindness, has informed this family, and reminded
me that the eighteenth of September is my birthday. The return of my Birthday,
if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care
of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in
which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed, a life diversified by
misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence
of pain, in gloomy discontent, or importunate distress. But perhaps I am better
than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted. With this I will try to
be content.”
Johnson
leavens the gloom with affectionate wit – Boswell’s “troublesome kindness,” a
quality we recognize in some of our loved ones. Johnson’s Christian stoicism, which
might in others tip into self-pity, is what I admire. This most industrious of
men forever berates himself for indolence, and yet few of us will ever have to labor
harder against illness and poverty. In our age of aggrieved entitlement,
looking at challenges as goads to accomplishment will make little sense to many.
Think of the couplet Johnson contributed to Goldsmith’s “The Traveller” in 1764:
“How
small, of all that human hearts endure,
That
part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”
Four
birthdays later, on Sept. 18, 1777, Johnson writes again to Thrale:
“Here
is another Birthday. They come very fast. I am now sixty eight. To lament the
past is vain, what remains is to look for hope in futurity. Queen[e]y has now
passed another year. I hope every year will bring her happiness.”
Queeney
is Thrale’s daughter. It’s typical of Johnson to celebrate his birthday by
wishing another well. One of the pleasures of rereading Johnson is to be
convincingly reminded of a better way to live. Rather than preaching, Johnson
shares his own experience. When I read his blessing on Queeney, I think: That’s
the right thing to do. As Johnson wrote in The Rambler #2: “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
Years ago a friend put it like this: “I’m not a slow learner. I’m a quick
forgetter.”
3 comments:
Good words. Dr. Johnson always strikes the right note. The more I read Johnson, and read about him, the more impressively great he becomes. Johnson provides many reminders to us as we read him. This post reminds me that I, too, have a sixty-fourth birthday coming up at the end of next month.
TJG
I don't think anyone can improve on W. Jackson Bate's summing up of Johnson's life. In the last sentence of his magisterial biography of Johnson, Bate writes, "With all the odds against him, he had proved that it was possible to get through this strange adventure of life, and to do it in a way that is a tribute to human nature."
"As Johnson wrote in The Rambler #2: “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.” "
Thought of Sam on seeing AWAD's Thought For Today, and a reader's comment on it:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see. -Baltasar Gracian, writer and philosopher (8 Jan 1601-1658)
It is very much like what Alexander Pope wrote in his “Essay on Criticism” (1711):
Men must be taught as if you taught them not;
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
Lawrence Crumb, Eugene, Oregon
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