“I
remembered Johnson’s advice to the clerk who was stealing, of all things,
packing thread, a mysterious habit he wanted to break. Johnson advised the poor
man to take up algebra. It’s a humorous story, but it’s a valuable one. It’s
quite true. Johnson, prone to morbid thoughts, prey to the depredations of
depression and despair, had
the great intelligence to know how to combat his propensities.”
In Boswell’s
account, Johnson’s warehouse clerk seeks the great man’s assistance because he
is “oppressed by scruples of conscience.” The man works in a warehouse and is “often
tempted to take paper and packthread enough for his own use, and that he had
indeed done so often, that he could recollect no time when ever had bought any for
himself.” Johnson suggests that the clerk’s boss would probably be “wholly
indifferent with regard to such trivial emoluments.” The clerk knows that to be
true because he has already told his master about the petty thievery, and the
master told him to take as much thread as he wanted. Johnson tells him to “tease
me no more about such airy nothings,” then concludes that “the fellow might be
mad.” That’s when Johnson gives him pragmatic advice for relieving a guilty
conscience:
“I would
advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your
head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors
about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is
bursting with sin and sorrow.”
Boswell concludes:
“It is perhaps needless to add that this visitor came no more.” Our clerk suffered
from over-scrupulosity. Depending on the severity of the case, Johnson’s
prescription might have worked. I remembered stories of people in prison distracting
themselves with mathematics. Odessa-born Jakow Trachtenberg, while held by the
Nazis, devised a streamlined technique for making mental mathematical
calculations. Simone Weil’s brother Andrew was the mathematician who, while
held in a French prison shortly before the Nazi invasion, devised the Riemann
hypothesis. And I remembered Arthur Koestler’s anecdote in Dialogue with Death (1942), his account of being held prisoner by
the Spanish Fascists during the Civil War. On the first day, angry, frightened
and bored, he turns to math:
“I took a
piece of wire out of the bedstead and began to scrawl mathematical formulae on
the wall. I worked out the equation of an ellipse; but I couldn’t manage the equation
of a hyperbola. The formulae became so long that they reached from the W.C. to
the wash-basin.”
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