'The Anfractuosities of His Intellect and of His Temper'

A friend tells me his reading of Macaulay’s essay on Dr. Johnson, “as histrionic as it sounds, transformed me into a literary man, removing me from the indifferent world of a mere English major.” I envy him the experience. I had no such road-to-Damascus moment. I always enjoyed books and writing – it was that simple. My friend writes:

“It sounds corny, and melodramatic, but this essay had a visceral effect on me. I read it alone in a dorm room, one Friday night while rain beat down. All alone on a Friday night--no, I didn't have much of social life. I think for the first time I understood excellence in prose, that it wasn’t all the same, that men could work legerdemain with words, create art.”

The classic expression of reading’s centrality to one’s life is Guy Davenport’s essay “On Reading” in The Hunter Gracchus (1996). While still a boy Davenport learned: “And then I made the discovery that what I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.” Some adults never grasp this seemingly self-evident truth. And this: “It is a truism that reading educates. What it does most powerfully is introduce the world outside us, negating the obstructions of time and place.” Seasoned readers know the pleasures of self-forgetting through books. With it comes a sense of familiarity with others. Nothing human is alien to the well-read. My friend reread Macaulay’s essay the other night and enjoyed it all over again:

“At the beginning of the essay, I was much taken with this sentence, reveling in its construction: ‘In the child, the physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were plainly discernible; great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper.’”

Macaulay celebrates the gravitas of Johnson’s style by almost imitating it. The sentence begins with a thesis followed by series of elegantly balanced proofs. “The man knows how to write,” my friend says, almost unnecessarily. Here is the latter half of Macaulay’s final sentence in his Johnson essay:

“[O]ur intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man.”

Anfractuosity is a very Johnsonian word. From the Latin by way of the French, the adjective form is defined in his Dictionary as “winding; mazy; full of turnings and winding passages.” The OED reminds us the word can also refer to “the grooves or furrows separating the convolutions on the surface of the brain.”