'I Do Not Talk from Books"

April 16, 1775 was Easter Sunday. After services at St. Paul’s, Boswell dined with Dr. Johnson and Anna Williams, the blind Welsh poet whom Johnson welcomed into his house, joining what John Wain called his “odd collection of friends.” Boswell starts the conversation: 

“I maintained that Horace was wrong in placing happiness in Nil admirari, for that I thought admiration one of the most agreeable of all our feelings; and I regretted that I had lost much of my disposition to admire, which people generally do as they advance in life.” [I haven’t found that to be the case.]

 

Johnson: “Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration--judgement, to estimate things at their true value.”

 

Boswell replies: “I still insisted that admiration was more pleasing than judgement, as love is more pleasing than friendship. The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.” [We sense Boswell is showing off, like the gent at the party who wishes to impress (especially the ladies) with his wit.]

 

Johnson: “No, Sir; admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgement and friendship like being enlivened. [Edmund] Waller has hit upon the same thought with you: but I don’t believe you have borrowed from Waller. I wish you would enable yourself to borrow more.” [A subtle putdown by Johnson. Did Boswell get it?]

 

The conversation moves on to a weightier, more interesting subject: “He then took occasion to enlarge on the advantages of reading, and combated the idle superficial notion, that knowledge enough may be acquired in conversation. ‘The foundation (said he,) must be laid by reading. General principles must be had from books, which, however, must be brought to the test of real life..’”

 

This is shrewd and true to my experience. What I glean from good conversation is less hard knowledge than a testing of ideas. Anecdotes, jokes, quips, philosophizing, sermonizing, argument – each an opportunity to learn something by letting the words bounce off my thoughts, which have already been fortified by books. Think of it as intellectual catalysis – from the Greek for “loosening.”

 

Among the commenters on last Tuesday’s post was Mike Zim, longtime reader and fellow Ohioan. Mike writes: “Next to my reading chair, under a dictionary, lives A Johnson Sampler, 1963, Harvard University Press, edited by Henry Darcy Curwen. Consulted endlessly.” Same here. Curwen’s taste is excellent. He gets Johnson. He devotes an entire chapter to “On Reading and Writing,” including this from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785):

 

“It  is common for people to talk from books, to retail the sentiments of others and not their own; in short to converse without originality of thinking . . . I do not talk from books.”