'We Find Other Things Which We Liked Better'

One night in the spring of 1766, Boswell and Goldsmith visited Dr. Johnson unannounced and asked if he wished to join them at the Mitre Tavern on Fleet Street in London. Johnson was “indisposed” and Goldsmith said, “[W]e will not go to the Mitre to-night, since we cannot have the big man with us.” Johnson calls for a bottle of port to serve his guests (he was now “a water-drinker”). Goldsmith observes that Johnson no longer goes to the theater and “the big man” replies: “Why, Sir, our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child's rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.” 

Goldsmith pushes the issue and Johnson adds, “But as we advance in the journey of life we drop some of the things which have pleased us: whether it be that we are fatigued and don’t choose to carry  many things any farther, or that we find other things which we liked better.” Naturally I thought of St. Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

 

We had guests for dinner on Friday. The woman is an old friend of my wife. Her partner has an administrative job in the English department of a college in Houston, and is a serious reader. We share an uncanny number of enthusiasms – Laurence Sterne, Philip Larkin, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Epstein, Evelyn Waugh, William Hazlitt, Guy Davenport, Charles Doughty, Desmond MacCarthy, High Kenner and so on, including Johnson. Without exception, we recognized each other’s allusions. This is an almost unprecedented event. We even share many bookish antipathies. We spoke of how our tastes in books have changed over the decades, and how some have remained the same.

 

Among his serious admirations are at least two that I have let grow cold. His talk rekindled my interest: Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay. I’ve always wanted to read the former’s The French Revolution: A History (1837), and never got around to it. I’ve read even less of Macaulay. Some writers, including some we formerly loved, we can no longer read. In my case, that would include, to cite names almost at random, William Faulkner and Hart Crane. Others have entered a torpid period, like hibernating bears, waiting for spring. I have read Macaulay’s “Life of Samuel Johnson.”