'By Studying Little Things'

“He advised me to keep a journal of my life, fair and undisguised.” 

So did my high-school English teacher two centuries later. Boswell took Dr. Johnson’s advice and later mined the resulting journal when assembling his Life of Johnson (1791). Much of Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763 (1950), one of thirteen eventual volumes, is self-exhortation, a wayward young man urging himself, usually unsuccessfully, to reform. In that July 16, 1763 passage (two months after first meeting Johnson), Boswell writes:

 

“I have considered that promiscuous concubinage is certainly wrong. It is contributing one’s share towards bringing confusion and misery into society; and it is a transgression of the laws of the Almighty Creator, who has ordained marriage for the mutual comfort of the sexes and the procreation and right educating of children.”

 

Boswell, like so many of us, was long on self-reproach and noble resolutions and short on genuine moral reformation. We know physicians treated him for venereal disease at least seventeen times (as documented in his journals). Remarkably, he lived to age fifty-five despite suffering malaria, chronic foot infections, gonorrhea (often contracted in the Blue Periwig, a brothel in The Strand, London), depression (possibly manic, known generically as "The Melancholia") and prolonged heavy drinking (whether or not he was clinically alcoholic, it couldn’t have helped the depression). He added another addiction, gambling, lost heavily and exacerbated his melancholia, all the while putting off literary work and mending his ways. That he completed his Life of Johnson and made it the greatest of all biographies is miraculous, a tribute to human tenacity. Boswell adds, regarding Johnson’s advice to keep a journal:

 

 “He said it would be a very good exercise, and would yield me infinite satisfaction when the ideas were faded from my remembrance. I told him that I had done so ever since I left Scotland. He said he was very happy that I pursued so good a plan. And now, O my journal! Art thou not highly dignified? Shalt thou not flourish tenfold? No former solicitations or censures could tempt me to lay thee aside; and now is there any argument which can outweight [sic] the sanction of Mr. Samuel Johnson?”

 

Early in 1968 my English teacher gave me advice that echoed Johnson’s to Boswell, but at age fifteen I was lazy and uninspired, and barely kept it going for several months. I remember writing about Walt Whitman, Eric Hoffer and Bernard Malamud.  Adolescents are supposed to be natural-born chroniclers of their own angst. I wasn’t though I dutifully wrote something every day. I remember a god-awful Whitman-esque poem I wrote after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4. Boswell continues:

 

“He said indeed that I should keep it private, and that I might surely have a friend who would burn it in case of my death. For my own part, I have at present such an affection for this my journal that it shocks me to think of burning it. . . . I told Mr. Johnson that I put down all sorts of little incidents in it. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’”