'But Johnson Fought Back'

Epigraphs to books are often superfluous. They can come off as cute or pretentious. They add little or nothing to the manner in which we read the book and often amount to our author showing off, touting his own vast reading or giving himself an unearned endorsement. The most appropriate and helpful epigraph in my experience is the one Nabokov appends to Pale Fire. 

Another wise choice of epigraphs are those used by John Wain in his Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1974). The first is from Johnson’s own History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759): “Few can attain this man’s knowledge, and few practice his virtues; but all may suffer his calamity.”

 

The speaker is Prince Imlac, who has listened to the Astronomer describe his ability to control the movements of the sun and regulate the light and heat reaching the Earth. Imlac realizes the Astronomer, who wishes to pass on his powers to the prince before he dies, is brilliant but quite mad. Imlac’s female companions laugh at the Astronomer’s delusions and the prince rebukes them:

 

“‘Ladies,’ said Imlac, ‘to mock the heaviest of human afflictions is neither charitable nor wise. Few can attain this man’s knowledge and few practise his virtues, but all may suffer his calamity. Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.’”

 

Wain’s second epigraph is from a very un-Johnsonian book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

 

“He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say,” [said the Mock Turtle].

 

“So he did, so he did,” [said the Gryphon].

 

Personally, I observe a long-standing prohibition against quoting Lewis Carroll, except in the context of logic or matrix algebra, but Wain’s point is a good one. Johnson was indeed one of those rare human beings who not only taught “Laughing and Grief” (a punning take on Latin and Greek), but in whom they coexisted and drove his thinking and emotions. In Johnson, the demarcation between thought and feeling is nearly nonexistent. In this, he is a representative member of the species Homo sapiens. Johnson is just like us, only more so.

 

Psychologists have diagnosed Johnson as being afflicted with an amusingly named disorder, dementophobia – fear of madness. That's his "calamity." Wain in his biography comments on Johnson’s “mental and emotional troubles, and the steps he took to fight against them”:

 

“[H]e never imagined that we were to be reasoned out of subjective states of mind. When melancholy lays siege, repel it with the methods that work best, not with those that sound most impressive. Where you cannot win, it is no disgrace to run away – such was his constant advice, to himself and others . . .”

 

One of Johnson’s favorite prescriptions for melancholy was also favored by Robert Burton: get and keep busy. Serious work has a way of inducing self-forgetfulness. One needs to remain vigilant against idleness, forever a temptation and a sort of gateway drug to insanity. Wain writes:

 

“But Johnson fought back. His periods of gloom and exhaustion, his terrifying anxieties, rose now and then to a point of crisis at which he was unfit for work or for company, useless to himself and others. Whenever they were at a lower intensity he fought them off, and with a variety of weapons. He prayed; he wrestled with doubt; he studied; he shifted huge loads of  work. And, whenever he got the chance, he talked.”

 

Johnson was born on September 18, 1709 and died in 1784 at age seventy-five.