'To Have Part of His Life to Himself'

“I am not obliged to do any more.” 

Retirement is my choice. For most of my life I assumed I would drop dead at the keyboard in my office, mid-sentence, but next week I retire. I have always enjoyed work, the sense of contributing something to an enterprise, no matter how paltry, mustering words for some utilitarian purpose and getting paid for it. In my case that amounted to five newspapers (three of them now defunct) and two universities. I like routine gently interrupted by the unexpected, which describes the career I have improvised. Reporting was the graduate school I never otherwise had. I’ve been fairly lucky with bosses. Only two stand out as sociopaths and one of them is dead. No grudges. No regrets. 

 

As a kid I once asked my mother what job could I get so they would pay me for reading books. When she stopped laughing at me she told me to grow up. So, now in retirement I’m reviewing books and sometimes even getting paid for it. Thanks to my wife we are financially secure.

 

The sentence at the top is Dr. Johnson speaking in the spring of 1766, age fifty-five, to Boswell and Goldsmith. As recounted by the former, he continues:

 

“No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A man is to have part of his life to himself. If a soldier has fought a good many campaigns, he is not to be blamed, if he retires to ease and tranquility. A physician, who has practiced long in a great city, may be excused, if he retires to a small town, and takes less practice. Now, Sir, the good I can do by my conversation bears the same proportion to the good I can do by my writings, that the practice of a physician, retired to a small town, does to his practice in a great city.”