'My Mind Was Not Free From Perturbation'

Dr. Johnson writes in his diary on January 1, 1774: “This year has past with so little improvement, that I doubt whether I have not [rather] impaired than encreased my Learning.” 

It’s customary, of course, to make resolutions this time of year -- to lose weight or stop drinking or swearing. Such resolutions assuage our guilt and postpone doing anything about it. It's yet another stratagem to deceive ourselves and feel good about it. Johnson offers a list of conventional resolutions – “to read the Gospels before Easter,” “to rise at eight,” “to be temperate in Food” – but there’s no mention of a resolution “encreas[ing] his Learning.”

  

At age sixty-four Johnson had already published his Dictionary, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler essays, Rasselas and A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. He was among the most learned men of his age, despite poverty, illness and the absence of a university degree. He even dabbled in chemistry. Johnson advised Susannah Thrale in a letter that because “all truth is valuable" she should take advantage of “all opportunities of knowledge that offer themselves,” including looking through a telescope and if visiting “a chymist’s laboratory; if you see a manufactorer at work, remark his operations.”

 

Johnson makes no grandiose resolutions. “To this omission some external causes have contributed,” he writes. “In the Winter I was distressed by a cough, in the Summer an Inflammation fell upon my useful eye from which it has not yet, I fear, recovered. In the Autumn I took a journey to the Hebrides, but my mind was not free from perturbation. Yet the chief cause of my deficiency has been a life immethodical, and unsettled, which breaks all purposes, confounds and suppresses memory, and perhaps leaves too much leisure to imagination.” Johnson’s familiar lament – overcoming a propensity for sloth and idleness, utterly at odds with his actual accomplishments.

 

Anthony Hecht associated Johnson with W.H. Auden.  In “Paralipomena to The Hidden Law” (Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry, 2003), he notes Auden’s “remarkable resemblance” to Johnson. Both writers had poor eyesight and held cleanliness in “utter disregard.” Both favored, in the words of Johnson biographer W. Jackson Bate, “the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.”

 

Quoting Bate again, Hecht says Auden and Johnson shared a “lifelong conviction – against which another part of him was forever afterwards to protest – that indolence is an open invitation to mental distress and even disintegration, and that to pull ourselves together, through the force of attention and the discipline of work, is within our power.” The poets shared a belief that “effort in daily habits – such as rising early – was necessary to ‘reclaim imagination’ and keep it on an even keel.” In the vernacular, both were workaholics, least unhappy when most engaged in work. We know from experience that concentrated work, mental or physical, is a tonic and relaxant, and idleness is corrosive of well-being.

 

Hecht notes that both Johnson and Auden were largely indifferent to their surroundings. “In addition, Bate wrote, Johnson ‘was able to distinguish between “loving” and “being loved” and to value the first without demanding equal payment through the latter,’ while Auden wrote, ‘If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me.’” Continuing with Bate’s observations, Hecht writes: “Both men were determined, if at all possible, ‘to be pleased’ with their circumstances and with their fellow human beings, as a reproval of their own ‘impatience and quickness to irritability or despair.’” Johnson and Auden maintained, in Bate’s words, that “the ‘main of life’ consists of `little things’; that happiness or misery is to be found in the accumulation of ‘petty’ and ‘domestic’ details, not in ‘large’ ambitions, which are inevitably self-defeating and turn to ashes in the mouth. ‘Sands make the mountain,’ [Johnson] would quote from Edward Young.”

 

Both were courteous and respectful of others – rare qualities among artists of all types. Again quoting Bate, Hecht writes: “Both firmly believed that fortitude ‘is not to be found primarily in meeting rare and great occasions. And this was true not only of fortitude but of all the other virtues, including “good nature.” The real test is what we do in our daily life, and happiness – such happiness as exists – lies primarily in what we can do with the daily texture of our lives.’” Both, in short, were thoroughgoing gentlemen of the middle class, religiously observant, and believed in regular habits even as they failed to live up to them. Near the conclusion of his “New Year Letter” (1940), Auden notes the folly of confusing good intentions with real change:

 

“But wishes are not horses, this

Annus is not mirabilis;

Day breaks upon the world we know

Of war and wastefulness and woe;

Ashamed civilians come to grief

In brotherhoods without belief,

Whose good intentions cannot cure

The actual evils they endure,

Nor smooth their practical career,

Nor bring the far horizon near.”