Dr. Johnson on an Author's Alleged Hypocrisy

A little thought makes this apply to most charges of hypocrisy:

[Hypocrisy] does not make his book the worse. People are influenced more by what a man says, if his practice is suitable to it, because they are blockheads. The more intellectual people are, the readier will they attend to what a man tells them. If it is just, they will follow it, be his practice what it will. No man practises so well as he writes. I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good. Only consider! You read a book; you are convinced by it; you do not know the author. Suppose you afterwards know him, and find that he does not practice what he teaches; are you to give up your former conviction? At this rate you would be kept in a state of equilibrium, when reading every book, till you know how the authour practised.

--page 283

Boswell On Hazy Memories

I have often experienced, that scenes through which a man has passed, improve by lying in the memory; they grow mellow. Acte labores sunt jucundi. This may be owing to comparing them with present listless ease. Even harsh scenes acquire a softness by length of time: and some are like very loud sounds, which do not please, or at least do not please so much, till you are removed to a certain distance. They may be compared to strong coarse pictures, which will not bear to be viewed near. Even pleasing scenes improve by time, and seem more exquisite in recollection, than when they were present; if they have not faded to dimness in the memory. Perhaps, there is so much evil in every human enjoyment, when present -- so much dross mixed with it -- that it requires to be refined by time; and yet I do not see why time should not melt away the good and the evil in equal proportions; why the shade should decay, and the light remain in preservation.

--page 365

On Place and Neighborhood

I suppose it's the mark of the provincial man, but in any case I find that I have a special and lasting love for this place, which is so obviously just a place, which has no particular beauty or grace or grandeur of scene, but which is, quite simply, a neighborhood, my neighborhood, a compound of sights and smells and sounds that have furnished all my years.

--Father Hugh Kennedy in Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness (1961)

Johnson Miscellania From Page 234

On usefulness and rarity: "You must consider, that a thing is valued according to its rarity. A pebble that paves the street is in itself more useful than the diamond upon a lady's finger."

On the unpleasantness of sea travel: "Why, sir, no man will be a sailor, who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for, being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned."

On what books to take on a long journey: "Why, sir, if you are to have but one book with you upon a journey, let is be a book of science. When you have read through a book of entertainment, you know it, and it can do no more for you; but a book of science is inexhaustible."

Observations on Emigration

In a time and place where the the demands and challenges on immigration receive so much attention, it's interesting to consider the subject from the opposite perspective of emigration - the land giving up its people, as happened to the Highlands of Scotland throughout the 18th century. Dr. Johnson offered this insight:

Emigration was at this time a common topick of discourse. Dr. Johnson regretted it as hurtful to human happiness: "For," said he, "it spreads mankind which weakens the defence of a nation, and lessens the comfort of living. Men, thinly scattered, make a shift, but a bad shift, without many things. A smith is ten miles off: they'll do without a nail or a staple. A taylor is far from them: they'll botch their own clothes. It is being concentrated which produces high convenience."

--page 169.

How Lawyers Defend the Guilty

We talked of the practice of law. William Forbes said, he thought an honest lawyer should never undertake a cause which he was satisfied was not a just one. "Sir," said Mr. Johnson, "a lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge. Consider, sir, what is the purpose of courts of justice? It is, that every man may have his cause fairly tried, by men appointed to try causes. A lawyer is not to tell what he knows to be a lie: he is not to produce what he knows to be a false deed; but he is not to usurp the province of the jury and of the judge, and determine what shall be the effect of the evidence -- what shall be the result of legal argument. As rarely happens that a man is fit to plead his own cause, lawyers are a class of the community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of applying to the points of issues what the law has settled. A lawyer is to do for his client all that his client might fairly do for himself, if he could. If, by a superiority of attention, of knowledge, of skill, and of a better method of communication, he has the advantage of his adversary, it is an advantage to which he is entitled. There must always be some advantage, on one side or other; and it is better that advantage should be had by talents, than by chance. If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim." This was sound practical doctrine, and rationally repressed a too refined scrupulosity of conscience.

--page 168-69

A Sweet Gesture

We sat till near two in the morning, having chatted a good while after my wife left us. She had insisted, that to shew all respect to the Sage [Dr. Johnson, of course], she would give up her own bed-chamber to him, and take a worse. This I cannot but gratefully mention, as one of a thousand obligations which I owe her, since the great obligation of her being pleased to accept of me as her husband.

--pages 167-68

A Lesson in Economics

I have found in the higher parts of Scotland, men not defective in judgment or general experience, who consider the tacksman [middleman between the lord and the tenant farmer] as a useless burden of the ground, as a drone who lives upon the product of an estate, without the right of property, or the merit of labor, who impoverishes at once the landlord and the tenant. The land, say they, is let to the tacksman at six pence an acre, and by him to the tenant at ten pence. Let the owner be the immediate landlord to all the tenants; if he sets the ground at eight pence, he will increase his revenue by a fourth part, and the tenants' burthen will be diminished by a fifth.

Those who pursue this train of reasoning, seem not sufficiently to inquire whither it will lead them, nor to know that it will equally shew the property of suppressing all wholesale trade, of shutting up the shops of every man who sells what he does not make, and of extruding all whose agency and profit intervene between the manufacturer and the consumer. They may, by stretching their understandings a little wider, comprehend, that all those who by undertaking large quantities of manufacture, and by affording employment to many laborers, make themselves considered as benefactors to the public, have only been robbing their workmen with one hand and their customers with the other. If Crowley had sold only what he could make, and all his smiths had wrought their own iron with their own hammers, he would have lived on less, and they would have sold their work for more. The salaries of superintendents and clerks would have been partly saved, and partly shared, and nails been sometimes cheaper by a farthing in a hundred. But if the smith could not have found an immediate purchaser, he must have deserted his anvil; if there had by accident at any time been more sellers than buyers, the workmen must have reduced their profit to nothing by underselling one another; and as no great stock could have been in any hand, no sudden demand of large quantities could have been answered, and the builder must have stood still til the nailer could supply him.

According to these schemes, universal plenty is to begin and end in universal misery. Hope and emulation will be utterly extinguished; and as all must obey the call of immediate necessity, nothing that requires extensive views, or provides for distant consequences, will ever be performed.

--pages 95-96

A Warmup for Boswell, and for Me

The cover and title of this book drew me in long ago when I picked it up for $3.95 in a used book store. After a sufficient aging period on the shelf, I finally pulled it out and dug in. (I had recently purchased a nice leatherbound edition of Boswell's titanic Life of Johnson, which led me to seek out a decent reading copy of it so I could learn firsthand why it's so well regarded, which led me to pick up this volume to satisfy my compulsive need to read things in order -- Boswell wrote his half of this book, you see, as a kind of prepatory exercise for his much more ambitious Life.)

I'm happy to report I was not disappointed. This was a great firsthand introduction to both Boswell and Johnson, both of whom were extraordinarily interesting men. Johnson for his uniqueness and wit, Boswell for his representation of the 18th century British gentleman. The book is really two journals (Johnson's first, and then Boswell's) of the pair's months-long journey together to the outer isles of the Highlands area of Scotland in 1773, just 28 years after the 1745 rising against the king. Boswell was 32 and Johnson was 63 and a legend of English journalism and criticism at the time. Boswell had wanted to get Johnson out of London and into the countryside of Boswell's native Scotland, in particular to see the rustic ways of the Highlands before they disappeared, which they nearly had already.

This book, like most travel journals or diaries, is best taken a few days' entries at a time, or even one entry at a time. I recommend keeping it by the bedside, to turn to at the end of the night just before going to sleep. Not because it's boring; it isn't. But it's broken up in such a way to make it practical to be read in that fashion, and it usually focuses on good conversation the pair had with someone over dinner. So even if you didn't have a relaxing evening with friends, food, wine and pleasant conversation, you can sit with Boswell, Johnson and their friends for just a few minutes and escape from your own 21st century life's demands.

I'll give a few excerpts over the coming days, but will open from this one that made the back cover (and my wife's list of facebook quotes!):

When I was at Ferney, in 1764, I mentioned our design to Voltaire. He looked at me as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said "You do not insist on my accompanying you?" "No sir." "Then I am very willing you should go."

--page 161 (Boswell).

Well, They Didn't Have Television!

[T]he Scottish publisher William Chambers wrote the biography of his brother Robert, with whom he had founded in 1832 the famous Edinburgh company that bears their name, and recollected certain such readings in their boyhood town of Peebles. "My brother and I," he wrote, "derived much enjoyment, not to say instruction, from the singing of old ballads, and the telling of legendary stories, by a kind old female relative, the wife of a decayed tradesman, who dwelt in one of the ancient closes. At her humble fireside, under the canopy of a huge chimney, where her half-blind and superannuated husband sat dozing in a chair, the battle of Corunna and other prevailing news was strangely mingled with disquisitions on the Jewish wars. The source of this interesting conversation was a well-worn copy of L'Estrange's translation of Josephus, a small folio of date 1720. The envied possessor of the work was Tam Fleck, "a flichty chield", as he was considered, who, not particularly steady at his legitimate employment, stuck out a sort of profession by going about in the evening with his Josephus, which he read as the current news; the only light he had for doing so being usually that imparted by the flickering blaze of a piece of parrot coal. It was his practice not to read more than from two or three pages at a time, interlarded with sagacious remarks of his own by way of foot-notes, and in this way he sustained an extraordinary interest in the narrative. Retailing the matter with great equability in different households, Tam kept all at the same point of information, and would them up with a corresponding anxiety as to the issue of some moving event in Hebrew annals. Although in this way he went through a course of Josephus yearly, the novelty somehow never seemed to wear off.

"Weel, Tam, what's the news the nicht?" would old Geordie Murray say, as Tam entered with his Josephus under this arm, and seated himself at the family fireside.

"Bad news, bad news," replied Tam. "Titus has begun to beseige Jerusalem, -- it's gaun to be a terrible business."

--page 119-20.

Thou Shalt Not Steal

Inscribed in a valuable Renaissance book:

My Master's name above you see,
Take heede therefore you steale not mee;
For if you doe, without delay
Your necke . . . for me shall pay.
Looke doune below and you shall see
The picture of the gallowstree;
Take heeds therefore of thys in time,
Lest on this tree you highly clime!

Posted in the library of the monastery of San Pedro, in Barcelona:

For him that steals, or borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.

--page 244.

Card Catalogs, Dewey Decimal and Arranging Your Bookshelves

The alphabet sometimes served as a key for retrieving volumes. In the tenth century, for instance, the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when travelling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.

--page 193.

Epitaph of Benjamin Franklin (Unused)

The Body of

B. Franklin, Printer,
Like the cover of an old Book,
Its Contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering & Gilding
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be lost;
For it will, as he believ'd,
Appear once more
In a new and more elegant Edition
Corrected and improved
By the Author.

--page 170.

Books That Bite and Sting

"Altogether," Kafka wrote in 1904 to his friend Oskar Pollack, "I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."

--page 93.

Eat This Book

Manguel is fascinated by the metaphor, and on occasion the practice, of the ingestion of the word by the reader. Thus, in his chapter on "Learning to Read":

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication. The child learning to read is admitted into the communal memory by way of books, and thereby becomes acquainted with a common past which he or she renews, to a greater or lesser degree, in every reading. In medieval Jewish society, for instance, the ritual of learning to read was explicitly celebrated. On the Feast of Shavuot, when Moses received the Torah from the hands of God, the boy about to be initiated was wrapped in a prayer shawl and taken by his father to the teacher. The teacher sat the boy on his lap and showed him a slate on which were written the Hebrew alphabet, a passage from the Scriptures and the words "May the Torah be your occupation." The teacher read out every word and the child repeated it. Then the slate was covered with honey and the child licked it, thereby bodily assimilating the holy words. Also, biblical verses were written on peeled hard-boiled eggs and on honey cakes, which the child would eat after reading the verses out loud to the teacher.

--page 71.

And in his chapter on "Metaphors of Reading", he picks up the idea again in a more extended passage:

Just as writers speak of cooking up a story, rehashing a text, having half-baked ideas for a plot, spicing up a scene or garnishing the bare bones of an argument, turning the ingredients of a potboiler into soggy prose, a slice of life peppered with allusions into which readers can sink their teeth, we, the readers, speak of savouring a book, of finding nourishment in it, of devouring a book at one sitting, or regurgitating or spewing up a text, of ruminating on a passage, of rolling a poet's words on the tongue, of feasting on poetry, or living on a diet of detective stories. In an essay on the art of studying, the sixteenth-century English scholar Francis Bacon catalogued the process: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

By extraordinary chance we know on what date this curious metaphor was first recorded. On July 31, 593 B.C., by the river Chebar in the land of the Chaldeans, Ezekiel the priest had a visiopn of fire in which he saw "the likeness of the glory of the Lord" ordering him to speak to the rebellious children of Israel. "Open thy mouth, and eat what I give you," the vision instructed him.

And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein;

And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.

Saint John, recording his apocalyptic vision on Patmos, received the same revelation as Ezekiel. As he watched in terror, an angel came down from heaven with an open book, and a thundering voice told him not to write what he had learned, but to take the book from the angel's hand.

And I went unto the angel, and said unto him. Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make they belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and as soon as I had eaten, it, my belly was bitter.

And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.

Eventually, as reading developed and expanded, the gastronomic metaphor because common rhetoric. In Shakespeare's time it was expected in literary parlance, and Queen Elizabeth I hersself used it to describe her devotional reading: "I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holye Scriptures, where I pluck up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences, eate them by reading, chewe them up musing, and laie them up at length on the seate of memorie . . . so I may the lesse perceive the bitterness of this miserable life." By 1695 the metaphor had become so ingrained in the language that William Congreve was able to parody it in the opening scene of Love for Love, having the pedantic Valentine say to his valet, "Read, read, sirrah! and refine your appetite; read, and take your nourishment in at your eyes; shut up your mouth, and chew the cud of understanding." "You'll grow devilish fat upon this paper diet," is the valet's comment.

--pages 170-72.

No Wonder I Sweat So Much

We makes notes in, or about, our books. We refer back to them when we need to. We copy passages and insert them into essays, speech texts, teleprompters and blogs. We rarely, if ever, rely on memory for a text because we might miss a word.

But it was not always so. In the thirteenth century, students poured over authoritative texts and committed whole passages to memory, making their minds living libraries they could consult at will in an age when books were rare and exceedingly expensive. So much effort went into this memorization that they convinced themselves of some curious beneficial side effects to memorization:

They even believed that memorizing a text was physically beneficial, and cited as an authority the second-century Roman doctor Antyllus, who had written that those who have never learned verses by heart and must instead resort to reading them in books sometimes have great pains in eliminating, through abundant perspiration, the noxious fluids that those with a keen memory of texts eliminate merely through breathing.

--pages 60-61.

In the following pages, Manguel quotes an imaginary dialogue created by Petrarch in the 14th century between himself and Augustine on this subject. After Petrarch complains that the good books he reads are helpful while he's reading them, but "as soon as the book leaves my hands, all my feeling for it vanishes," Augustine proposes a solution:

Augustine: This manner of reading is now quite common; there's such a mob of lettered men. . . . But if you'd jot down a few notes in their proper place, you'd easily be able to enjoy the fruit of your reading.

[Petrarch]: What kind of notes do you mean?

Augustine: Whenever you read a book and come across any wonderful phrases which you feel stir or delight your soul, don't merely trust the power of your own intelligence, but force yourself to learn them by heart and make them familiar by meditating on them, so that whenever an urgent case of affliction arises, you'll have the remedy ready as if it were written in your mind. When you come to any passagtes that seem to you useful, make a firm mark against them, which may serve as lime in your memory, less otherwise they might fly away.

--page 63.

Or you could just type them into your blog!