The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life

by Henry Hitchings

  Rambler 68 captures the essence of this experience. But it does more than this – and takes a couple of unexpected turns. After referring to life being composed of small incidents and petty occurrences, Sam goes on to emphasize its essentially domestic character: ‘Very few are involved in great events, or have their thread of life entwisted with the chain of causes on which armies or nations are suspended.’ Home, he believes, is the heart of our lives, and ‘To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.’ This is one of those Johnsonian statements that I greet easily but then review with less equanimity. Is it true? And if it is true, am I going about my life the right way?

  The line ‘To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition’ seems to be at odds with what we know of Sam’s own domestic life, but the truth is that the difficulty he had in achieving domestic happiness made him more keenly aware of its rewards. Whenever he was hospitable to life’s unfortunates, he was trying to provide them with comfort and stability, and when he found these elsewhere, as at the Thrales’ pleasantly tranquil house in Streatham, it delighted him. Here was a promise of safety and seclusion. Consequently, anything that threatened the home was terrifying. ‘The passions rise higher at domestic than at imperial tragedies,’ he wrote in a letter to Hester Thrale, adding that ‘What is nearest us touches us most.’ He cherished the home’s connotations of permanence and refuge – the latter material, but also psychological, for domestic security could anchor one’s identity.

  In Rambler 68 he sustains the idea that our existence is shaped by small matters, and that ‘a few pains and a few pleasures are all the materials of human life’. But he turns aside to make the case that our home lives, not our public ones, should ideally form the basis of people’s estimate of our character: while there are lots of people whose existence is a ‘continual series of hypocrisy’, on their own turf they are true to themselves. For this reason, domestic servants are peculiarly useful witnesses; we betray our weaknesses to them, and we can do little to hide from them the reality of who we are. I can’t vouch for this, but it feels right, and in the space of a few paragraphs Sam has moved a long way. At the start of the essay he claims that ‘our pleasures are for the most part . . . secret’, and that it is normal for people to be ‘borne up by some private satisfaction, some internal consciousness, some latent hope, some peculiar prospect, which they never communicate, but reserve for solitary hours and clandestine meditation’. By the end, he is asserting that having servants is hazardous, because their knowledge of their masters’ frailties gives them power: the fallible masters must keep buying their silence, but will find that in the end the truth bursts forth, in a moment of rage or drunkenness.

  This kind of swerve is a feature of the Rambler. These essays don’t tend to leave the reader with comforting certainty; instead the experience of following their intricacies is like going for a workout. Sam’s arguments shift, ramify, and even appear to reverse themselves, not because he’s indecisive but because the truth is complex. ‘When we have heated our zeal in a cause,’ he writes in an earlier Rambler, number 66, ‘we are naturally inclined to pursue the same train of reasoning’ and ignore ‘some adjacent difficulty’. His own approach is to go against this natural inclination: if the argument of an essay meets adjacent difficulties, they become part of the essay, enlarging and enriching it. Sometimes the result is a trip to the mind gym, and sometimes it’s nutritious even if less obviously a tonic. Yet either way it’s a salutary alternative to the kind of essay that bulges with pride in its own unanswerable decisiveness – the kind that’s all codpiece and no cod.

  19

  A short musing, upon exemption from oblivion (or what is otherwise called Memory)

  One of Sam’s recurrent subjects in the Rambler is memory. His own was legendary, and there is a wealth of testimony to its calibre. Edmund Hector claimed that it was ‘so tenacious, that whatever he heard or read he never forgot’, and Boswell pronounced it ‘eminent to a degree almost incredible’. Another, lesser-known biographer, William Cooke, commented that Sam possessed an active rather than static memory; having in his youth absorbed a great fund of learning, he could at any time ‘draw bills upon this capital with the greatest security of being paid’. His friends commonly thought that his ability to retain and recall information underpinned his excellence in argument. In private he contemplated writing what he called a ‘history of memory’, which sounds more like a project for a modern literary theorist or the title of a band’s unlistenable concept album. Yet his contemporaries would doubtless have thought him perfectly qualified, in both range of knowledge and mnemonic power, to attempt such a work.

  In reviewing the plaudits above, we may well reflect that it’s easy to attribute great powers of memory to people who can no longer be tested, and that even the best memory is faulty and mutable. We may note, too, the tendency to think that other people’s memories are either very good (‘She never forgets anything’, ‘His powers of recall are practically photographic’) or very bad (‘His brain’s like a sieve’, ‘She can never remember my name’). I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone described as having an average memory, or heard people describe themselves in such terms, whereas the unexceptional nature of other faculties draws comment (‘I’ve got an okay singing voice’, ‘She’s not a bad listener’, ‘Their spatial awareness is so-so’). It’s also not unusual to think of superlative recall as a kind of trick: because there are little sleights we can perform to get facts lodged in our minds, a good memory must be a museum of such sleights.

  Sam doesn’t see memory this way. His fullest statement of its importance comes in Rambler 41 (in August 1750), where he characterizes it as ‘the purveyor of reason’. It is ‘the power which places those images before the mind upon which the judgment is to be exercised, and which treasures up the determinations that are once passed, as the rules of future action, or grounds of subsequent conclusions’. By making it possible for us to look beyond what’s right in front of our noses, memory enables us to perform comparative judgements, equipping us to evaluate, consolidate or change our behaviours and beliefs. It therefore ‘may be said to place us in the class of moral agents’.

  In 1759, he returned to the subject in an Idler essay, where he represented memory as ‘the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation’, and in another Idler paper that year he declared, ‘The true art of memory is the art of attention.’ He was thinking in particular about our ability to remember what we read. Rather alarmingly, he went on to say that we must bring to a book ‘an intellect defecated and pure’. It’s hard now to see the word defecated without thinking of shit, but Sam is using it to mean ‘cleared of dregs’, a sense common among seventeenth-century authors he admired. The mind is continually being invaded by dregs – stray images and fragments of ideas, noise and the brief caress of other sensations – and the success of memory rests on the ability to direct it away from them.

  But having a first-rate memory wasn’t wholly rewarding. Not for Sam what Alexander Pope had called the ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’, in which past traumas are forgotten and life is a state of blissful oblivion. Memory is dynamic, and its relationships with the imagination and self-esteem are complex and unsettling. Some of what we recall is inconvenient, and some of it disturbing. The ability to think of things in their absence is indispensable, but at times this faculty appears to dictate to us. Although the past has retired, it’s still shouting instructions and can seem restlessly determined to impinge on our decisions; even when it’s slumbering, some sensation in the present can jolt it awake.

  One of Sam’s best-known aphorisms, which occurs in the second instalment of the Rambler, is ‘Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed’. Though this is mostly treated as straightforward, a statement about the porous nature of memory, the meaning is ambiguous; it hinges on how we understand the verb require. Is
he saying that people ask to be reminded or need to be? On the one hand, he may be suggesting that the appetite for reminders is greater than that for fresh instruction: we desire something familiar more often than something new. On the other, he may be speculating that in many cases, when we seek the answer to a question, the information has already been vouchsafed us: when our memories are jogged we are reunited with facts of which we’d lost track.

  Both are worthwhile insights. The former is relevant to questions of artistic taste. The latter seems especially applicable to education: a key part of teaching is activating ideas that have become submerged. But if we go back to the Rambler essay to see what Sam posits, the double meaning recedes. He is thinking of a specific problem that faces writers: ‘What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered, that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.’ So, while readers are likely to shun the efforts of a writer who produces something truly original, they also tend to ignore or undervalue established work because they fail to appreciate the rewards of being reacquainted with books and ideas they have seen before. The line about readers more frequently requiring to be reminded than informed isn’t exactly thrown away, but Sam, rather than presenting it as a bright new perception, frames it as a familiar one that gets neglected – indeed, as something of which we need to be reminded, not informed.

  Implicit in this statement are three linked arguments about the relationship between memory and the appreciation of books (and of art in general). First, he believes that criticism and commentary routinely deny the true tenor of people’s tastes. Instead they are obsessed with originality. That this obsession existed, and continues to exist, is clear: a vast amount of energy is expended in claiming that ideas and products are revolutionary. It is not that he pooh-poohs originality, but he believes that the virtue of an original achievement lies in its usefulness rather than simply its distinctiveness. Something novel may be of huge value, yet isn’t automatically so. To be great, it must open a fresh vista of understanding. Neophiliacs fail to grasp this and think that originality alone is enough. Addicts of newfangledness are keen to be cultural gatekeepers (and vice versa). Their influence results not only in a preoccupation with being first, but also in a quibbling concern over the ownership of ideas and images. Sam recognizes how unhealthy this obsession is. It fires up hype, obliges artists to become hucksters, and leads to a work’s timeliness being regarded as more important than the intensity of its soul-effect.

  Secondly, he suspects that what passes for originality is frequently nothing of the sort. Only because we are ignorant or forgetful does it seem pristine. When he read Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition he was, by Boswell’s account, ‘surprised to find Young receive as novelties what he thought very common maxims’. But of course he wasn’t all that surprised. He thought that Young’s excitability in the presence of the less than extraordinary was a symptom of what he described in the Rambler as ‘the mental disease of the present generation’, to wit ‘impatience of study’. Such impatience had two aspects: it was a failure to stock the mind with information, and it was a failure to access whatever information the mind already held. It is normal to think of impatient people being easily bored, but here we encounter a different idea: the impatient are easily impressed. Impatience, poor memory and impressionability form an unholy alliance. We can perhaps make out its character by thinking of a rather mundane circumstance: when we are being reminded of something, we often believe that it’s new to us – and that the reminder is a mistake, even an insult. If in this situation I ask myself ‘Did I already know that?’, there is a tremor of embarrassed self-doubt and, briefly horrified by the notion that my memory isn’t airtight, I find it preferable to savour the newness of the not-actually-new.

  Finally, in grasping that true originality is ‘opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught’, Sam gets close to a troubling truth: while the not-new is continually being acclaimed as splendid novelty, the genuinely original is misprized. It’s identified as unpalatable, worthless or incomprehensible – and sometimes as not-new. Here the problem is not the failure of memory, but a failure of its prerequisite, attention, and of integrity and judgement. ‘The learned are afraid to declare their opinion early, lest they should put their reputation in hazard’, and ‘the ignorant always imagine themselves giving some proof of delicacy, when they refuse to be pleased’. Whoever seeks acclaim for a bold new piece of work ‘solicits the regard of a multitude fluctuating in pleasures’ and ‘appeals to judges prepossessed by passions, or corrupted by prejudices, which preclude their approbation of any new performance’.

  20

  Containing much to exercise the reader’s thoughts upon the questions of Fear and Sanity

  Because memory makes it possible for us to dwell on our past mistakes and traumas, consolidating our ideas about what might do us harm, it plays a role in conditioning our fears. This is its dark side, the counterpart of its being ‘the purveyor of reason’. Yet while such a sense of memory’s ambivalence is common, Sam also – and more unusually – finds grounds for thinking in much the same way about fear. There is more than a hint of this in his Dictionary entry for the word, where he quotes a sermon by John Rogers, a preacher popular in the 1720s: ‘Fear . . . is that passion of our nature whereby we are excited to provide for our security.’ It’s an unexpected choice of illustration, indicative of Sam’s belief that fear has its uses.

  Today, if we think about the utility of fear, we are likely to picture the kinds of people who profit from increasing society’s anxieties: religious leaders, psychiatrists and the suppliers of faintly palliative therapies, pharma companies selling sedative drugs, providers of security services and equipment, journalists who suppose that intensifying readers’ fretfulness is a means of making their reports and commentary seem vital. We know, too, that fear can be an effective political tool, an instrument of oppression and coercion, used by many leaders to manipulate their people, who live in terror of brutal physical and mental abuse, although now we are more likely to think of the fear-inducing tactics of terrorists, who exploit the media’s appetite for the sensational in order to gain maximum attention and heighten our sense of risk and vulnerability.

  Yet fear can also perform a very different function – as an instrument of self-control, keeping our coarser urges at bay and obliging us to think of the consequences of what we do. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud distinguishes between two different kinds of fear. One is ‘objective’, ‘a reaction to the perception of external danger’ that expresses our instinct for self-preservation. The other is what he calls ‘neurotic’ fear, ‘a general apprehensiveness . . . a “free-floating” anxiety . . . ready to attach itself to any thought which is at all appropriate, affecting judgements, inducing expectations, lying in wait for any opportunity to find a justification for itself’. Whereas neurotic fear is a handicap, objective fear is purposeful. It consists of alertness, a knowledge of danger’s sources and harbingers, an awareness of the limits of our power, and may be useful to explorers or, say, prison inmates. It proves powerful but not ungovernable, for ‘when dread is excessive it becomes in the highest degree inexpedient; it paralyses every action, even that of flight’.1

  In the Rambler, Sam observes that there is widespread contempt for fear – for fearfulness itself, and for those who suffer from it. Yet no one is immune from its clutch: ‘Fear is a passion which every man feels . . . frequently predominant in his own breast.’ At root, ‘Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil’, and its role ‘is not to overbear reason, but to assist it’. This chimes with the view of the historian Joanna Bourke, who in her book Fear: A Cultural History describes how it can ‘stimulate attention, sharpen judgement and energize combatants’. She cites advertising campaigns that play on our fear of death to discourage smoking and drink-driving, and argues that fear has played an import
ant part in civilizing us, causing us to be more reflective and stimulating creativity (because we dread loneliness or being struck down in our prime). Bourke’s conclusion that ‘A world without fear would be a dull world indeed’ differs from Sam’s, but both understand fear as a response to those features of the world that make it interesting.2

  Fear is not, of course, the same as worry, though it is common to narrow the gap between them. One is involuntary, the other a choice. Fear is electrifying, worry wearisome. Yet we tend to deny that our worries are manufactured. Many of us also treat worries as if they’re a form of protection: to worry about something is to prevent its happening. Sam defined the verb to worry as ‘To tear, or mangle, as a beast tears its prey’ and ‘To harass, or persecute brutally’. It is something done to others; he gives the examples of wolves worrying sheep and heathens using dogs to worry the Christians they wished to persecute. Only in the nineteenth century did worry start to be something self-inflicted, a state of anxious inner debate, a kind of literary criticism of the self in which the nuances of the ordinary are scrupulously parsed.

  We worry about things, not of or on them, though we can worry away at an issue. The gesture here is fidgety and oblique rather than direct: instead of stepping decisively into view, worry encroaches, making the feelings that preceded the worry shrivel up. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes that worries ‘can be punishments for wishes, or wishes cast in persecutory form’; when we worry, we regret desires and reject our dreams, and our sense of life’s potential narrows. ‘All of us may be surrealists in our dreams,’ notes Phillips, ‘but in our worries we are incorrigibly bourgeois.’3 We worry about not having enough money, our status at work, how attractive we are, whether there’ll be enough room in the suitcase for the vast number of things we need to take on a trip. All of which is prosaic. If I asked you to say what colour worries are, I’m guessing you’d say grey rather than purple. The grey army of worries, not so much soldier-like as bureaucratic, swarms around our plans and hopes and ideas, penning them in, causing them to starve.