Amid all the cries of “Socialism!” as the Congress has grappled with the problems of reshaping the nation’s health care system, I thought that it would be helpful to get a clearer idea of what the nation is up against. This would be particularly useful in identifying what used to be called “creeping socialism,” the insidious practices catching the citizenry unaware.
Accordingly, I took a look at the Socialist Party platform for 1912, the year Woodrow Wilson, nominated in sweaty Baltimore, defeated William Howard Taft. Amid a lot of boilerplate about workers and collective ownership, there were these platform planks:
[S]ecuring for every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.
[F]orbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age.
[A]bolishing official charity and substituting a non-contributary system of old age pensions, a general system of insurance by the State of all its members against unemployment and invalidism and a system of compulsory insurance by employers of their workers, without cost to the latter, against industrial diseases, accidents and death.
The adoption of a graduated income tax and the extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the value of the estate and to nearness of kin-the proceeds of these taxes to be employed in the socialization of industry.
Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.
The adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall and of proportional representation, nationally as well as locally.
The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for purely local affairs.
The enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits. The Bureau of Education to be made a department.
Citizens, be alert!
Friday, September 25, 2009
Today's word: egregious
Egregious (adj.) From the Latin egregius (surpassing, illustrious). Formerly excellent, outstanding, or distinguished. Now used almost exclusively to mean excessive, flagrant, or repellent.
It is always helpful to illustrate the use of a word. Yesterday, several sources (my spies are everywhere) brought to my attention the most egregious allusion to the September 11 attacks that I have ever seen in print.
An article by Karl Raymond, the sports editor of the Sun Prairie Star of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, was published with these opening paragraphs:
The nightmare of 9/11 will live forever in our minds and memories.
Fast forward eight years later and last Friday, Sept. 11 is a night the Sun Prairie High School football team, coaching staff and Cardinal fans hope can soon be forgotten. Dealt a 22-0 halftime deficit by Madison Memorial in a Big Eight Conference football game at Ashley Field, the Cardinals made an inspiring comeback in the second half but never fully recovered, falling to the Spartans, 22-14.
Please note the elements: the platitudinous opening sentence, the fast forward to cliche, the two clotted sentences that delay to the very end the magnitude (22-14) of this colossal defeat, and the utter, grotesque disproportion of the two events.
Bonus word of the day:
Execrable (adj.) From the French exécrable, ultimately from the Latin verb execrari (to curse). Of wretched quality, bad beyond description,
That someone would attempt such a comparison is monstrous enough, but presumably someone else displayed the execrable judgment to allow it to be published.
It is always helpful to illustrate the use of a word. Yesterday, several sources (my spies are everywhere) brought to my attention the most egregious allusion to the September 11 attacks that I have ever seen in print.
An article by Karl Raymond, the sports editor of the Sun Prairie Star of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, was published with these opening paragraphs:
The nightmare of 9/11 will live forever in our minds and memories.
Fast forward eight years later and last Friday, Sept. 11 is a night the Sun Prairie High School football team, coaching staff and Cardinal fans hope can soon be forgotten. Dealt a 22-0 halftime deficit by Madison Memorial in a Big Eight Conference football game at Ashley Field, the Cardinals made an inspiring comeback in the second half but never fully recovered, falling to the Spartans, 22-14.
Please note the elements: the platitudinous opening sentence, the fast forward to cliche, the two clotted sentences that delay to the very end the magnitude (22-14) of this colossal defeat, and the utter, grotesque disproportion of the two events.
Bonus word of the day:
Execrable (adj.) From the French exécrable, ultimately from the Latin verb execrari (to curse). Of wretched quality, bad beyond description,
That someone would attempt such a comparison is monstrous enough, but presumably someone else displayed the execrable judgment to allow it to be published.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The downward spiral
Yesterday the Lexington Herald-Leader laid off Brian Throckmorton, who oversaw the copy desk. Mr. Throckmorton, an amiable colleague, is an energetic editor with good ideas and high standards. I have watched him conduct workshops on editing in mute admiration.
His departure is one more depressing instance of the purge of talent and ability taking place at the nation’s newspapers, and the consequences for those papers will not be good.
For an example of those consequences: The City/Region section of today’s Herald-Leader proclaims that it is published on Thurday, Septmeber 24.
No doubt many other marks of excellence can be discovered therein.
His departure is one more depressing instance of the purge of talent and ability taking place at the nation’s newspapers, and the consequences for those papers will not be good.
For an example of those consequences: The City/Region section of today’s Herald-Leader proclaims that it is published on Thurday, Septmeber 24.
No doubt many other marks of excellence can be discovered therein.
Punctuation without fear
Today is National Punctuation Day, one of those gimmicky holidays on which one can be jocular or sober or both. Last year I posted a sentence that incorporated the standard punctuation marks. This year, some practical advice.
The comma
By now you should have figured out where the comma is required, such as setting off appositives and nonrestrictive clauses, and where it is discretionary to mimic the rhythms of speech.
What some of you have not grasped, and I’m talking to you journalists in the back of the room now, is the difference between a compound sentence and a compound predicate, because a lot of you habitually omit the comma in the former and wantonly insert it in the latter.
Attend, please:
When two independent clauses are joined by and, but, or or, separate them with a comma. The trumpet sounded, and the marchers set forth.
When a subject has two verbs, it is not necessary to separate the verbs with a comma. The trumpet sounded and propelled the marchers forward.
The semicolon
No one has written more vividly about punctuation than Nicholson Baker, whose 1993 essay, “The History of Punctuation,”* is reprinted in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber.
The semicolon, he writes, the latest-arriving of the standard punctuation marks, is “even now subject to episodes of neglect and derision. Joyce preferred the more Attic colon, at least in Ulysses, and Beckett, as well, gradually rid his prose of what must have seemed to him an emblem of vulgar, high-Victorian applied ornament, a cast-iron flower of mass-produced Ciceronianism; instead of semi-colons, he spliced the phrases of Malone Dies and Molloy together with one-size-fits-all commas, as commonplace as stones on a beach, to achieve that dejected sort of murmured ecphonesis so characteristic of his narrative voice—all part of the general urge, perhaps, that led him to ditch English in favor of French, ‘pour m’appauvrir’: to impoverish himself.
“Donald Barthelme, too, who said that the example of Beckett was what first ‘allowed [him] to write,’ thought that the semi-colon was ‘ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly’—but he allowed that others might feel differently. And still the semi-colon survives, far too subtle and useful, it turns out, to be a casualty of modernism. It even participates in those newer forms of emotional punctuation called ‘smileys’ or ‘emoticons’—vaguely irritating attempts to supply a sideways facial expression at the close of an E-mail paragraph—e.g., :-) and >%-(. The semi-colon collaborates in the ‘wink’ or ‘smirk,’ thus—;-).”
The dash* and the hyphen
Hyphens join; dashes separate.
When you make use of compound modifiers, as in Mr. Baker’s “one-size-fits-all commas,” make sure that each part of the compound is linked with a hyphen.
When you make use of a dash to indicate some discontinuity, some branching off from the main line of the sentence, make sure that you have a dash, not a hyphen. Take the trouble to learn how to make a dash in your word-processing software. (Those of you bold enough to embark on the subtleties differentiating the use of the en-dash and em-dash can resort to the Chicago Manual of Style. Should you not return by sundown, we’ll send out a search-and-rescue party.)
And, I’m talking to you journalists in the back of the room again — sit up and pay attention — stop using all those dashes for mere parenthetical elements that could just as well be set off with commas.
The period
When you have said all you have to say, come to a stop.
*The essay is a review of Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West by M.B. Parkes.
**Mr. Baker devotes considerable space in his essay to his admiration of the nineteenth-century fondness for the dash combined with the comma, semicolon, or colon in the works of Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Newman, though, regrettably, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, “dash-hybrids are currently illegal in the U.S.”
The comma
By now you should have figured out where the comma is required, such as setting off appositives and nonrestrictive clauses, and where it is discretionary to mimic the rhythms of speech.
What some of you have not grasped, and I’m talking to you journalists in the back of the room now, is the difference between a compound sentence and a compound predicate, because a lot of you habitually omit the comma in the former and wantonly insert it in the latter.
Attend, please:
When two independent clauses are joined by and, but, or or, separate them with a comma. The trumpet sounded, and the marchers set forth.
When a subject has two verbs, it is not necessary to separate the verbs with a comma. The trumpet sounded and propelled the marchers forward.
The semicolon
No one has written more vividly about punctuation than Nicholson Baker, whose 1993 essay, “The History of Punctuation,”* is reprinted in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber.
The semicolon, he writes, the latest-arriving of the standard punctuation marks, is “even now subject to episodes of neglect and derision. Joyce preferred the more Attic colon, at least in Ulysses, and Beckett, as well, gradually rid his prose of what must have seemed to him an emblem of vulgar, high-Victorian applied ornament, a cast-iron flower of mass-produced Ciceronianism; instead of semi-colons, he spliced the phrases of Malone Dies and Molloy together with one-size-fits-all commas, as commonplace as stones on a beach, to achieve that dejected sort of murmured ecphonesis so characteristic of his narrative voice—all part of the general urge, perhaps, that led him to ditch English in favor of French, ‘pour m’appauvrir’: to impoverish himself.
“Donald Barthelme, too, who said that the example of Beckett was what first ‘allowed [him] to write,’ thought that the semi-colon was ‘ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly’—but he allowed that others might feel differently. And still the semi-colon survives, far too subtle and useful, it turns out, to be a casualty of modernism. It even participates in those newer forms of emotional punctuation called ‘smileys’ or ‘emoticons’—vaguely irritating attempts to supply a sideways facial expression at the close of an E-mail paragraph—e.g., :-) and >%-(. The semi-colon collaborates in the ‘wink’ or ‘smirk,’ thus—;-).”
The dash* and the hyphen
Hyphens join; dashes separate.
When you make use of compound modifiers, as in Mr. Baker’s “one-size-fits-all commas,” make sure that each part of the compound is linked with a hyphen.
When you make use of a dash to indicate some discontinuity, some branching off from the main line of the sentence, make sure that you have a dash, not a hyphen. Take the trouble to learn how to make a dash in your word-processing software. (Those of you bold enough to embark on the subtleties differentiating the use of the en-dash and em-dash can resort to the Chicago Manual of Style. Should you not return by sundown, we’ll send out a search-and-rescue party.)
And, I’m talking to you journalists in the back of the room again — sit up and pay attention — stop using all those dashes for mere parenthetical elements that could just as well be set off with commas.
The period
When you have said all you have to say, come to a stop.
*The essay is a review of Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West by M.B. Parkes.
**Mr. Baker devotes considerable space in his essay to his admiration of the nineteenth-century fondness for the dash combined with the comma, semicolon, or colon in the works of Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Newman, though, regrettably, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, “dash-hybrids are currently illegal in the U.S.”
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Take off your hat, sir
I was on the stand, testifying* in Baltimore County Circuit Court, when a man in a dark suit and a hat came into the courtroom and sat down. The judge stopped me and addressed the newcomer: “This is a courtroom. Take off your hat.” The man said, “Your Honor, may I approach?”
It turned out that the man in the hat was a lawyer scheduled to appear in a pending case. He explained that he had just completed a course of chemotherapy. “That’s all right,” the judge said; we don’t care how you look.”
“It’s not pretty, Your Honor,” the lawyer said.
“I’d prefer for you to take it off.”
”Are you threatening me with contempt?” the lawyer asked.
The judge backed off. If the lawyer had been Jewish and Orthodox, a head covering would not have been objectionable. And I assume that the judge preferred not to appear to bully a cancer survivor. The hat stayed on.
It was, however, a white hat worn after Labor Day, and a contempt citation on that ground alone could have been justified.
Gentlemen: I wear a hat, usually a fedora from September to May, a Panama from Memorial Day to Labor Day. You, too, may wear headgear, perhaps, despite your having attained adult years, a baseball cap. Let me give you some advice.
You may recall the song from Hello, Dolly: “I stand for motherhood, America and a hot lunch for orphans, / Take off your hat, sir, Betsy Ross’s flag is passing. ...” Uncover your head in church, at the library, at the opera, at table,** or at any other sacred place, unless you are Jewish and Orthodox, or Quaker. Take your hat off at the singing of the national anthem, or when a lady enters an elevator. You were not brought up in a barn.
Flannery O’Connor, asked repeatedly why the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” wears a black hat, finally snapped, “To cover his head.” That, indeed, is the function of the hat, to cover the head against the heat of the sun in summer and the chill of winter (because so much heat is radiated from the head in cold). Taking the hat off is a mark of respect in those circumstances where respect is advisable.
*My daughter, Alice, had taken her former landlady to Small Claims Court in a dispute over refunding of the bulk of her security deposit. Alice prevailed in Small Claims Court, and again on the landlady’s appeal to Circuit Court, because her heart is pure and her cause was just.
**It should tell you something that James Thurber once described the members of the Ohio Legislature as “the sort of men who fanned their soup with their hats.”
It turned out that the man in the hat was a lawyer scheduled to appear in a pending case. He explained that he had just completed a course of chemotherapy. “That’s all right,” the judge said; we don’t care how you look.”
“It’s not pretty, Your Honor,” the lawyer said.
“I’d prefer for you to take it off.”
”Are you threatening me with contempt?” the lawyer asked.
The judge backed off. If the lawyer had been Jewish and Orthodox, a head covering would not have been objectionable. And I assume that the judge preferred not to appear to bully a cancer survivor. The hat stayed on.
It was, however, a white hat worn after Labor Day, and a contempt citation on that ground alone could have been justified.
Gentlemen: I wear a hat, usually a fedora from September to May, a Panama from Memorial Day to Labor Day. You, too, may wear headgear, perhaps, despite your having attained adult years, a baseball cap. Let me give you some advice.
You may recall the song from Hello, Dolly: “I stand for motherhood, America and a hot lunch for orphans, / Take off your hat, sir, Betsy Ross’s flag is passing. ...” Uncover your head in church, at the library, at the opera, at table,** or at any other sacred place, unless you are Jewish and Orthodox, or Quaker. Take your hat off at the singing of the national anthem, or when a lady enters an elevator. You were not brought up in a barn.
Flannery O’Connor, asked repeatedly why the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” wears a black hat, finally snapped, “To cover his head.” That, indeed, is the function of the hat, to cover the head against the heat of the sun in summer and the chill of winter (because so much heat is radiated from the head in cold). Taking the hat off is a mark of respect in those circumstances where respect is advisable.
*My daughter, Alice, had taken her former landlady to Small Claims Court in a dispute over refunding of the bulk of her security deposit. Alice prevailed in Small Claims Court, and again on the landlady’s appeal to Circuit Court, because her heart is pure and her cause was just.
**It should tell you something that James Thurber once described the members of the Ohio Legislature as “the sort of men who fanned their soup with their hats.”
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Papers, please
In a jocular post the other day, I connected — and one reader cried “non sequitur”— high school students’ ignorance of basic information about U.S. civics and the uproar over illegal immigration. One reader commented:
"Illegal" should mean you don't qualify for anything to which legal American citizens are entitled. Why is this so difficult to absorb? The idea of anyone just showing up in another country and demanding what those citizens have is, to me, anathema.
The principle is simple and clear. It’s the reality that is not.
For one thing, many illegal immigrants are doing work that Americans prefer not to do, and doing it cheaply. I don’t hear anyone saying that illegal immigration is a good thing, but rather that it has become deeply intertwined with our economy. (Like the underground economy in which people, including citizens, get money on which they don’t pay taxes. You wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would you?) Disentangling it poses complications.
Assume that illegal immigrants could be expelled and further illegal immigration could be blocked. How much extra, then, are you willing to pay for produce at the grocery? For clean dishes in a restaurant? For clean sheets in a hotel?
That assumption in the previous paragraph that illegal immigration can be reversed and curbed, how far are you willing to go to accomplish that? We have already been paying a fantastic sum to build a wall across our southern border. But that is plainly not enough. How far are you willing to go in enforcement? How many businesses are you willing to shut down and employers to lock up over employment of illegal immigrants? How many additional federal immigration enforcement officers are you willing to pay for?
Or this: Are you willing to require every American citizen to carry an ID card containing a memory chip with personal data? That would make it simple to identify the undocumented. But with people screaming in the streets that the country will go Stalinist if everybody has medical insurance, I doubt that there would be much enthusiasm about being stopped regularly by police officers asking, “May I see your papers, please?”
What journalism — honest-to-God journalism, not the back-and-forth shouting on radio and cable television that passes for it — is supposed to do is to reveal and explain the complexity of the world, so that we can understand it and make intelligent and informed decisions.
That, incidentally, is also why it would be a good thing for high school students to learn how the country operates, so that they can recognize and understand actual journalism when they stumble across it, and perhaps even be a little less vulnerable to demagogy of all flavors.
"Illegal" should mean you don't qualify for anything to which legal American citizens are entitled. Why is this so difficult to absorb? The idea of anyone just showing up in another country and demanding what those citizens have is, to me, anathema.
The principle is simple and clear. It’s the reality that is not.
For one thing, many illegal immigrants are doing work that Americans prefer not to do, and doing it cheaply. I don’t hear anyone saying that illegal immigration is a good thing, but rather that it has become deeply intertwined with our economy. (Like the underground economy in which people, including citizens, get money on which they don’t pay taxes. You wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would you?) Disentangling it poses complications.
Assume that illegal immigrants could be expelled and further illegal immigration could be blocked. How much extra, then, are you willing to pay for produce at the grocery? For clean dishes in a restaurant? For clean sheets in a hotel?
That assumption in the previous paragraph that illegal immigration can be reversed and curbed, how far are you willing to go to accomplish that? We have already been paying a fantastic sum to build a wall across our southern border. But that is plainly not enough. How far are you willing to go in enforcement? How many businesses are you willing to shut down and employers to lock up over employment of illegal immigrants? How many additional federal immigration enforcement officers are you willing to pay for?
Or this: Are you willing to require every American citizen to carry an ID card containing a memory chip with personal data? That would make it simple to identify the undocumented. But with people screaming in the streets that the country will go Stalinist if everybody has medical insurance, I doubt that there would be much enthusiasm about being stopped regularly by police officers asking, “May I see your papers, please?”
What journalism — honest-to-God journalism, not the back-and-forth shouting on radio and cable television that passes for it — is supposed to do is to reveal and explain the complexity of the world, so that we can understand it and make intelligent and informed decisions.
That, incidentally, is also why it would be a good thing for high school students to learn how the country operates, so that they can recognize and understand actual journalism when they stumble across it, and perhaps even be a little less vulnerable to demagogy of all flavors.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Saturday morning
Saturday turns out to be a day to catch up.
Item: James Wolcott makes a graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson on his Vanity Fair blog, bringing a blush to my pallid cheeks in the process.
Item: Language Log linked to a Daily Telegraph article that attempts to identify the twenty worst sentences in Dan Brown’s oeuvre. It couldn't have been an easy task.
Item: If you were wondering just how America’s newspapers came to the brink of destruction, and what they might yet do in an attempt to pull back from that brink, have a look at Part 1 and Part 2 of Bill Wyman’s analysis. It was published a month ago, and I have only just gotten to it. It all rings depressingly true.
Item: Time follows its cover story on Glenn Beck with an article, “The secrets inside your dog’s mind.”
Sorry. Too easy. Moving on.
Item: Elizabeth Large asks readers of Dining@Large what people 35 and older look for in a bar’s happy hour. “A clean glass for my Metamucil,” one reader suggested. Having gone with Kathleen to the Best of Baltimore reception* on Wednesday, for a few bursts of shouted conversation amid the ear-splitting music and a lengthy period of meditation waiting — vainly — to see if a bartender would arrive within fifteen feet of me, I find resonance in her topic. If you do, too, go over there and add your comments.
Item: That’s how the day goes; I didn’t get this finished until Saturday afternoon.
*Thanks, guys, for the award. I was touched. And that missing hyphen in the headline — no biggie.
Item: James Wolcott makes a graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson on his Vanity Fair blog, bringing a blush to my pallid cheeks in the process.
Item: Language Log linked to a Daily Telegraph article that attempts to identify the twenty worst sentences in Dan Brown’s oeuvre. It couldn't have been an easy task.
Item: If you were wondering just how America’s newspapers came to the brink of destruction, and what they might yet do in an attempt to pull back from that brink, have a look at Part 1 and Part 2 of Bill Wyman’s analysis. It was published a month ago, and I have only just gotten to it. It all rings depressingly true.
Item: Time follows its cover story on Glenn Beck with an article, “The secrets inside your dog’s mind.”
Sorry. Too easy. Moving on.
Item: Elizabeth Large asks readers of Dining@Large what people 35 and older look for in a bar’s happy hour. “A clean glass for my Metamucil,” one reader suggested. Having gone with Kathleen to the Best of Baltimore reception* on Wednesday, for a few bursts of shouted conversation amid the ear-splitting music and a lengthy period of meditation waiting — vainly — to see if a bartender would arrive within fifteen feet of me, I find resonance in her topic. If you do, too, go over there and add your comments.
Item: That’s how the day goes; I didn’t get this finished until Saturday afternoon.
*Thanks, guys, for the award. I was touched. And that missing hyphen in the headline — no biggie.
Friday, September 18, 2009
A copy editor's job description
My son, J.P., recounts that one of his high school classmates said of me that “he was the most intimidating of my friends’ parents, because his job was to know as much as possible.”
That is it: An effective editor can never know too much, and will never know enough.
That is it: An effective editor can never know too much, and will never know enough.
To the books, citizens!
In the clamor over revamping the health care system, the term illegal immigrants is surfacing again. But before our good native-born fellow citizens hit the streets with their pitchforks and torches, they might consider the following set of questions.
These ten questions — all taken from the test that an immigrant must pass to acquire U.S. citizenship — were administered to a thousand Oklahoma public high school students. About three percent of them got enough correct answers to pass the citizenship test.* I entertain deep suspicions that those thousand Oklahoma high school students are not anomalous.
But I also doubt that raising this point will bring any measure of humility or restraint to the discussion of immigration.
What is the supreme law of the land?
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?
What are the two major political parties in the United States?
We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?
Who was the first President of the United States?
Who is in charge of the executive branch?
No, dammit, I am not going to give you the answers.
*The article about this experiment can be found here. Thanks, @Fritinancy, for the tip.
These ten questions — all taken from the test that an immigrant must pass to acquire U.S. citizenship — were administered to a thousand Oklahoma public high school students. About three percent of them got enough correct answers to pass the citizenship test.* I entertain deep suspicions that those thousand Oklahoma high school students are not anomalous.
But I also doubt that raising this point will bring any measure of humility or restraint to the discussion of immigration.
What is the supreme law of the land?
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?
What are the two major political parties in the United States?
We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?
Who was the first President of the United States?
Who is in charge of the executive branch?
No, dammit, I am not going to give you the answers.
*The article about this experiment can be found here. Thanks, @Fritinancy, for the tip.
A personal note at the Johnson tercentenary
“Greek, sir, is like lace,” said Samuel Johnson; “every man gets as much of it as he can.” Fashions in men’s clothing and, sadly, learning have changed since the eighteenth century, and not all of Johnson’s advice remains applicable. But the great lexicographer, critic, essayist, and poet, born three hundred years ago today, has much to say that we would do well to hear.
One caricature of Johnson that has come down to us is the roaring Tory. He did “talk for victory,” and, in a sublime understatement in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, he was “sometimes a little actuated by the spirit of contradiction.” But he was a complex personality, and deeply humane.
He knew what it was to be poor without a place to spend the night. He knew the grind of turning out hackwork for small pay. He knew the horror of depression and breakdown, and the fear of its return. He knew himself to be ugly, even physically repulsive. His struggles with his own disabilities and disadvantages gave him an insight into and sympathy with the struggles of other human beings.
In No. 14 of the Rambler he wrote:
Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues, which he neglects to practise; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.
In No. 60, the great essay on the writing of biography, he summed up:
We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.
Human life, he saw, was a struggle “in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” His own career is mirrored in the famous line from his poem London:
SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESSED
And yet, all this granted, he had a genius for friendship, a relish of conversation, and — despite his self-condemnations for indolence and procrastination — an energy to take on and complete huge and complex tasks. One of the things that ring most true in Boswell’s grand biography is his image of Johnson as a gladiator in the amphitheater of his own mind, heroically combating the apprehensions that beset him.
Twenty years ago, in a vacation in London, I made a pilgrimage to the garret in Gough Square where, sitting in a defective chair propped against a wall, Johnson labored for nearly nine years to produce the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, and I stood, my head bowed, for a moment at his grave in Westminster Abbey.
His work and his example merit our attention and respect.
One caricature of Johnson that has come down to us is the roaring Tory. He did “talk for victory,” and, in a sublime understatement in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, he was “sometimes a little actuated by the spirit of contradiction.” But he was a complex personality, and deeply humane.
He knew what it was to be poor without a place to spend the night. He knew the grind of turning out hackwork for small pay. He knew the horror of depression and breakdown, and the fear of its return. He knew himself to be ugly, even physically repulsive. His struggles with his own disabilities and disadvantages gave him an insight into and sympathy with the struggles of other human beings.
In No. 14 of the Rambler he wrote:
Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues, which he neglects to practise; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.
In No. 60, the great essay on the writing of biography, he summed up:
We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.
Human life, he saw, was a struggle “in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” His own career is mirrored in the famous line from his poem London:
SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESSED
And yet, all this granted, he had a genius for friendship, a relish of conversation, and — despite his self-condemnations for indolence and procrastination — an energy to take on and complete huge and complex tasks. One of the things that ring most true in Boswell’s grand biography is his image of Johnson as a gladiator in the amphitheater of his own mind, heroically combating the apprehensions that beset him.
Twenty years ago, in a vacation in London, I made a pilgrimage to the garret in Gough Square where, sitting in a defective chair propped against a wall, Johnson labored for nearly nine years to produce the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, and I stood, my head bowed, for a moment at his grave in Westminster Abbey.
His work and his example merit our attention and respect.
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