The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away...Blessed be the name of the Lord

Patrick Kurp quoted a portion of a Samuel Johnson essay on his blog this morning. He linked to it, and I followed the link. Johnson himself suffered from many infirmities, both physical and vexatious:

So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires, that one of the principal topicks of moral instruction is the art of bearing calamities. And such is the certainty of evil, that it is the duty of every man to furnish his mind with those principles that may enable him to act under it with decency and propriety. ....

That life has many miseries, and that those miseries are, sometimes at least, equal to all the powers of fortitude, is now universally confessed; and therefore it is useful to consider not only how we may escape them, but by what means those which either the accidents of affairs, or the infirmities of nature, must bring upon us, may be mitigated and lightened, and how we may make those hours less wretched, which the condition of our present existence will not allow to be very happy. ....

The great remedy which heaven has put in our hands is patience, by which, though we cannot lessen the torments of the body, we can in a great measure preserve the peace of the mind, and shall suffer only the natural and genuine force of an evil, without heightening its acrimony, or prolonging its effects. ....

In those evils which are allotted to us by Providence, such as deformity, privation of any of the senses, or old age, it is always to be remembered, that impatience can have no present effect, but to deprive us of the consolations which our condition admits....

The chief security against the fruitless anguish of impatience, must arise from frequent reflection on the wisdom and goodness of the God of nature, in whose hands are riches and poverty, honour and disgrace, pleasure and pain, and life and death. A settled conviction of the tendency of every thing to our good, and of the possibility of turning miseries into happiness, by receiving them rightly, will incline us to bless the name of the Lord, whether he gives or takes away. (more)

Samuel Johnson, "No. 32. The vanity of stoicism. The necessity of patience," The Rambler, July, 1750.

"At a particular time and in a specific place"

Yesterday I quoted from Paul Johnson's Modern Times. Johnson was an historian, a graduate of Oxford, a student of C.S. Lewis, and a Christian. The quotations below are from two of his essays I once posted here, neither of which I could find online when I searched today. If anyone does find the sources, please let me know where.

From "A Historian Looks at Jesus":

Christianity, like the Judaism from which it sprang, is a historical religion, or it is nothing. It does not deal in myths and metaphors and symbols, or in states of being and cycles. It deals in facts. It presupposes a linear flight in time, through a real universe of concrete events. It sees humanity as marching inexorably from an irrecoverable past into an unprecedented future. The march is not haphazard. It proceeds according to a divine plan, in part revealed to us. Christians believe that certain specific, historical events occurred, and that, in time, certain other specific historical events will occur, bringing humanity’s sojourn in this world to a climax. Then, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, “time must have a stop." There the Christian’s perception of the timeless world of eternity—the nonhistorical afterlife—is much less clear. But the Christian notion of historical time is very definite, and central to the faith.

Jesus, the Son of God, was born of a virgin, at a particular time and in a specific place. He was God and man. He was crucified for our sins, but rose again the third day. The incarnation and the resurrection are not metaphors but actual, historical events. A man or woman cannot reject their historicity and remain a Christian. To accept the message of Christ, the teaching, the ethics, the example, the human perfection of Christ, is not enough. It is necessary to accept the Godhead as well as the manhood, to believe that the incarnation and the resurrection actually occurred. Without them, Christianity is nothing; it becomes a mere fantasy, a delusion. .... (more)

And from one about Evelyn Waugh:

The truth is that all of us are Jekyll and Hyde creatures, part saint, part beast. The great strength of Christianity is that, while insisting that man is made in the image of God, it accepts that there is a radical flaw in the reproduction. From time to time, God's image is reflected in man's face as in a hideous distorting mirror. Theologians call this the doctrine of Original Sin. But this is merely to rationalize what we can all observe but cannot explain. Shakespeare, in his marvelous play Hamlet, in which he tried to pour everything he knew of man's ambivalent nature, has his hero say: 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a God!' And yet, he adds, man is the quintessence of dust. Man can be, and often is, the most destructive, cruel and malicious of creatures. When Dr. Samuel Johnson was touring the Scottish Highlands with James Boswell, Lady Macleod of Dunvegan Castle asked him if no man was naturally good. He replied: 'No madam, no more than a wolf!' Boswell: 'Nor no woman, Sir?' Johnson: 'No, Sir!'

Dr. Johnson's listeners were shocked by his rigor, but what he meant was obvious enough. We have a propensity to evil in our natures which cannot be entirely corrected from our own resources. We need external help to keep our dark side under control.... (more)

Paul Johnson's approach reminds me of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Dangerous dreamers

Patrick Kurp begins his post today quoting Samuel Johnson:

How small of all that human hearts endure

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,

Our own felicity we make or find.

Kurp continues:

A reader complains about the absence of politics at Anecdotal Evidence, and I thank him for noticing. It’s not a compelling subject. Busybodies with big ideas, unafraid to impose them on others, are dangerous. In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), Robert Conquest — poet and historian, Jeremiah of Communism and its evils — writes:

[I]t is no part of its culture that a government elected by a bare majority, or even by a fairly large majority, is thereby empowered to totally reconstruct the social and political order by sacrificing the minority. That great political philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that for some people government is ‘an instrument of passion; the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire.’ For others, which is to say, in general, for those who have a traditional regard for the unity and continuity of a culture, the business of government is something different: ‘to restrain, to deflate, to pacify, and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down,’ on the grounds that, as Oakeshott puts it, ‘the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.’

Conquest is quoting Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962; rev. 1991). .... (more)

A contemporary example: "I Was in the DSA. Here’s What They Really Believe"

Patrick Kurp, "The Conjunction of Dreaming and Ruling," Anecdotal Evidence, July 21, 2026.

"Not the smooth and orderly outcome, but the struggle"

From "Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years":

Moral advice is everywhere in Johnson’s work, not just the essays that expressly deal with ethical questions. In an age obsessed with taxonomy, the codification of knowledge, the scientific revolution, with understanding and categorising everything, Johnson was a voice of warning. Knowledge can be ordered. People cannot. He spent his whole life in the struggle for peace of mind. As a moralist, that was what he wrote about. Not the smooth and orderly outcome, but the struggle.

Much of Johnson’s insight captures the worser side of human nature, about which he is obdurately, provocatively truthful. He wants to expose all parts of the human mind to reason, to understanding. He knows about all the little vanities of man. ....

Johnson was able to specify any number of human frailties. Many of his sharpest lines come not from his essays, but were delivered to someone’s face. Johnson was not a lurker, a moralist who only let his thoughts out on the page; everywhere he went, Johnson preached. But he was generous, pragmatic, concerned not just to puncture hypocrisy, but to genuinely encourage better living. “I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice.” Johnson combined strict ideals with a deep understanding of how hard it was to live up to them. He knew that most of all from personal experience. ....

Johnson contracted to start work on the Dictionary in 1746; he finished in 1755. He was forty-six. The Dictionary is an extraordinary accomplishment of scholarship, composition, and imagination to come from just one mind. But it was not all Johnson did in those years. In 1748 he published his most successful poem The Vanity of Human Wishes. Starting in 1750, he wrote the Rambler, a twice-weekly essay, with topics covering religion, morality, literature, social manners, psychology, marriage, and many other topics. The Rambler was published for over two years, more than two hundred essays in total. From 1758–1760, Johnson wrote the Idler, another set of essays, simpler and more direct than the Rambler. In 1759, he wrote Rasselas, a philosophical novella which has been described as having more wisdom than any other book by multiple writers and critics. All the while, he was often slowly working at his edition of Shakespeare. And there were minor works, too. .... (more)

Henry Oliver, Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years," The Common Reader, May 4, 2026.

A prayer for the New Year

It was Samuel Johnson's practice to mark each New Year by composing a personal prayer. This is the one for 1772:

ALMIGHTY GOD, who hast permitted me to see the beginning of another year, enable me so to receive Thy mercy, as that it may raise in me stronger desires of pleasing Thee by purity of mind and holiness of Life. Strengthen me, O Lord, in good purposes, and reasonable meditations. Look with pity upon all my disorders of mind, and infirmities of body. Grant that the residue of my life may enjoy such degrees of health as may permit me to be useful, and that I may live to Thy Glory; and O merciful Lord when it shall please Thee to call me from the present state, enable me to die in confidence of Thy mercy, and receive me to everlasting happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A New Years' prayer

Samuel Johnson on New Year's Eve, 1749/50:

ALMIGHTY GOD, by whose will I was created, and by whose Providence I have been sustained, by whose mercy I have been called to the knowledge of my Redeemer, and by whose Grace whatever I have thought or acted acceptable to Thee has been inspired and directed, grant, O Lord, that in reviewing my past life, I may recollect Thy mercies to my preservation, in whatever state Thou preparest for me, that in affliction I may remember how often I have been succoured, and in Prosperity may know and confess from whose hand the blessing is received. Let me, O Lord, so remember my sins, that I may abolish them by true repentance, and so improve the Year to which Thou hast graciously extended my life, and all the years which Thou shalt yet allow me, that I may hourly become purer in Thy sight; so that I may live in Thy fear, and die in Thy favour, and find mercy at the last day, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.

An outrageous zeal

Quoted at Anecdotal Evidence today, Samuel Johnson describes an attitude not confined to his time:

He certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called and thought liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and not rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth or degrading greatness; and of which the immediate tendency is innovation and anarchy, an impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established.

Patrick Kurp, "An Impetuous Eagerness to Subvert," Anecdotal Evidence, June 23, 2024.

Lying liars

I've been enjoying reading Samuel Johnson's essays. He made his living by writing and there is a great deal of it quite apart from the famous Dictionary. And much of it can be found online. The following is from a 1753 essay about liars:

When Aristotle was once asked, what a man could gain by uttering falsehoods? he replied, “Not to be credited when he shall tell the truth.”

The character of a liar is at once so hateful and contemptible, that even of those who have lost their virtue it might be expected that from the violation of truth they should be restrained by their pride. Almost every other vice that disgraces human nature, may be kept in countenance by applause and association: the corrupter of virgin innocence sees himself envied by the men, and at least not detested by the women; the drunkard may easily unite with beings, devoted like himself to noisy merriments or silent insensibility, who will celebrate his victories over the novices of intemperance, boast themselves the companions of his prowess, and tell with rapture of the multitudes whom unsuccessful emulation has hurried to the grave; even the robber and the cut-throat have their followers, who admire their address and intrepidity, their stratagems of rapine, and their fidelity to the gang.

The liar, and only the liar, is invariably and universally despised, abandoned, and disowned: he has no domestick consolations, which he can oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity, where his crimes may stand in the place of virtues; but is given up to the hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist. It is the peculiar condition of falsehood, to be equally detested by the good and bad: “The devils,” says Sir Thomas Brown, “do not tell lies to one another; for truth is necessary to all societies: nor can the society of hell subsist without it.” ....

Samuel Johnson "On Lying."

"Now I lay me down, to sleep"

From Samuel Johnson "On Sleep":

—Pallas pour’d sweet slumbers on his soul;
And balmy dreams, the gift of soft repose,
Calm’d all his pains, and banish’d all his woes. POPE.

If every day did not produce fresh instances of the ingratitude of mankind, we might, perhaps, be at a loss, why so liberal and impartial a benefactor as sleep, should meet with so few historians or panegyrists. Writers are so totally absorbed by the business of the day, as never to turn their attention to that power, whose officious hand so seasonably suspends the burden of life; and without whose interposition man would not be able to endure the fatigue of labour, however rewarded, or the struggle with opposition, however successful.  ....

Sleep is necessary to the happy to prevent satiety, and to endear life by a short absence; and to the miserable, to relieve them by intervals of quiet. Life is to most, such as could not be endured without frequent intermission of existence....

Sleep, therefore, as the chief of all earthly blessings, is justly appropriated to industry and temperance; the refreshing rest, and the peaceful night, are the portion only of him who lies down weary with honest labour, and free from the fumes of indigested luxury; it is the just doom of laziness and gluttony, to be inactive without ease, and drowsy without tranquillity.

Sleep has been often mentioned as the image of death; “so like it,” says Sir Thomas Brown, “that I dare not trust it without my prayers:” their resemblance is, indeed, apparent and striking; they both, when they seize the body, leave the soul at liberty: and wise is he that remembers of both, that they can be safe and happy only by virtue.

Samuel Johnson, "On Sleep," March 20, 1753.

Memento mori

Samuel Johnson's "Serious reflections on the death of a friend":

Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year; and there is none who does not, upon the same principle, hope another year for his parent or his friend: but the fallacy will be in time detected; the last year, the last day, must come. It has come, and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects.

The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horrour. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled. ....

We know little of the state of departed souls, because such knowledge is not necessary to a good life. Reason deserts us at the brink of the grave, and can give no further intelligence. Revelation is not wholly silent. “There is joy in the angels of Heaven over one sinner that repenteth;” and, surely, this joy is not incommunicable to souls disentangled from the body, and made like angels. ....

These are the great occasions which force the mind to take refuge in religion: when we have no help in ourselves, what can remain but that we look up to a higher and a greater Power? and to what hope may we not raise our eyes and hearts, when we consider that the greatest POWER is the BEST?

Surely there is no man who, thus afflicted, does not seek succour in the gospel, which has brought life and immortality to light. The precepts of Epicurus, who teaches us to endure what the laws of the universe make necessary, may silence, but not content us. The dictates of Zeno, who commands us to look with indifference on external things, may dispose us to conceal our sorrow, but cannot assuage it. Real alleviation of the loss of friends, and rational tranquillity, in the prospect of our own dissolution, can be received only from the promises of Him in whose hands are life and death, and from the assurance of another and better state, in which all tears will be wiped from the eyes, and the whole soul shall be filled with joy. Philosophy may infuse stubbornness, but Religion only can give patience.

Samuel Johnson, "Serious reflections on the death of a friend," The Idler #41, Jan. 27, 1759.

A refutation

Today Patrick Kurp refers to one of my favorite Samuel Johnson stories:

The best-known and still unchallenged refutation of the Irish Anglican Bishop George Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism — he called it “immaterialism” — is recounted by James Boswell on August 6, 1763:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’

Dr. Johnson’s demonstration of common sense is at once amusing, convincing, and somehow quintessentially English, the sort of act Jonathan Swift would have applauded... Johnson’s critics have dismissed his logic as fallacious and dubbed his approach argumentum ad lapidem — “argument to the stone” — so freshmen in Philosophy 101 and other sophisticates can feel vindicated. For the rest of us it’s QED. ....

Patrick Kurp, "Cloudy, Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones," Anecdotal Evidence, March 13, 2024.

Growing old

A blog I read every day sends me looking for an essay by Samuel Johnson in The Rambler (1750):

.... Yet, however age may discourage us by its appearance from considering it in prospect, we shall all by degrees certainly be old; and therefore we ought to inquire what provision can be made against that time of distress? what happiness can be stored up against the winter of life? and how we may pass our latter years with serenity and cheerfulness?

If it has been found by the experience of mankind, that not even the best seasons of life are able to supply sufficient gratifications, without anticipating uncertain felicities, it cannot surely be supposed that old age, worn with labours, harassed with anxieties, and tortured with diseases, should have any gladness of its own, or feel any satisfaction from the contemplation of the present. All the comfort that can now be expected must be recalled from the past, or borrowed from the future; the past is very soon exhausted, all the events or actions which the memory can afford pleasure are quickly recollected; and the future lies beyond the grave, where it can be reached only by virtue and devotion.

Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religious hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulph of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper, and where he finds only new gradations of anguish, and precipices of horrour.

Samuel Johnson, "The miseries and prejudice of old age," The Rambler, November 13, 1750.

Courage

According to Western tradition:

"...the seven Christian virtues or heavenly virtues refers to the union of two sets of virtues. The four cardinal virtues, from ancient Greek philosophy, are prudence, justice, temperance (or restraint), and courage (or fortitude). The three theological virtues, from the letters of St. Paul of Tarsus, are faith, hope, and charity (or love).

Peter Kreeft:

The four cardinal virtues – justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), and moderation (self-control, temperance) – come not just from Plato or Greek philosophy. You will find them in Scripture. They are knowable by human nature, which God designed, not Plato. Plato first formulated them, but he did for virtue only what Newton did for motion: he discovered and tabulated its own inherent foundational laws.

These four are called "cardinal" virtues from the Latin word for "hinge." All other virtues hinge on these four. That includes lesser Virtues, which are corollaries of these, and also greater virtues (the three "theological virtues"), which are the flower of these.

Courage may not be the greatest of virtues but it is the necessary one:

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.
— C.S. Lewis

Courage is the greatest of all the virtues. Because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
— Samuel Johnson

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
— Winston Churchill

"Strengthen me, O Lord, in good purposes"

Samuel Johnson, New Year's Day, 1772:

ALMIGHTY GOD, who hast permitted me to see the beginning of another year, enable me so to receive Thy mercy, as that it may raise in me stronger desires of pleasing Thee by purity of mind and holiness of Life. Strengthen me, O Lord, in good purposes, and reasonable meditations. Look with pity upon all my disorders of mind, and infirmities of body. Grant that the residue of my life may enjoy such degrees of health as may permit me to be useful, and that I may live to Thy Glory; and O merciful Lord when it shall please Thee to call me from the present state, enable me to die in confidence of Thy mercy, and receive me to everlasting happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sixty years on, not forgotten

A.N. Wilson, on C.S. Lewis sixty years after his death:

He died on the very day that President Kennedy was assassinated, Friday 22 November 1963, so it is not surprising that the event was overshadowed at the time. With the passage of 60 years, C.S. Lewis’s reputation is undiminished and the sheer range of his achievements as a writer and teacher appears ever more prodigious. For many, he is most beloved as the creator of the seven Narnia books: for others as the author of the science-fiction Space trilogy, which is not only a page-turner but horrifyingly and accurately prophetic.

For still others – and for a long time this would have included myself – the great work is his scholarly but always readable contribution to literary studies. I am thinking of the ever-accessible English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, or the wonderful account of how medieval humanity looked at the cosmos: The Discarded Image. ....

Another book I cannot recommend too highly is a short text he wrote in 1943, first given as lectures at the University of Durham, and published as The Abolition of Man. If I had absolute power, I would make every teenager, every teacher and every parent read this book. It would also be compulsory reading in all the philosophy departments of universities. The book is an analysis of what has happened since the 19^th century to the picture of the world as drawn by clever people.

He was writing when Hitler was still in power and when, in order to defeat him, the western allies had embraced Stalin as an ally. But the powerful thing about the book is that he sees that the utter monstrosity of Hitler and Stalin’s worldviews derives from the Enlightenment and from the worldview of 19^th-century agnostics, and that comparatively mild figures such as George Bernard Shaw or A.J. Ayer (not named in the text) have had a truly catastrophic effect on the way we think. ‘Many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. “Traditional values are to be debunked” and mankind to be cut into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent “ideologies” at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere specimens… begins to affect our very language – once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. ....

His fantasy of what the world will become as a result of the mild-mannered scientists and amateur philosophers is crudely but quite brilliantly painted in the third volume of the Space trilogy, That Hideous Strength. ....

He could be arrogant in debate and, like Samuel Johnson, he talked for victory, but he was a man of enormous humility. His Christian witness was perhaps most eloquent, not in his apologetics, but in the brokenness with which he tried to match ‘The Weight of Glory’ (the title of his best sermon) with all too human frailties. One thing is certain: he has not been forgotten. And there was a quality of greatness about him. Of all the writers of his generation, he is perhaps alone in being worthy himself of comparison to Dr Johnson. (more, perhaps behind a subscription wall)

A.N. Wilson, "The greatness of C.S. Lewis," The Spectator, November 25, 2023.

Growing old

Patrick Kurp just reached 71. Yesterday at his blog, Anecdotal Evidence, he quoted Samuel Johnson on aging. From "a December 7, 1782 letter to Boswell":

I am afraid, ...that health begins, after seventy, and often long before, to have a meaning different from that which it had at thirty. But it is culpable to murmur at the established order of the creation, as it is vain to oppose it. He that lives, must grow old; and he that would rather grow old than die, has God to thank for the infirmities of old age.

Patrick Kurp, "His Empty Heart is Full at Length," Anecdotal Evidence, October 26, 2023.

Old friends

I found this affecting. Patrick Kurp quotes a letter Samuel Johnson wrote upon discovering the death of a man who had been a friend for a very long time:

When I came to Lichfield, I found my old friend Harry Jackson dead. It was a loss, and a loss not to be repaired, as he was one of the companions of my childhood. I hope we may long continue to gain friends, but the friends which merit or usefulness can procure us, are not able to supply the place of old acquaintance, with whom the days of youth may be retraced, and those images revived which gave us the earliest delight.

9/21 - I improved the post title.

Patrick Kurp, "A Loss Not to Be Repaired," Anecdotal Evidence, Sept. 18, 2023.

Conversation

From a review of “'Talking Cure,' an essay on the civilizing power of conversation”:

Political polarization quickly rears its head as a conversation killer, blocking the interchange of different perspectives that give a good talk its vitality. “To speak to the converted or the entirely familiar is not to truly converse,” Ms. Cohen writes. “It is to have one’s beliefs reinforced; it is self-soothing but not self-developing.” Mentioning the liberal pedigree of her family, Ms. Cohen writes gratefully about how her world view was expanded by a deep friendship and decades of thoughtful exchanges with a conservative colleague who has since died. “What sustained us in our disagreement,” she recalls, “was our mutual respect, indeed deep affection, for each other. It was a feeling that carried moral as well as emotional weight.”

Disagreement, Ms. Cohen suggests, is an essential element: “Good conversation digs deep into a subject, turns it over, examines it from angles that might otherwise remain in shadow, and presents hypotheses that may be wrong or even unpleasant, but thought-provoking.” Such openness to opposing viewpoints is now harder to come by in national life. “I used to routinely adopt the devil’s advocate position in class,” she writes, “but I find it harder to do this now, when dissenting viewpoints are less tolerated and when playful or ironic positions are taken literally.” ....

Her models of good conversation include Samuel Johnson, the 18^th-century English wit whose bon mots were copiously recorded by his friend and biographer, James Boswell. But Ms. Cohen makes the point that Boswell was more than a mere stenographer of Johnson’s dinner-table pronouncements. He was a cheerful interlocutor, challenging Johnson’s assumptions in a way that brought out the best in his mentor. It’s a lesson in how conversation can reveal our truest, fullest selves.

The obstacles to good conversation can be as simple as the spaces in which we’d like to linger and chat. Ms. Cohen sighs at the popular fashion in industrial décor at restaurants, where steel tables and backless chairs don’t exactly invite warm exchanges. ....

The picture is a composite of two members of a group that famously engaged in good conversation.

Danny Heitman, "‘Talking Cure’ Review: The Joys of Spirited Conversation," Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2023.

Thoughts which mislead

O Lord, my maker and protector, who hast graciously sent me into this world to work out my salvation, enable me to drive from me all such unquiet and perplexing thoughts as may mislead or hinder me in the practice of those duties which Thou hast required. When I behold the works of Thy hands and consider the course of Thy providence, give me grace always to remember that Thy thoughts are not my thoughts, nor Thy ways my ways. And while it shall please Thee to continue me in this world where much is to be done and little to be known, teach me by Thy Holy Spirit to withdraw my mind from unprofitable and dangerous enquiries, from difficulties vainly curious and doubts impossible to be solved. Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted, let me serve Thee with active zeal and humble confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul which Thou receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge. Grant this, O Lord, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen.

Samuel Johnson, 1709-84

Abide with me

Patrick Kurp today:

.... The worthy dead are to be remembered. I take that to mean the personal dead – family, friends – and those we know only second-hand, perhaps through books or history. Memory grants a post-mortem immortality. Only when the last to remember the dead person is gone is he truly dead. Memory reanimates. The Jewish practice of observing the Yahrtzeit only makes sense. Forgetting kills. Every March 28 I remember my maternal grandmother, the kindest of my relatives, who died in 1972 at age eighty-four and whom I never saw angry. While she was alive I would never have thought to tell her that. .... In his Rambler essay published on February 17, 1751, Dr. Johnson writes:

[F]ew can review the time past without heaviness of heart. He remembers many calamities incurred by folly, many opportunities lost by negligence. The shades of the dead rise up before him; and he laments the companions of his youth, the partners of his amusements, the assistants of his labours, whom the hand of death has snatched away.”

The hymn “Abide with Me” was written by the Scottish Anglican cleric Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847). It’s a prayer imploring God to stay with the speaker throughout life and in death, and was written by Lyte as he was dying from tuberculosis. ....

Patrick Kurp, "The Shades of the Dead Rise Up," Anecdotal Evidence, Feb. 17, 2023.