The Consolations of Literature

Abstract

The Consolations of Literature MARILYN SIDES boswell: I said, Dr. Dodd seemed to be willing to die, and full of hopes of happiness. johnson: “Sir, Dr. Dodd would have given both his hands and both his legs to have lived. The better a man is, the more afraid he is of death, having a clearer view of infinite purity.” James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1799) i. Here is how I knew my mother was dying at last. My office door shut, the light off. November sun slants in through the tall, narrow window and casts on the adjacent wall a sharp-edged parallelogram strangely brilliant. Enough illumination to read. The tiny clock, positioned right above a student’s head when a student occupies the chair facing my desk, reads 11:48. Class is at 1:30 and I have yet to prepare the readings I assigned from our anthology of drawn-and-quartered masterpieces of British Literature. Today two texts by Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), grand master of English prose. Judicious and opinionated literary critic, majestic essayist, stoic poet, first great lexicographer of the English language (“Lexicographer : A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words,” Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language , 1755). Rambler No. 60, an essay on biography (1750), and excerpts from the “Life of Pope,” a biographical essay included in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1781). Plus bits and pieces of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), an arion 26.2 fall 2018 early celebrity biography and still the greatest biography in English. Our topic, a quintessential eighteenth-century question : “How to write a ‘life’?” Cutting it close, today, but I can pull off the most precarious of cliffhanger preparations. For I am a speed-reader, a talent honed in grade school by projectors that cast up on the screen lines of phantasmagoric text erased at faster and faster speeds. A talent perfected a few years later at the public library by scanning page after page of novels from the adult section for my keywords, “breast,” “thighs,” “wet,” “hard”—these novels I dared not check out on my mother’s card. If a student knocks, I won’t answer. If my cellphone rings, I will take only two calls. From my daughter’s school, of course. And from Denver, where two thousand miles away my mother might be dying. My mother has been almost dying for decades. Several heart attacks, a bout with throat cancer, all befall her, but do not fell her. This autumn the pace of Mother’s dying seems to have picked up, more sudden trips to the emergency room, more overnights at the rehabilitation center. Still, for thirty years it’s been the same old story. So my mother’s dying, out of habit, continues to feel infinite. Calls from or about my mother come at home and range among other domestic worries: the child (did you really do your homework?), the cat (chronically constipated, am I going to pay the vet $200 dollars for another enema or do it myself?), the house (down in the basement the brick columns supporting the core of the house crumble), the writing (lately, the not-writing). One of Johnson’s most quoted aphorisms: “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Standing up, in one hour and thirty-five minutes, before twenty students to discuss Johnson can feel like a form of public hanging. So I concentrate my mind. First, lower expectations. I’m a pinch hitter for the eighteenth-century survey; the expert is on sabbatical . The class session is only seventy minutes. The stu116 the consolations of literature dents only undergraduates. No background reading—just the assigned texts, closely read. Turn to the Rambler essay. Johnson is fascinated by the incidents “of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory and are rarely transmitted by tradition”; the “invisible circumstances . . . more important than public occurrences” that make ‘a life’ come alive. Johnson’s examples : The Roman writer Sallust, “that great master of...