Revisiting Dr. Johnson

exlibrismagnis was going along pretty well this year . . . until late September. And then life got turned on end. There was illness, and there were legal shenanigans by someone who has tried several times to steal from us, and there was a man shooting at my daughter’s fence. So it’s actually November as I write this post. We’ve just enjoyed a St. Martin’s summer – ending on St. Martin’s Day! (See my notes on March 10, 2021 about using that term for warm days in November) – and now the crisp is back in the air and the leaves are on the ground and on the driveway. Rather than going out with the leafblower, though, I’m going to start catching up on the blog with some brief comments about some reading from October.

I just can’t pass up writing about this year’s passage from Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson. It was the passage that, exactly ten years ago, inspired my favorite post on this blog. I can’t find now where or when I posted the note about temporarily losing this piece about dining with Samuel Johnson and his friends in Wendy’s. But I did. That fateful October day of 2011, after my mind churned with the idea during the lunch break and all the rest of the afternoon during work, I sat down and composed the post on the blogspot editor, almost without stopping or going back to correct anything. I know I didn’t edit much at all because the piece was completely finished when I committed the dreadful error of trying to undo one mistake using control-Z . . . and found out that the online editor considered that key combination to be a command to obliterate the post and all memory of it. (Did I click “Save” at all during this time? No, I did not.) I thought about just starting over, but my head, having emptied itself in emitting the full-grown production once, found itself unable to recreate Athena. Still, I knew that that string of characters had to be in my computer’s RAM somewhere, and I searched online until I found an explanation and an app that brought my precious lamb back home to me. Of course I love it more than the ninety-nine that never went astray! And since I have now apparently lost the post in which I thanked the people who showed me how to recover a lost post, let me take the opportunity.ten years too late, to thank the Villeneuve family once again for their invaluable help.

So now I’ve written about shooters and St. Martin and old posts, but I haven’t yet said anything about my reading from October, even though my express purpose today is to begin catching up on blogging, which is done best without extraneous comments. I haven’t yet written anything about the passage in which Dr. Johnson says that a majority of any professional's time is not spent on the proper focus of his work: the author, for instance, spends most of his time reading, not writing. (Maybe I should take that comment as exoneration since, in today’s post about Boswell and Dr. Johnson, I’ve spent most of my effort not writing about Boswell and Dr. Johnson?) I haven’t given any space to Dr. Johnson’s observation that knowledge must come through reading, not conversation, because conversation is not systematic. I haven’t mentioned Johnson’s practice, when entering a man's home for the first time, of rushing to his bookshelves and perusing the "backs" (covers?) of the books. It’s a pity; I could say a lot about it since I have the same habit. And I haven’t even said anything about Boswell’s account of the time in France when Dr. Johnson, much less fluent in French than in Latin, nevertheless spoke in broken French to a Frenchman who spoke back in broken English. If I had, I could have said that I found myself several times having that same surprising kind of conversation in Italy. Well, you know, except using Italian.

I’ll have to leave it all unwritten, though: I have to start thinking now about writing on some November reading.