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just sense of Thy love and assist me to the performance
of all holy purposes, that after the sins,
errors, and miseries of this world, I may obtain
everlasting happiness for JESUS CHRIST’S sake ...
It’s a similar plea for stability from a man with his
own crippling depression. But it’s a prayer – as is most
of Johnson’s diary. And it’s much closer to the Protestant
function of the very first personal diaries. Zaretsky
explains that “while Boswell continues this tradition of
self-probing, he also transforms it. In a sense, he takes
it out of the closet – that is, the praying closet where his
father’s generation retreated in order to wrestle with
their souls.”
Boswell wrestles with his soul, all right. But even
if he must remind himself to pray, even if his sanity
seems to depend on the promise of an afterlife (Thomas
Reid “has relieved me from the uneasy universal
Scepticism into which David Hume led me, and from
which I absolutely could not escape”), his journal addresses
only his innermost self. “While I am attacked
by melancholy,” he reports, in quite a different mood,
“I seldom enjoy the comforts of religion. A future state
seems so clouded, and my attempts toward devotion
are so unsuitable, that I often draw my mind away
from divine subjects.”
The title of Zaretsky’s book is, for this reason, an
ironic one. The godless Age of Reason doesn’t often
claim fatherhood of James Boswell, who, yes, suffered
from lingering doubt, but still clung for dear life to
the comforts of religion, scorned the French materialist
philosophes, and would years later all but beg
Hume for a deathbed confession in an attempt to save
the philosopher’s soul. Boswell’s strange relation to
the faith he so desired illustrates a tricky but vital
fringe of the Enlightenment: a reluctance to accept the
possibility that we are alone. Zaretsky: “In the end, it
is not the rightness of the Enlightenment’s methodology
we question, but instead the rightness of the
world it has given us.”
Taking his cues from Rousseau, an outspoken defender
of this paradox, Boswell lands somewhere
between the believers and the skeptics, or, rather, is
hurled violently between them as he searches not only
for a self but for an answer to the God question. Amid
the commotion, with a nudge from Robert Zaretsky,
this spongy, incorrigible, honest young man, lustful
not only in matters of the flesh but in all matters of life,
endears himself to the 21st-century mind, which like
him is left to fend for itself. Does he contradict himself?
Very well, then he contradicts himself, he is large, he
contains multitudes.
n
FALL 2016