Boswell's Life of Johnson

I would have never dared to open this link or read the blog or know ANYTHING about this book without the provocative title. I had seen this article elsewhere so knew what this HN link was because of it.

Why would most normal people be interested in a biography of an 18th century literary figure? I was an English lit major for god's sake and don't care that much about Samuel Johnson.

I dislike as much as anybody the fashion of judging historical figures by today's mores, but that's not what's happening in Boswell's case. He's being retconned as an idiot and a terrible person not by people in pursuit of 21st century social justice, but by the likes of Borges and Thomas Carlyle. Though the author has gone overboard by calling him "the worst man in the world".

Personally, I like the Borges interpretation, that it needs to be thus for the narrative - the noble and brilliant Johnson contrasted with the base and feeble Boswell. Though I don't get the Don Quixote comparison - isn't Sancho Panza in some ways the smarter one in that relationship?

"The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all has vanished; in every deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there: of London, of England, of the World, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were they of adamant), only slower. The mysterious River of Existence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the former Billow with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it? Where! Now this Book of Boswell's, this is precisely a revocation of the edict of Destiny; so that Time shall not utterly, not so soon by several centuries, have dominion over us. A little row of Naphtha-lamps, with its line of Naphtha-light, burns clear and holy through the dead Night of the Past: they who are gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed, though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that little miraculously lamplit Pathway; shedding its feebler and feebler twilight into the boundless dark Oblivion, for all that our Johnson touched has become illuminated for us: on which miraculous little Pathway we can still travel, and see wonders."