Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. Resolve, work, fail and resolve again. We should do this not just for ambition, for ‘hope of a better fortune’, but because ‘the time comes at last, in which life has no more to promise’ and all we can do then is remember our lives; and ‘virtue will be ll that we can recollect with pleasure’.
– Henry Oliver
It’s Monday.
Resolve. Work. Fail. Resolve again.
The Samuel Johnson chapter continues to inspires.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024.
He once picked up a destitute prostitute in the street and carried her on his back to his house where she stayed for some weeks to recover her health. He loved few things better than a tavern. ‘It is wonderful, Sir, what is to be found in London,’ he told Boswell, ‘the most literary conversation that I have ever enjoyed, was at the table of Jack Ellis, a money scrivener behind the Royal Exchange.’ ‘A great city,’ he believed, was ‘the school for studying life’. It was by studying life, as much as from his scholarly reading, that Johnson became the writer he did.
– Henry Oliver
Henry Oliver’s book is brilliant. Carrying it with me everywhere. Burning through pages.
The Samuel Johnson chapter inspires.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024.
She shows us that simply deciding to act when faced with a challenge can reveal new depths of capability. The more she did, the more capable she became. ‘Do your work,’ said Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘and you shall reinforce yourself.’
But readers persist, silently making their way though the great works, keeping unbroken the chain that takes us back, generation by generation, through human history. It is not just scholarship that keeps great texts alive, but the life of the common reader, the silent, unheralded reader, who finds herself unable to complete a bus journey without resorting to her scrawny old copy of Bleak House
Everyone has something stopping them from writing. Confronting the blank page isn’t hard because of your circumstances, it’s just hard. For sure, it’s harder for many people, but the advice applies all the same that you need to sit your ass in the chair and type.
If you lack the ability to write your own epigrams, collect other people’s. What matters is knowing them, not writing them. Be thy own palace, said John Donne, or the world’s thy jail.
Keep a commonplace book or journal of quotes.
We live at one of the greatest periods of history. Only bitch about it as a prelude to doing something to improve the world. What starts as a joke ends up as a way of life. Aim to understand the world, not judge it.
Yes, your parents did tell you at age seven that when you grow up you should follow your dreams and be whatever you want to be — and yes, they are now telling you to be a lawyer, consultant, banker, dentist or engineer. It is less impressive than you think that you have spotted this little inconsistency, especially without realising that it was borne from the sheer bloody expense of bringing you up. Anyway, those are good jobs you should be proud to have.
These jobs may not have the prestige of the arts or entertainment, but they are valuable and worthy. Take pride in your “dull” job.
I’ve been waiting months for this podcast episode. Tyler Cowen and Lydia Davis did not let me down.
For a writer of her stature, Lydia openly admits she finds very long books hard to approach:
COWEN: Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?
DAVIS: Since I hesitated to even open the books, I can’t answer you, because I do find — not all long books — but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them, I try over and over. If I sense that it’s really a load of verbiage, I really don’t. I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven’t.
Don’t despair! Lydia Davis also struggled to read Ulysses. It took two cracks and a move to Ireland for her to finish:
I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too.
I’m believing more and more, that what great books do, what the internet at it’s brightest light does, is make introductions.
Today’s introduction? The Catalan writer Josep Pla:
There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it.
Lydia admits the Harry Potter series didn’t captivate her. She preferred the writing in Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials trilogy. But she understands, Harry Potter’s greatest value is hooking kids on reading:
COWEN: How would you articulate why you don’t like the Harry Potter novels?
DAVIS: That’s fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It’s always better if you have the page, and you can say, “Look at this sentence, look at that sentence.” At a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter as kids do and did. I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9 — I don’t know. Also, the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grownups were reading them and enjoying them. I thought, “This is great. There are a lot of them.”
But when I tried to read them, I didn’t like the style of writing, and I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t like anything about them. Whereas, I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, “This is wonderful. The writing here is wonderful.” I really think there’s an ocean of difference. I wouldn’t put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. I think that matters more than anything, really — getting kids hooked on reading.
Brilliant and insightful. Do give it a listen or read the transcript in full here.
The most important thing to understand about Smiles is that he worked for his whole life. When he wasn’t in the office, he was pursuing his education or writing articles. This doesn’t mean he was succeeding. Often he was simply reading and learning for the sake of it. The successful books he published were the eventual result of decades of accreted labour. He studied because he wanted to. For a long time, the returns were zero.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part I, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader
That last sentence though, a pile driver – “For a long time, the returns were zero.” Writer Samuel Smiles was a model of persistence. He is what Henry Oliver calls an opsimath, or a late bloomer. (You know a word is good when the spellchecker redlines it). Smiles persisted with his dream project – a biography of the father of railroads George Stephenson. Smiles persevered with the book despite discouragement from Stephenson’s son, and day jobs sapping his writing time. The George Stephenson project began for Smiles in 1849. It was finally published in 1857.
Failure and rejection be damned. A side hustle is for life — and the sheer hell of it. He was a walking writer. And he began to benefit from his accumulated experiences. One trait of late bloomers is their ability to turn their experiences, however incoherent, however seemingly irrelevant, to their advantage as they persist in their interests.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part II, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader
Samuel Smiles’ determined path reminds me of Brooklyn Nets guard Seth Curry, who went undrafted and didn’t sign his first guaranteed contract until age twenty five. And the “exceptional case” Athletic Bilbao striker Aritz Aduriz. An athletic polymath who found success at the top level of Spanish football during the latter stages of his career. Scoring 66% percent of his career first division goals after age thirty and then retiring at thirty nine.
Read Henry Oliver’s full profiles on Samuel Smiles here: pt.1, pt.2.
And do subscribe to The Common Reader. It’s one of the brightest lights on the internet.
Floodlights and Goalposts 