#much laughter

Silly conversation I had today

Them: *creates a social rule surrounding bedtime and doesn't tell me about it but decides I must initiate it for it to happen*

NINJA CHICKEN

On the topic of the Apple event.

Boswell’s only note after an evening with Dr Johnson Nothing about the food, the wine, the subjects of that night’s passions. Nothing even about the weather—rain most likely, the damp seeping under doors. Just those two words for a night when everything else slipped into the vacancies of the unrecorded. That’s all that’s left. We know now the more complete story that Boswell chose not to tell: the good doctor’s wearied martyr’s gaze as he walked the alleyways where the poor remained poor, the blind, blind, where the only lesson learned from suffering was how much better it would be not to suffer. We know, too, that Johnson wanted about this time to rest in God and yet could not imagine how to surrender himself to a future he couldn’t anticipate; he couldn’t help but believe, to his dismay, that all life needed to go wrong was the hope it would go right. Too many could not see how evil fouled the gears of the century’s benign God. He was headed for another breakdown; Mrs Thrale had already been secretly entrusted with a padlock and chain to restrain his fits when the time came. But on this particular evening, happiness must have arrived when he least expected it. A few hours when everyone’s burdens were shouldered, when there was no tomorrow sprouting its thousand forms of grief and humiliation and defeat. Just jokes and small talk, and wine sweetened with oranges and sugar tumbling down the doctor’s throat. A night, perhaps, when all the timorous and beaten faces suddenly brightened in their common temple of laughter. A night when even a stray black dog might have been allowed to lick clean a patron’s greasy hands and warm its flea-bitten belly near the fire. A night caught in the genius and irony of Boswell’s two words—what they left unsaid and what they say, the simple phrase like a pardon after our sins have been listened to one by one, and there is nothing left to remember but ‘much laughter’ after another day on earth is done.