#robert cording

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.

"I'd like to say I'm getting by and getting on with life, but the latter is a stretch. A tapeworm of grief has been eating my insides, …"

« At times they nested above us, Hugely fixed in silent considerings, Shadow lakes pooled along their sides As rafts of clouds passed across The sun. At other times, weightless As breath, chameleonlike, They could take the color of rain And vanish behind a scrim of cloud. Always expected and always strange— How, staying exactly in the same place The mountains were continually leaving Day after day, [...] in the Chinese-misted drift of evening. »

There’s a chair in the snow-covered field where I left it, and you, dead now a year, are sitting in it, looking at three crows, their black nearly burning in the morning sun. Thanks for the chair, you say when I make some crack about where will the dead turn up next, unsurprised by your being here. I left it just for you, I say, and maybe I did. And maybe you’re here because I cannot stop loving you, and maybe this is all a dream, but I don’t want to wake up before you answer all those questions I have— not so much about the afterlife, but about the unfairness of things here, in particular who suffers and why, and maybe something about God’s silence—but already you’ve put your fingers to your lips, still looking at the crows, at home in the cold, a little cape of snow warming you. I keep chattering away about the shitty state of the world, listing my complaints as if you were a messenger between my world and the next. But snow is falling through me, as if I were suddenly porous and every boundary had been removed, and I am shining in the light it makes. When I look to you, you are gone and I have not said how much I’ve missed you, nor how, at times, I’ve prayed to you. And whatever peace you brought is interrupted now by fears—how dwarfed I am by the field and the sky filling the empty chair with snow. Then my waking sense of everything missed, and missing again.

A Cottage in the Country

Robert Cording: An Unasked for Inauguration Prayer, 2025