Busy Sept. 23

 

     I love writing books. You learn so much, though never enough — particularly when you bit off a big topic, such as Judaism, and have only a few months to furiously chew it down to a size that you and some as-yet-to-be-determined-but-certainly-small group of people can swallow.
      But writing a book does narrow your range of reading. Pretty much limited to the subject at hand. People will suggest other books to me, interesting books, books that I'd like to read, were I not occupied with adding to their numbers, and I'll smile and say "I'll put it on the list" without mentioning that the list is in suspended animation until after Jan. 15, my deadline, at least.
     I've also been neglecting my heroes, such as Dante and Samuel Johnson, who I like to take in regular doses, like medicine. But Facebook, for all its downsides — AI slop, intrusive advertising, constant harping on topics I'm coming to Facebook to be distracted from — is redeemed by the "Memories" section, which I check each morning to see what I was doing last year and the year before, and all the way to ... ulp ... 18 years ago, when I first began using it, at orders from the newspaper.

     Wednesday served up some prime Johnson quotes, which I'll get to. In a minute. After I submit to recounting a few of the other things mentioned as memories for the day.

     What's that line from the movie? "You've had a wonderful life." Particularly on Sept. 23.

     Sept. 23's pack of associations was satisfying bordering on amazing, beginning with the reopening of the Goodman Theatre after COVID five years ago, then including the Symphony, the Lyric Gala, the Goodman again,.

    A dozen years ago: "Fun hanging with Joakim Noah and his mom, Cecilia, at a party raising money for Noah's Arc Foundation."
     In 2012, after being slapped around by the New York Times Book Review, the paper added compliment to injury by winking at me from the Style section, a moment I described thus:
     "Okay, take your New York Times, pull out the Sunday Style Magazine, turn to page 40, direct your attention to the tiny photo on the bottom right. 'A rollicking newspaperman's memoir ... and strong case for Second City exceptionalism...' Right there next to books about China, South Africa and other exotic locales that few New Yorkers would actually visit. What I had thought last week was a NY Times travel blog pops up in print. Not quite the treatment I had hoped for, true ("Kinda small..." Ross sniffed) but still, the mighty New York Times pauses, cocks its head, detecting the faintest 'ping' from somewhere in the vast undifferentiated expanse of nothingness that is the nation beyond the Hudson. It'll have to do."
     Dinner at the Star of Siam, 15 years ago, then bumping into Rick Kogan in the Goat and over to the Tribune Tower to learn about Twitter, the future X. "My takeaway from the whole thing: Keep the day job" which turned out to be rare prescience.

   In 2009, I wrote: "just returned from a late night dinner with writers and editors from Granta" where earlier I had scoured the British Museum (I didn't mention it, but the room where my friends, the Lewis chessmen were on display, was being re-carpeted, and I couldn't go in, though for one desperate moment considered plunging into the bowels of the museum to find them. Gotta go back to London).
     The earliest entry, 18 years ago, was: "is saddened at the departure of his colleague Robert Feder, which will make the Sun-Times an even more grim and lonely place to work than it already is." Have to give him a call — we're overdue for lunch.
     None of which would have prompted me to write this post. Bragging, I can resist, with effort. But Victoria Driver — who I see, from her still-current Facebook page, is back in Chicago; welcome! — posted these 1758 Samuel Johnson quotes from a column which, now that I re-read it, is worth posting in its entirety.  That means you'll read the quotes below twice, if you come back Saturday. Which is okay, because they bear repeating, a reminder that what strikes us as a current depravity is actually a universal:

     “Credulity, or confidence of opinion too great for the evidence from which opinion is derived, we find to be a general weakness imputed by every sect and party to all others, and indeed by every man to every other man."
     “Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots . . . [who] resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow . . ."
     “[They] deny the most notorious facts, contradict the most cogent truths, and persist in asserting today what they asserted yesterday, in defiance of evidence and contempt of confutation.”

    The more things change ...