’Tis the season—for waking on a February morning to the consciousness of having failed to keep the resolutions made on New Year’s Day. I am meditating on this subject over a teacup full of Häagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate chip ice cream, at an hour long past the early bedtime I had promised myself, in the glare of a laptop screen I had resolved to shut down with the setting sun.
My comfort, along with the ice cream, is sitting next to me on the couch: volume 1 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, containing the prayers and diaries of this remarkable poet, journalist, critic, lexicographer, conversationalist, moralist, and satirist of human vanities: “Dr. Johnson,” “Dictionary Johnson.”
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