Chapter 7 - Johnson and Time

Summary

The theme of Time is the philosophical issue of this chapter – the perplexity of how we can at once exist in time and observe time as it flows “over” our heads, or “before us” as a stream. Johnson shares an ambition to disentangle such problems with philosophers. But the need to mark time as a self-accounting is an emotional determinant of Johnson. Johnson’s reckoning is connected to life’s possibilities and limits, to his religion, to the pleasures of literature and to his experience of writers whose work seemed so much longer than it was. Johnson is a literary artist on time; his words have philosophical value and effect; but his treatment recalls the metaphorical temper of poetry. Johnson allows us access to a consciousness partitioned off by the specializations of philosophy and folds us back into our own consciousness. He gives us an experience of what it means to be in time and out of time as a shared condition. This is elusive, ironic, comic and tragic; it is one and indivisible, as a function of General Nature, indefinable because universal.