Let’s talk about devotion, dear reader.  Not the quiet, prayer-hands kind, but the type of all-consuming, synapse-frying, 20-year obsession that births a legend.  Today we raise a glass – probably several, let’s be honest – to James Boswell, born on this day in 1740.  He was the ultimate literary wingman, the patron saint of biographers, and a man whose personal journals read like a depraved field guide to 18th-century London.

Imagine, if you will, dedicating your life to another human being.  Not just as a friend, but as a kind of human recording device.  For two decades, Boswell attached himself to the literary giant Samuel Johnson, like a barnacle with a notebook.  Johnson was the great intellectual wolverine of his age, with a mind that was a cathedral of genius and whose social graces were more or less those of a cornered badger.  And Boswell was right there, scribbling it all down.  Every thunderous insult or pronouncement, every witty comeback, every depressive sigh.  He stalked Johnson through taverns, print shops, and drawing rooms, his pen (well, quill) flying, capturing the man in all his flawed, human glory.

The result was The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., a book that mainlined Johnson’s life directly into readers’ veins.  That biography and its detail rawness basically invented the form as we know it.

But when Boswell wasn’t chronicling Johnson’s genius, he was conducting his own frantic, balls-deep experiments in the human condition.  His private journals, found long after his death, are a scandalous mess of high philosophy and low-life pursuits.  Philosophical benders, existential crises, orgies, hangovers, and an almost heroic number of STDs.  It’s the diary of a man wrestling with God and prostitutes, often in the same week, sometimes on the same night.  The man had impressive appetites – for fame, for booze, for flesh, and for Life.

Whatever he did, he dove in headfirst.  My favorite Boswell-Johnson moment was the two of them, deep in their cups, getting into a ferocious, slurring argument about the age-old philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound.  I’m confident I have drunkenly held forth on this exact questions many times, but, like most people would have, I’m sure, I have forgotten this drunken exchange by morning.  Boswell went home and wrote it all down.

So cheers to James Boswell.  He proved that sometimes the most important story you can tell is someone else’s, but that your own story – the really messy, chaotic part of it – is just as vital.  Go read his work, dear reader.  Let me know if you don’t think he makes our modern lives feel beige by comparison.

N.P.: “Superhero” – Johnny Hollow