Brisk and wonderful …

…The Choice of Life: Dr Johnson’s Christmas message | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Small it may be, this condensed prose masterpiece, and a little neglected these days, but its influence is not easily exaggerated. Anyone with an ear for the accommodating ironies of the English novel, for that laughing and loving doubleness that runs through Austen and Eliot and onwards, will find a progenitor in Rasselas. Johnson’s ancient and perennial theme is the search for a good life – a search we are all still embarked upon, whether we see it that way or not – and he writes in vigorous and surging prose, declamatory yet questioning, authoritative yet self-interrogating, always working toward a clearer view of things through doubles, paradoxes and inversions.