One (wo)man projects

I feel pretty strongly that someone should compile a catalog of impressive things that were created by one person.^{obligatory philosophical footnote}

Its purpose would be to make us feel awful about ourselves so that it will induce enough existential dread that we will get off of our asses and DO something.

I had that feeling this afternoon when I read in Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue about Samuel Johnson’s project, his Dictionary of the English Language:²

The English-speaking world has the finest dictionaries, a somewhat curious fact when you consider that we have never formalized the business of compiling them. In the English-speaking world, the early dictionaries were almost always the work of one man rather than a ponderous committee of academics, as was the pattern on the Continent.

Samuel Johnson, who lived from 1709 to 1784, was an odd candidate for genius. Blind in one eye, corpulent, incompletely educated, by all accounts coarse in manner, he was an obscure scribbler from an impoverished provincial background when he was given a contract by the London publisher Robert Dodsley to compile a dictionary of English.

His Dictionary of the English Language, published in two volumes in June 1755, is a masterpiece, one of the landmarks of English literature. Its definitions are supremely concise, its erudition magnificent, if not entirely flawless. Without a nearby library to draw on, and with appallingly little financial backing (his publisher paid him a grand total of just £1,575, less than £200 a year³, from which he had to pay his assistants), Johnson worked from a garret room off Fleet Street, where he defined some 43,000 words, illustrated with more than 114,000 supporting quotations drawn from every area of literature.

He had achieved in under nine years what the forty members of the Académie Française could not do in less than forty. He captured the majesty of the English language and gave it a dignity that was long overdue. It was a monumental accomplishment and he well deserved his fame.

What’s your excuse?

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^{obligatory philosophical footnote}Of course, nothing is ever created by only one person, because if (s)he used some materials in the process, then in all likelihood those materials were created by other people. And to get even more philosophical on your ass, I think we could fairly say that his ideas are not really “his.” Ideas don’t emerge in a vacuum; they are always and inevitably a product of ideas that came before.

²This passage was seriously trimmed. I left in the glowing parts but much of it was about Johnson’s pretty ridiculous errors.

³I worked that out to be about $40,000 a year.