About the book
Samuel Johnson's philosophical tale follows Rasselas, fourth son of the King of Abyssinia, who is kept in the Happy Valley until his turn to take the throne arrives. Weary of its artificial pleasures, he slips away with the poet Imlac, his sister Nekayah and Pekuah, who attends her, to see the world and make a choice of life. Their travels raise questions about happiness, the work of a poet, the stability of reason and the immortality of the soul. Johnson's working title was The Choice of Life, and he drew on his own translation of Jerónimo Lobo's A Voyage to Abyssinia. Critics often note how hard it is to classify as a novel.
Tim O'Reilly, who counts Johnson among his heroes, put it on his list of books that have shaped how he thinks and says it holds the Johnson line he quotes most often.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Tim O'Reilly (Founder/O'Reilly Media)
Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson. Johnson, author of the first major dictionary of the English language, is one of my heroes. His work can be considered an extended meditation on Milton's phrase from Paradise Lost: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." The quote from Johnson I subject people to most often is from his short novel Rasselas, in which a character remarks something like this: "I consider the pyramids to be a monument to the insufficiency of all human enjoyments. He who has built for use till use is supplied must begin to build for vanity." The pyramids are actually quite a wonderful thing, but there's a lot of wisdom in this analysis. Johnson's work is a wonderful reminder that our minds have prodigious energy that must be focused on the right objects, and that much human pathology comes from having insufficient objects for our striving.
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