Part of this tension is to do with his desire to preserve ‘good’ in the journal, to make a genuine harvest of his life. More deep-seated, though, is Boswell’s confusion over the relation between two dimensions of reality - between action and reflection, between the world as lived and the world as confessed. Where, in particular, is there any security in identity when the recording self is constantly to be appalled by the active self, is obliged, in fact, to set down actions and moods that would be better, safer, though less truthful, if let go into oblivion? This confusion is particularly acute for the hypochondriac who, as Boswell writes in The Hypochondriack, is perpetually in need of reassurance about his own stability:

Nothing is more disagreeable than for a man to find himself unstable and changeful. An Hypochondriack is very liable to this uneasy imperfection, in so much that sometimes there remains only a mere consciousness of identity. His inclinations, his tastes, his friendships, even his principles, he with regret feels, or imagines he feels are all shifted, he knows not how. This is owing to a want of firmness of mind.[25]

When there are two realities, for the hypochondriac the question that most acutely demands answering, and which never can be answered, is not which is the more real, but which is the more sane.

These uncertainties make the journalistic confession of hypochondria particularly distressing. Early in his life, Boswell looked optimistically even on this aspect of keeping a journal. Not only will he ‘preserve many things that would otherwise be lost in oblivion’ but he will ‘find daily employment for myself, which will save me from indolence and help to keep off the spleen’.[26] Elsewhere, he speculates as to whether writing might not actually transplant depression from his mind to the page: ‘Lord Monboddo said on Saturday that writing down hurt the memory. Could I extract the hypochondria from my mind, and deposit it in my journal, writing down would be very valuable.’[27] More often, though, Boswell resents the constant, and increasingly frequent, presence of depression in his journal, not least because recording, he feels, gives validity to what should not be acknowledged: ‘I really believe’, he writes from Holland in 1764, ‘that these grievous complaints should not be vented; they should be considered as absurd chimeras, whose reality should not be allowed in words.’[28]

The relation between depression and writing is acutely problematic. Hypochondria was a condition that was for Boswell an undeniably real feature of his life, yet to be always recording it was perhaps to offer it an endorsement that it did not deserve. But the urge to tell was itself a powerful factor within the hypochondriac temperament. Moreover, if confession of so major a part of his existence was to be denied, then where was the truth of the journal to be found?

These issues, always underlying Boswell’s attitudes towards his journal and its writing, are especially accentuated in the recording of the final years of his life, from the mid 1780s until 1795, following the death of Johnson, Boswell’s own move from Scotland to London, and the death in 1789 of his wife. Boswell, while working on the Life of Johnson, experienced almost unrelieved depression:

What sunk me very low was the sensation that I was precisely as when in wretched low spirits thirty years ago, without any addition to my character from having had the friendship of Dr. Johnson and many eminent men, made the tour of Europe, and Corsica in particular, and written two very successful Books. I was as a board on which fine figures had been painted, but which some corrosive application had reduced to its original nakedness.[29]

He castigates the journal he is keeping: ‘What a wretched Register is this! “A Lazarhouse it seem’d.” It is the Journal of a diseased mind.’[30] The mentality that had been in doubt over so many years of recording, held in check or endorsed in words, is revealed for what it is. The ambiguities have cleared: confirmed by the journal, he has a diseased mind.

Back in September 1777, on a trip to Ashbourne in Derbyshire with Dr Johnson, Boswell had recorded a conversation concerning death and futurity, concluding the journal entry by observing of himself: