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I felt my own mind much firmer than formerly, so that I was not depressed tonight; and even the gloom of uncertainty in solemn religious speculation, being mingled with hope, was much more consolatory than the emptiness of infidelity. A man can live in thick air, but perishes in an exhausted receiver.^[31]

The same image, the ‘exhausted receiver’, recurs two years later, in August 1779, in Boswell’s Hypochondriack essay ‘On Reserve’. ‘An Hypochondriack’, he writes, ‘is sometimes ... totally incapable of conversation, having a mind like an exhausted receiver, and organs of speech as if palsied....’^[32] However, an important slip has taken place in those two years. Where in Ashbourne the image referred to an intellectual and spiritual milieu, religious non-belief, in The Hypochondriack the ‘exhausted receiver’ is an image of the mind itself, and in particular of the mind in relation to language.

Less than a decade later, not only is the mind confirmed as exhausted, but Boswell’s journal writing is so palsied by depression that language itself can scarcely be brought to persist in giving an account of it. Boswell resident in London, for so long the absolute height of his ambitions, is unrelievedly miserable. At last, after weeks of dreariness, he finally makes, in what is virtually a footnote to his journal entry, the confession that in effect concedes defeat. Wednesday 10 October 1787: ‘N.B. Understood not well till a change is marked.’^[33] The moment is crucial. The lifelong battle to keep pace in language with the events of his life, to live no more than he could record, has been lost, not because Boswell has been living too much, but too little. Language, after all, was outflanked by life, the confessor by the confessed, the recreative energies of the world of language by the inertness, the exhausted capacities of habitual depression.

If Boswell’s journal had been a place for confessional recreation, in all the variety of his life’s activities, this defeat has other implications, for confession, especially of the order of Boswell’s, depends on language telling more truthfully, in its privileged space, than deeds, actions, appearances can. But language, now, for Boswell, has nothing to tell, or rather what it tells is nothing pertinent to what is really the case. It is appearance that is given over to the language of the journal, while confession is reduced to silence. That which is more roundedly true is to be marked not in language but by the absence of language, ‘understood’ until ‘a change is marked’. Silence, when all is said and done, is conceded to be the appropriate medium for a state of mind ‘whose reality should not be allowed in words’.

С.И. Бреев, Л.С. Бреева. Исповедальный морально-философский трактат Я.А. Коменского “Лабиринт мира и рай сердца”

Среди мыслителей, признанных поборниками исповедального слова, достойное место принадлежит Я.А. Коменскому, вошедшему в историю мировой культуры как великий педагог, в этом звании он и больше всего известен человечеству. Однако Я.А. Коменский не ограничивал свою деятельность педагогикой, школой, он выступал в роли общественного деятеля своего времени, предметом заботы его являлась проблема единения народов мира. Как поборника мира его глубоко почитали современники.