THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

“A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls into the burning faggots of the pit. He makes his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history either had to be taught as such–or falsified.”
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, from the chapter entitled FAILURE.

I often say I only want to read great books. It’s not hard to do, there are more than I could read in 3 lifetimes, if you include nonfiction. I don’t see how you could NOT include nonfiction, and the book in question is the greatest nonfiction book in the English language. But of course you can’t actually only read great books if you are going to read contemporary writing at all. Greatness doesn’t settle on the contemporary. Poets are used to thinking in terms of the long game. But fiction and nonfiction are not be for the ages, and only accidently become so. As far as canons go, the academic canon dispute is for the academies, I don’t really care what they teach, so long as they teach Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare when young is like learning algebra. Nothing else makes sense without it. But beyond that, who cares? The canon that means something is the canon formed like a termite mound by generations of readers and writers. That’s how Donne and Shakespeare became canonical in the first place: poets read them, and continued to do so after they stopped reading Milton.

Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams is intellectual autobiography told in a slightly mocking, gently ironic third person. Henry Adams is never off the page. He anatomizes himself with the same acuity, but greater clarity, than the other Henry, Mr. James, analyzes his characters. Adams was born in 1838 and bears witness to the industrial, scientific, cultural, and intellectual revolutions of the 19th century. He is aware that he shares a womb with the future, even as his instinct draws him to the past, the medieval past of the High Middle Ages, of Dante, and Aquinas, of the cathedrals of Chartres and Mont St. Michel. A provincial boy, he grows into a true cosmopolitan, traveling the world, teaching at Harvard for 7 years, writing about art and politics, and presiding over a legendary Washington DC salon. He wrote a multivolume history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. He knew everyone. As a very young man he accompanied his father, a congressman, and son of John Quincy Adams, to the court in London, as personal secretary. Their job was to prevent England from entering the civil war on the side of the south. His closest friends were John Hay, who served presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, senator from Massachusetts, cousin of American philosopher Charles Pierce. In The Education the scientific revolution, especially Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also in theoretical physics, provokes a spiritual crisis that Adams resolves into a theory of history. I have never encountered a more fascinating, ruminative mind in action. Adams ponders, is troubled by, and works out the complex philosophical/spiritual/ethical challenge of emerging modernism with the mind of an average person, and this is what is so exhilarating. His very modesty allows you to share his puzzlement. And the thing is, he seems to love the sensation of alienation, he enjoys the antiquation of a world he grew up in (the 18th century is his world in many ways, not the 19th). He gently weaves a thesis out of chaos and perceived order. His mind is deeply, intractably dialectical. He seems to have absorbed Marx. He anticipates Freud. Chaos Theory and Quantum Mechanics would not have surprised him at all. Post-modern skepticism is already in his mental framework. It is no wonder that the great historian of American politics, Walter Lefebre, assigned this book to all of his first year graduate students.

This book makes it to number one on all the greatest hits of nonfiction lists. There’s a reason for it. It is totally fucking brilliant from beginning to end, and it is one of the few books I wish had kept going and going and going.