Henry Adams
Presented on: Thursday, May 23, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America Our Critical Heritage:
James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain
Presentation 8 of 13
Henry Adams:
His Education and the Split within Hermetic America
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, May 23, 1985
Transcript:
The date is May 23rd, 1985. This is the eighth lecture and a series of lectures by Roger Weir on our critical heritage. Tonight's lecture is entitled by Roger Weir is entitled, Henry Adams, His Education and the split within Hermetic America.
We continue to pursue our course. And I think that by now most of you who are here are used to a rather strenuous course. We have discovered again and again that most of the great figures in our past have been misused, if not misunderstood. And we found this to be the case in every century all the way back. And we began with Homeric Greece and made our way up to the 20th century and found that there was no time in our past that has properly been utilized ever. So that the modern world should be a junkyard is no great surprise. You can't have a cake if you don't follow the recipe. And if you just throw the ingredients in, you're going to have the **inaudible word or two** which we have today. The only remedy for this is to go back and find the recipe. And the recipe seems to be quite simple. That life has a pattern and that we are pattern makers. And that in our living intelligence we should be able to find some way, if not dozens of way, if not thousands of ways, in which to be human.
The difficulties began to focus in this fashion in the mind of Henry Adams when he was still a very young man. He recounts in his autobiography called the, entitled The Education of Henry Adams that no one born in the year 1838 had been dealt a better hand by circumstance, by fortune, by fate than he. He was born to the Adams family. Beacon Hill, Boston. With two presidents in the background. And for all he knew his father was to be a president next. In fact, his father would be a vice presidential nominee on a free-soil party. What Adams wished to do was the very simple task of educating himself. Simply to apprise himself, what does life have to offer? What have I to offer life? And how may I proceed?
And his account takes us through from his birth in 1838 to a hiatus point in 1871, which he will then take up the autobiography in 1892 20 years later. But the section from 1838 to 1871 reveals the travesty of the impossibility of being educated in this world. That the sensitive human being is encouraged at all stages to give up, to fit in, to find a niche and keep it quiet. And what Adams wished to find was an understanding of the purposes of life.
In his work, we have looked at Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and understood that The Education of Henry Adams was to be a balance to that. That those 13th century works dealt with the theme of unity in man's nature and the way in which that unity could be amplified and given an expressive form. And Adams identified the two cathedrals. The one Mont Saint Michel dedicated to the masculine desire to have unity triumph over all conflict. Symbolized by the arc angel in sculpture at the top of Mont Saint Michel holding his sword aloft and triumph. The point of unity discovered in a masculine way. And balancing that the unity of the feminine presented by the great palace of the Queen of heaven, the Virgin Mary and Chartres. And those two 13th century unified expressive forms were to be balanced then by the multiplicity of the 20th century. The individual man, who in the 20th century must Harbor within himself multiplicities. That in some implied way we are not able any longer to either be satisfied by unity nor to achieve unity. That in the 20th century the best that we can hope for is to Harbor in harmony the multiplicities.
Adams discovered in the writing of His Education that the multiplicities grew in such complexity that he could not finish his task. And in fact, in 1907 only 100 copies were printed up for friends with the emendation that it not to be published. That it was unfinished. And as far as Adams could see it might be unfinishable. That he had in fact plumbed to the core of the problem of 20th century man. That his multiplicities proliferate labyrinthinely for bidding him from finding any kind of expressive base upon which to coordinate a sense of form, a sense of person, a purposiveness even within multiplicity. And Adams in fact, never again in his life published The Education. it was published in 1918. I have a first edition here. The year that Henry Adams died, years after he had become incapacitated by illness.
It is so difficult to understand the mysteriousness of Henry Adams character and mind. For in fact, it is my contention that he did finish The Education. That it's unfinished torso quality is exactly like those great last works of Michelangelo. That they are to show us the tremendous sense of form that compels us to ask ultimate questions. But also showing us with a yoga like equanimity, the very reality of the formlessness from which we must work. And that there is no way to resolve all of the formlessness into a form. Best to leave it as a mystery half undone to show that we belong in both realms simultaneously. And that if there is a unified vision available to 20th century man it is that he must rest assured that he will forever be incomplete.
The key to this understanding of Adams, which is not traditional, which is not academically respectable, I feel is in the contrast of two poems that he wrote. Two long poems. Last week, we had the opening parts of his Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres. If you recall, he began it,
Gracious lady simple as when I asked your aid before. Humble as when I prayed for grace in vain 700 years ago. Weak, weary, sore. In heart and hope I ask your help again. You who remember all, remember me. An English scholar of a Norman name. I was a thousand who then crossed the sea to wrangle in the Paris schools for fame. When your Byzantine portal was still young, I prayed there with my master Avelar. When Ava Maria's Stella was first sung, I helped to sing it here with Saint Bernard.
And he went on in this vein. And The Prayer to the Virgin of, Virgin of Chartres was in fact not published until after Adam's death in 1920. That was the visionary core of his work Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.
The other poem is the visionary core of The Education of Henry Adams. And without the poem we are unable to understand the incredible refinement Henry Adams was able to bring to bear upon himself. The problem of himself. Or perhaps better phrased, himself understood as a problematic. The second poem and the core to his great autobiography has a very surprising title. Its title is Buddha and Brahma. Buddha and Brahma.
Henry Adams was first in Asia, in Japan, 1886. But it was during another visit in a period of years when he was sojourning everywhere. Living in the South Pacific. Living in Asia. Trying to go West. Trying to go to Europe. Trying to rediscover some horizon, some sense of context within which he could interpret himself to himself. Or barring that interpret the world in terms of a self, which was not fully identifiable. Nothing worked. In 1891 coming back from Asia again, after one of those interminable voyages, ocean voyages. Traveling with his companion John Lafarge, he wrote a letter to his great lifelong friend, John Hay. This was 1891. And included this poem in it. And when Adams was very elderly, 77, infirm, incapable of really responding, this poem was published courtesy of John Hay in The Yale Review for 1915.
Now John Hay, to refresh your memory, was the private secretary of Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln first came to Washington as the president elect, Hay was with him. And it is Hay and the other secretary Nichola who did the great 10 volume Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, which has not been superseded by Carl Sandberg or anyone else. The Hay volumes are really the best.
Henry Adams and first seeing John Hay in 1861 in a period of incredible turmoil. And we'll see his description of it. Washington was up for grabs. The country was up for grabs. And no one had any confidence at all that there was going to be a savior of the situation. And Adams said, the first time he saw Hay step off the train in Washington he knew that this man was a friend. He will have the same observation at the very end of this section of The Education that we're going to get to tonight. He will have the very same observation of another friend of his, a man named Clarence King. Very famous as a geological explorer here in the Western part of the United States. Clarence King. There are peaks in the Sierra Nevada named for him. And he will observe of King as he observed of John Hay, that friends are eternal. He will in fact use a geological term. He will say that friends are made in the Silurian period of geologic pre time. That we somehow belong together with certain other people as if we were geologic formations. We get along together. We resonate together. We are in a crystalline structure together. We pulse a common understanding together.
And this was the John Hay, his first great friend in life who was not of the new England Brahmans. Not of that cast of the Beacon Hill crowd. Hay was the first individual that Adams could find the relief in understanding some other human being who saw him for what he was. And so, it was in 1891, 30 years later that he sent this poem to John Hay. I'll read just two short excerpts of it.
The Buddha known to men by many names. Siddhartha. Shayamuni. Blessed one. Sat in the forest as had been his want. These many years since he attained perfection. In silent thought, abstraction, purity. His eyes fixed on the Lotus in his hand. He meditated on the perfect life. While his disciples sitting round him waited. His words of teaching every syllable more and more precious as the master gently warned them how near was come his day of parting. In silence, as the master gave example, they meditated on the path and the law. Till one, Malenka looking up and speaking said to the Buddha, Oh omniscient one, teach us if such be in the perfect way, whether the world exists eternally.
And then in the poem, Adams goes on to show that the Buddha did not respond. And the monks thinking that they had misphrased the quest, question tried other syntactical arrangements, other Hermeneutic insights, other theses. And none of them brought a response. Until finally in the desperation of the quandary, which they by now had created in their urgency, Henry Adams has the Buddha slightly raise the Lotus for an instant. And then return it to its meditative position. The first disciple who had asked the first question in true humility, thinking that he had been told the secret, but could not understand it returns back home to his father, who was a King. Who was a Kshatriya caste warrior. And he wants the father to explain to him the wisdom of the Buddha. And the wise old father King assures him. He says, you know the Buddha is a Kshatriya like we are. And that he and I came from the same origins, the same beginning point. But our paths of diverged. And you have followed him. And this is right for you because his teaching is the perfect way. I know only the compromise of the world. I know only the jungle of existence. I act and my actions are all that I have. I do not understand them. I do not even approve of them. I have nothing that I can offer you except to show you how to use the sword. And the youngster in the poem perseveres, you must know. You know the secret. Tell me, please tell me.
And so, the old man goes into the Vedic structure of the cycles of ceremony. But he does it in a language to the son, much as he would have talked to him when he was a young teenager. He says,
This is the Veda, as you know. The alphabet of all philosophy. For he who cannot or dares not grasp and follow this necessity of Brahman is but a fool and weakling. And must perish among the follies of his own reflection. Your master, you and I and all wise men have one sole purpose, which we never lose. Though different paths we each seek to attain. Sooner or later as our paths allow a perfect union with the single spirit. **inaudible word** his way is best, but all our good. He breaks a path at once to what he seeks by silence and absorption. He unites his soul with the great soul from which it started. But we who cannot fly the world must seek to live two separate lives. One in the world, which we must ever seem to treat as real.
We are compelled to treat it as real. The other in ourselves, behind a veil, not to be raised without disturbing both. That this bifurcation of the existence is the wisdom that one eventually comes to. That we must treat the worldly life as if it were real. We must compel ourselves as it were to believe it. And yet in ourselves, we must maintain a veil of secrecy, which we do not talk about. Which we do not share.
So, at the end of the poem Henry Adams, writing to his great lifelong friend, John Hay.
This is the jungle in which we must stay according to the teachings of the master. Never can we attain the perfect life. Yet in this world of selfishness and striving the wise man lives as deeply sunk in silence as conscious of the perfect life he covets as any reckless in his forest shadows. As any Yogi in his mystic trances. We need no noble way to teach us freedom amid the clamor of a world of slaves. We need no lotus to love purity where life is else corruption. So, read Siddharths secret. He has taught a certain pathway to attain the end and best and simplest yet devised by man. Yet still so hard that every energy must be devoted to its sacred law. Then when Malenka turns to ask for knowledge would seek what lies beyond the path he teaches what distant horizon transcends his own. He bids you look in silence on the lotus. For you he means no more. For me this meaning points back and forward to that common goal from which all paths diverge. To which all paths must tend. Brahman be only true. Gadamer tells me my way is too good. Life, time, space, thought, the world, the universe end where they first began in one soul thought of purity in silence.
This is Adams reaching out to express best he can to the closest friend he had at a very formative time in his life, 1891. He had finished that great work, which came before Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Before The Education of Henry Adams. He had finished a nine-volume History of the times of Jefferson and Madison. Because he had come to understand that for him all of the mysteriousness of the universe had become embodied in the United States. In the curious madness, the nightmare that had become the United States. That from these incredible beginnings it had degenerated within a couple of lifetimes into a free for all with no meaning whatsoever. And he saw American history as the perfect spiritual mystery. It had been as if the country were acting out a mystery play waiting only to be solved. And Adams in the poem found by 1891 that only the purity of silence could respond to the nightmare that had become manifest in himself, in his country, in his understanding of world history.
So, The Education of Henry Adams is in fact, a concerted designed effort to show that the ordered pace of a life, a fantastic life, having the best beginnings anyone could ever wish for. Family, name, money, position, tradition. Everything became progressively unraveled, progressively denuded of its meaningfulness. To the extent to the, the realization that there was no way to even conjure up meaning any longer. In fact, he will close out his first great section of the life by holding general Grant up, who is by 1870 president of the United States. And say is this evolution? Is this survival of the fittest? That 2000 years after Alexander the great and Julius Caesar, we have Ulysses Grant. And he will say he has a section called Failure of Grant.
And everyone was expecting, of course, with 1870 that the United States would finally get on track. That after the debacle of the civil war, after the assassination of Lincoln, after the first fretful beginnings of reconstruction, after the tremendous developments that were happening in Europe of 1870, that Grant would finally be the rallying person around whom everything could begin to work its way out. And he says that the disappointment came as an utter sudden lightning bolt shock when Grant named his cabinet. Because anyone could see that if this were the cabinet of the man nothing was going to happen. Nothing was able to happen. And he would say here that in fact for a whole generation the United States was condemned to just continue the nightmare. He writes that,
2000 years after Alexander the great and Julius Caesar a man like Grant should be called and should actually and truly be the highest product of the most advanced evolution made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant's own common places to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from president Washington to president Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin. Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because he was 18th century and yet it worshiped Grant because he was archaic. And should have lived in a cave and wore skins.
I don't know if you have any images of Grant with his cigars and his nicely trimmed beard and his Victorian wife stringing draperies upon draperies. And Grant swatting flies away and naming all of his cronies to run the country.
Darwinist ought to conclude that America was reverting to the stone age. But the theory of reversion was more absurd than that of evolution. Grant's administration reverted to nothing. One could not catch a trait of the past, still less of the future. It was not even sensibly American, not an official in it, except perhaps Rollins, who Adams never met and who died in September, suggested an American idea.
What Adams is saying is that by 1870, all vestiges of any trace of a tradition were completely gone. Were completely effaced. We were cut adrift. We were not only post historical; we were not even in a history. There was no history. There was no context. That formlessness like some great mother had swallowed whole her children.
He says, Yet this administration which upset Adam's whole life, he writes of himself in the third person, was not unfriendly. In fact, it was largely made up of friends. He knew them all. He knew them all very well. This is why his judgment was so profound. These are worthless men. And they were in fact. And he goes through all of this. And then he says that, evidently for the next generation there was no hope. And that the next time there would be any chance at all of the United States coming out of this would be in the 1890s.
And so, Adams from this moment on began thinking about trying to go back in his mind, in his experience, in his investigation and recreate the formative apex of the origins of the United States in order to turn this over to the American people. And that's why he wrote the great volumes The History of the Administration of Jefferson and Madison. Jefferson, because he was the mover. Madison because he continued Jefferson's mind. Remember Madison is about five foot three and was just overjoyed with the fact that Dolly would have him. And was really glad to carry on with Jefferson's vision.
In fact, a there's an excellent book on Jefferson and Madison called The Great Collaboration by professor Adrian Con, Conch, published by Princeton. Also, even though it was not stressed by Adams, we have seen that Monroe carried it on also. And that even in his curmudgeon sort of way, John Quincy Adams carried it on.
And in fact, it is this personal contact with John Quincy Adams, Henry Adams grandfather, that allowed him the tone. Allowed him the chance to have the musical pitch in order to recapture the theme of the United States when it came into flowering. Because it was the personal remembrance of how old John Quincy, the president had handled him. And he gives us several events. The one most outstanding is a time when he refused to go to school. And he was stamping his feet and telling his mother, he was not going to school today. He did not like school. I will not go. And he had raised such a commotion. And they were not at home in Boston, but they were staying with the president. And the president opened the door of his library and came out and took little Henry by the hand and didn't say a word. And walked him slowly, silently to school and sat him in his seat and went back home. And Henry said that he never forgot that. The lesson in silence that the old man had taught him. And that there is a warrior wise way of being in this world. Just do it. And that this experience instead of turning him against his grandfather, made the grandfather dear to him. That he had cut through all of the arguments, all the passions, all of the nets of involvement that his mother was susceptible to.
And he carried that insight in his work and said, is this not why we gave up worship of the Virgin? Why the medieval world, the queen of heaven no longer really would do for us? Yes, she is our mother, but she is susceptible to our tantrums. She will always forgive us. She will always welcome us in. And we know that we have been bad beyond reproach. We need to understand in a masculine way that this silent doing is a pure path which does not negate the mother but is necessary to compliment it. And this is what we must learn.
This lightening insight of doing is the only thing that keeps us from atrophying in our sense of multiplicity. Otherwise the multiplicity proliferates and takes from us any evocative echoes any chance of reality. And we languish like some Homeric gibbering ghost fading into the possibilities of infinity. That it is only this definiteness, this purity of silence of the individual that finally allows us to change this.
Adams after recounting Grant, who is the epitome of the failure of watered-down multiplicity then jumps to the first time he went West in the United States, 1871. And as he's going West Adams changes his tone in The Education. And this is just before the great break, because the section, the chapter that comes after this is written in 1892, 21 years later. He tells us about having finally gotten out into the vast Western spaces. You see these cathedral-like spaces of the West. More vast than any Chartres could ever be. And there was a presence there that drew him out. And he went on his horse alone and went up into the mountains, the Rockies. Up into some Cirque Valleys and was drawn by this enormous presence, the vastness of the West. And didn't realize until it was too late, that he was in fact lost in the sun was going down. And it would set long before he could come back to any trail. And fearful as a e an Easterner would be. As a Henry Adams with his mentality would be. At being lost in the vast night of the West, realized for the first time in his life that the horse was at home. And so, he dropped the reins and let the horse go by itself. And he rode as a silent, pure passenger and the horse made it back home.
And when he saw the lights of the cabin, Adam shouting out as only a Boston dude could, here I am. And opening the door wide came Clarence King. And Adams weeping rushed off his horse in claim, Kings arms. And he says, this is Estes park in Colorado.
Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer night for an army of professors. But the supper question offered difficulties. There was about one cabin in the park near its entrance, and he felt no great confidence in finding it. But the, he thought his mule clever than himself and the dim lines of mountain pressed against the stars fenced his range of error. The patient mule plotted on without other road than the gentle slope of the ground. And some two hours must've passed before a light showed in the distance. As the mule came up to the cabin door two or three men came out to see the stranger. One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp. Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships it was never a matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons. They were shaped with the potaserous in solarium. They have nothing to do with the accident of space. King had come up that day from Greeley in a light four-wheel buggy over a trail hardly fit for a commissary at mule. As Adams had reason to know since he went back in the buggy. In the cabin, luxury provided a room and one bed for guests. They shared the room and the bed and talked to a far toward dawn.
And he goes on and then using a technique that Mark Twain made famous in humor. But Adams with his relentless search for education slowly turned this almost tall tale of Western adventures. And the protagonists hero Clarence King, not Henry Adams, slowly turns that to spiritual account. Slowly brings out the incredible internalness of it all. And then it strikes him that it's not general Grant in Washington in charge of the government who's the focus of the new world. It is men like Clarence King. Alone out in the wilderness at home in this vastness, which to them is no nightmare at all. But simply the dawn of a new age, a promise not yet known. What's to be afraid of the unknown. One must give up the past. One must let go in order to be free to be there.
He says,
This man had Californian instincts. He was a brother of Brett Hart in character. They had no leanings toward the simple uniformities of Darwin and Charles Lyle. They saw a little proof of slight and imperceptible changes. To them catastrophe was the law of change. They cared little for simplicity and much for complexity. But it was the complexity of nature, not of New York. Or even of the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox. He started them like rabbits and cared for them. No longer when caught or lost. But they delighted Adams for they helped, among other things, to persuade him of that history was more amusing than science. The only question left, open to doubt was there relative money value.
Well, let's take a break and then we'll come back.
END OF SIDE ONE
So, in
.we can bring our that's all right. Some people are addicted to that. If we can bring our minds back somewhat.
20 years after Henry Adams had written what I was unable to present to you, except in just a few indications. The book is eminently readable. Not as college students, of course, but from our standpoint as sensitive aware persons. He begins chapter 21, 20 years after saying, Once more, exclamation point.
This is a story of education, not of adventure. It is meant to help young men. For such as have intelligence enough to seek help, but it is not meant to amuse them. What one did or did not do with ones education after getting it, need trouble the Inquirer in no way. It is a personal matter only which would confuse him. Perhaps Henry Adams was not worth educating. Most keen judges inclined to think that barely one man in a hundred owns a mind capable of reacting to any purpose on the forces that surround him. And fully half of these react wrongly.
Fully half. You see Adams from one standpoint is jaded. From another standpoint is distant. Distant as like E.E. Cummings in his six lectures later at Harvard would be. Distant from the mind that conceives. That the sum total after a long enough period of time will be dead even. That man's mind has a symmetry and creates as many problems as it will solve. The solution is not in the mind. It's not in terms of the mind.
And so, Adams then writes,
Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871 and began to apply it for practical uses like his neighbors. At the end of 20 years, he found that he had finished and could sum up the result. He had no complaint to make against any man or woman. They had all treated him kindly. He had never met with ill will, ill temper, or even ill manners or known a quarrel.
He's holding everything at arms length.
How is this true? He had never been seriously dishonest. Or in gratitude he had found a readiness in the young to respond to suggestion that seemed to him far beyond all he had reason to expect. Considering the stock complaints against the world, he could not understand why he had nothing to complain of.
Well, this is humorous. This is like Mark Twain. In fact, Adams used Twain an example in here. He said, if Twain had said this, everyone would have classified it as one of his greatest witisms but actually U.S. Grant said, the only thing wrong with Venice is that they should drain it.
So, Adams continues in his education, in his autobiography. And finally brings himself to a section called The Abbess of Ignorance. And each chapter has dates, years. And The Abbess of Ignorance chapter 29 is dated 1902. And in The Abbess of Ignorance 1902 Adams is just about ready to finish Mont Michel and Chartres. And is just about ready to finish The Education at the same time. And occurring to him with increasing realization is the, was the understanding that these two points, these two historical eras, the 20th century and the 13th century. He began to characterize them as the Virgin and the dynamo. That is the Virgin was the symbol of the 13th century. The electric dynamo was the symbol of the 20th century. That in fact there was no way to make an evolution out of this in the normal understanding. That what context would allow for these to be related was it context which had in fact no base line. There were no Cartesian coordinates in reality. There were no coordinates in man's mind. There was no program of development for man. There was no plan, but there was a law. But the law was not any plan form. There was not any, as Adams would call it, a baseline. There was no baseline. There was only the phase form flow. And that this was perceptible to the patterning recognition of man in his pure silence.
And the recognition of the pattern of this phase flow after 1902 began to occur to Adams increasingly as an intelligibility. And in fact, in 1903, the chapter is called The Grammar of Science. It begins,
Of all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante this new exploration along the shores of multiplicity and complexity promise to be the longest. Though as yet it had barely touched two familiar regions. Even within these neuroses the navigator lost his bearings and followed the winds as they blew. By chance it happened that Raphael plummily helped the winds for being in Washington on his way to central Asia. He fell to talking with Adams about these matters and said that Willard Gibbs thought he got most help from a book called The Grammar of Science by Carl Peterson. To Adam's vision Willard Gibbs stood on the same plane with the three or four greatest minds of his century. And the idea that a man so incomparably superior should find help anywhere filled him with wonder. He sent for the volume and read it. From the time he sailed for Europe and reached his den on the Avenue Dubois until he took his chart return steamer at Sherbet on December 26th, he did little, but try to find out what Carl Pearson could have taught Willard Gibbs. Here came in more than ever the fatal handicap of ignorance in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed as the right to judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of the finer values of French or German. And often deceived by the intricacies of thought hidden in the muddiness of medium. One could sometimes catch a tendency to intelligible meaning, even in Cot and Hagle. But one had not the right to a suspicion of error where the tool of thought was algebra.
And so, he goes on in this chapter, The Grammar of Science. And finally develops in chapter 33, almost like in Canto 33 of Dantes form, A Dynamic Theory of History 1904. And this is where we well go next week. We will go to the end of The Education of Henry Adams and the beginning of the last phase of Adam's thought. They attempt to recover by intelligence, what is that phase form flow of reality? Which is the very essence of the pattern of man's consciousness. Which has no baseline detectable anywhere but how's it balanced and symmetry of its own flow. And that one must be able to be a mariner on the oceans of multiplicity in order to discover the hidden unity that never was not there.
Let's have some slides. These are unlabeled but I think these figures are familiar to us. And then call it an evening.
This is Walt Whitman, who we will get to in the next series. We had a chance to do our photography on a certain day and so we had to take these slides all together. This is Walt quite aged. All the time that Adams is living his life, writing his works Adams is developing the theme and insight that we saw and unfolded with Thoreau. Because Thoreau developed in his journal the form of a new American genre that one could discover in nature the cosmic man. And Whitman would take off, step off, from Thoreau and develop the personal cosmetics in that form. So, we'll get to Whitman.
And I think this is him. A little younger. Whitman's hair started to turn when he was very young, in his thirties. And of course, we will, we will see that the great walter
watershed for Whitman was the civil war, as it was for Henry Adams. In fact, in his education, he recounts how he had been apprentice to his father during the civil war. Lincoln had appointed Charles Francis Adams as the us ambassador to England during the civil war. And that Henry Adams was the secretary to his father. It was an Adams family tradition. Young John Quincy Adams had then taken at the age of 11 by his father John Adams to Europe during the revolutionary war period. And so, it was a family tradition.
And Adams goes on to recount the tremendous disappointment at arriving in London and finding that all of England was siding with the Confederacy. Thinking that Jefferson Davis was sure to win. And they were snubbing the ambassadors. Snubbing the United States. And he points out how only an Adams could take these nuts with equanimity. Only a Boston Brahman could absorb it all and not be moved by any of them. And how the English finally with the defeat of the union forces at Bull Run, finally called the Adams and to tell him to keep packed because any day now he would be sent back. And how they for years kept their bags packed. And finally, in 1864, when it was apparent that the union forces were going to prevail, that they began to change suddenly. And regarded Charles Francis Adams as somewhat an American peer. And how C.F. Adams was also unmoved at this side of the English character equally well.
And that after seven years of being in Europe they came back to the United States in 1868. And he said, I might as well have been a Carthaginian from the year one because the U.S. was completely different. And was a total stranger to it because the civil war had changed this country drastically for once and for all. At least until it's return to its Hermetic roots.
This is a photograph of Whitman right after his experiences in the civil war. When he was a nurse tending the thousands of wounded for a week and month after month. And of course, Whitman's acceptance of that debacle was again quite different from an ordinary person. He turned it to a cosmic account.
Now this is Walt as a young man in his thirties, late thirties.
This is archetypal, classical view of Whitman.
Oh, well get to him next. That's Mark Twain. Of course. I came into this world, he said, asking for a life.
That's Sam Clemens a friend of mine claims.
Theres the old boy. I don't think that's on his porch in Hartford. I think that's up in the Hills trying to get away from it all.
And we'll get to him next. We'll spend a whole month with Twain, who is interesting beyond compare. All of these figures in our past, in our tradition, when we really look at them in their own terms turn out to be quite a heritage, quite a legacy. A lot better than television.
This is Henry Adams lady. His wife. He never loved another. They were married for 13 years. And she finally contracted an illness, a disease, that made it very, very difficult for her to continue. And she actually took her own life. And that set Henry Adams back a long time. Many years.
This is Henry. Just to comment there is a slight resemblance of Dostoevsky.
This is Henry Adams at 80, the end of his life. He maintained his famous silence last decade or so of his life. The last thing that he wrote was in 1910. A letter to a teachers.
This is Mont Saint Michel.
Heres a view looking down from an area, a parapet of the Mont. Down to the sand. That swirl there is the sand. And of course, it's covered with title water. So, you have to constant shift of earth and sea. Two primal contexts. But the stability of the church you see.
This is in the upper reaches of Saint Michel.
Also, Mont Saint Michel and this is in the
.this looks like Chartres. This is Chartres.
And this of course.
You remember Henry Adams **inaudible word** last week, no matter who came to her house, the queen of heaven was always home. Her presence was always there. Accepting. You were welcome to be here. Whereas the dynamo, the polar opposite of that, everyone is compelled to be somewhere else.
He talks and he writes about an interesting aspect that in the 13th century no expense was too great for man to strive for his expression of his contact with wholeness. But it was in later centuries that she was seen to be too expensive to keep. The cost of such **inaudible** was prohibited. And by the 19th century man found that she just didn't pay in terms of the legend. This is his comment on the degeneration of civilization.
This is from the west portal. These figures are quite interesting here. The folds, the fold of the draperies on these figures and the way in which the form underneath, the human form, highly stylized is a structure which holds up the pattern, symmetry of the folds is actually from central Asia. That style was a great ecumenical style from the 6th to the 12th century in central Asia. And its carried over here and brought West. By whom? By those inheritors of historian Christianity, the **inaudible word or two**.
The soaring spaces of the presence of unity. It is just that it is turned up in the 20th century. Given no place to be. And thats why we have this. A long night.
Well, we will see next week Henry Adams finally making clear the great phase form of history. Hope that some of you will be able to make it.
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