Posted by David Post:
For Jefferson Fans:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_06_28-2009_07_04.shtml#1246369069
Maira Kalman, over on the NY Times website, has put together a
[1]truly extraordinary piece (I'm not even sure what to call it -- an
essay with drawings? a pictorial thought-piece?) on Thomas Jefferson.
Lovely and lyrical, and it captures something about the guy that's
difficult, sometimes, to capture in naked prose.
Jefferson's undergoing a little bit of a public rehabilitation these
days, it seems to me. I'm absurdly biased, I realize; I just spent 12
years of my life writing a book in which he's the main character, and
I developed the deepest admiration for his ideas and his principles
and his approach to the world. But I do detect something of a turning
of the tide -- from a focus on "evil slaveholder" back to one on
"profound thinker." It's a good move for us all - Jefferson's got a
lot to teach us, and I think a generation or so went by when it was
almost impossible to get any of that across because of the ill-regard
in which he was held by so many.
Ms. Kalman's title -- "Time Wastes Too Fast" -- comes from a deeply
poignant episode in Jefferson's life. I described it this way in my
book:
"In the Spring of 1781, Jefferson was finishing up his second term
as Governor of Virginia, the office to which he had been appointed
following his service with the Continental Congress and his
justly-celebrated work drafting the Declaration of Independence. It
was a very difficult and unhappy time in his life. His infant
daughter Lucy Elizabeth died in April; his wife Martha, who had
never quite recovered from the pregnancy (her fifth in seven
years), was also, slowly, dyingMartha Jefferson died the following
year (September, 1782).
Her deathbed scene is the stuff of legend. Just before she died,
she scrawled an excerpt from Laurence Sterne�s Tristram Shandy on a
piece of paper:
Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what
rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying
over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return more �
every thing presses on
In the almost unimaginably vast trove of Jeffersoniana out there,
it is, other than a few inventory lists and the like, the only
surviving item written in Martha Jefferson�s own hand.
Jefferson himself � whether before or after her death is not known
� then wrote out the remaining lines at the bottom of the page:
� and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which
follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are
shortly to make!
Martha�s death threw Jefferson into a depression from which friends
feared he would never recover. �He kept his room for three weeks,�
his daughter Patsy wrote, and �walked almost incessantly night and
day, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely
exhausted, on a pallet that had been brought in during his long
fainting fit.� When he at last he left his room, �he rode out and
from that time he was incessantly on horseback rambling about the
mountain on the least frequented roads and just as often through
the woods.� A �miserable kind of existence . . . too burthensome to
be borne,� Jefferson wrote, �. . . all my plans of comfort and
happiness reversed by one single event and nothing answering in
prospect before me but a gloom unbrightened with one cheerful
expectation.�
It wasn't entirely relevant to my purposes, in the book - but so
touching I felt I couldn't exclude it.
I never did, however, find a way to sneak in the loveliest piece of
Jeffersoniana out there -- the bookend, as it were, to Martha's
deathbed scene. In 1818, when informed of the death of Abigail Adams,
Jefferson sent his condolences to her husband -- with whom he had just
a few years before resumed correspondence after nearly fifteen years
(fifteen years that had been filled with rancor and bile on both
sides). It's a hard genre, the letter of condolence, and Jefferson
writes the most beautiful one I've ever read:
"The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of
which your letter of Oct. 20 had given me ominous foreboding. Tried
myself, in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of
connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel
what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have
yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so
immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines. I will not
therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your
grief nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I
say a word more, where words are vain, but that it is of some
comfort to us both that the term is not very distant at which we
are to deposit, in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering
bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the
friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and
never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy
affliction."
References
1. http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/time-wastes-too-fast/
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