The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams was born into American aristocracy the grandson of a president and the son of a diplomat. He spent his life in the corridors of power and the libraries of Europe, amassing what he called an education, only to watch everything he knew dissolve around him. The Education is his attempt to understand how a man could be so thoroughly prepared for a world that ceased to exist. Written in the years before World War I and privately printed in 1907, it reads like an elegy for a civilization the dynamo had rendered obsolete. Adams charts his formation in the conservative world of Quincy and Harvard, his years as a journalist and historian in Washington and London, and his gradual realization that the 19th century had been a long mistake, that history was accelerating beyond any human scale. The books most famous chapter, 'The Dynamo and the Virgin,' captures the central terror: that meaning itself had been Automated out of existence. This is not a happy book, but it is a profound one, a portrait of a brilliant mind in dialogue with its own obsolescence that speaks directly to anyone who has felt the ground shift beneath them.
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“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.””
— Henry Adams
“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.””
— Henry Adams
“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.””
— Henry Adams
“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.””
— Henry Adams
“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.””
— Henry Adams
“The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.””
— Henry Adams
“Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.””
— Henry Adams
“The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.””
— Henry Adams
“Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce...in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.””
— Henry Adams
