Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Education of Henry Adams"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series covers The Education of Henry Adams. It begins:

Written in 1905, The Education of Henry Adams was printed in a private edition of one hundred copies, limited, perhaps, to that number because it was thought to be as large an audience as it was likely to command. Adams explains at the very beginning the somewhat unusual ambition he had for the book.

“American literature offers scarcely one working model for high education…. Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to discuss it.”

Five hundred pages later, in a chapter entitled, “The Abyss of Ignorance,” Adams tells us what he had hoped his education would teach him and why this was a necessary sequel to something else he had written. The century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, was, he believed, “the unit from which he might measure down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation.” He had written Mont Saint Michel: a study of thirteenth-century unity so that he could, from that point, “fix a position for himself, which he would label: The Education of Henry Adams: a study of twentieth-century multiplicity. With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his line forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from anyone who should know better.” Adams was serious. This was not some generalized scheme of historical movement; he had something quite specific in mind: to trace, to “triangulate,” not just the movement, the “acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in finance and force.”

Born on February 2, 1838, Adams had more than the ordinary chances of acquiring the education he needed. His great-grandfather, John Adams, and his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, had both been President, and his father, Charles Francis Adams, was the American minister to England during the Civil War. Henry Adams, however, was never to have anything like the same kind of career. “As it happened he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it….” It was not because he was a particularly good student. He hated school, “and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away.” There were, really, only four things he thought he needed to know: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. “With these he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society.” It is a mark of how much has changed in what we mean by education, that Adams added, “Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school.”

After the wasted years of ten to sixteen, Adams wasted four more at Harvard. Looking back on it...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams.

--Marshal Zeringue