Artsy6 quotes Adams:
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words
are slippery and thought is viscous."
And Artsy6 then asks:
> Do you agree with Henry Adams?
>
It's hard to agree totally with Henry Adams. He was a shallow guy, with a
fondness for a glossy phrase. Certainly his words were slippery in the sense
that they slipped easily from his pen, undeterred by prolonged or
penetrating intellect. After the Civil War he wrote:
"I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he
was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It's always the
good men who do the most harm in the world."
That kicker, "It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.",
has the sheen of something profound, but it's brainlessly wrong, and not a
little ugly. Adams's lack of intelligence was consistently reflected in his
vociferous and stupid anti-semitism. ("I detest [the Jews], and everything
connected with them, and I live only and solely with the hope of seeing their
demise, with all their accursed Judaism. I want to see all the lenders at
interest taken out and executed.")
in the line above, "No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they
mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous." he displays his gift
for costume-jewelery rhetoric. Here's a fact about "thought": it is not
stable; in a respectable mind, it starts as something weightless and, as the
thinker reflects, the thought is tested and advanced, it takes on density,
heft, and richness. All words are preceded by a thought; the mind then
searches for the words to express that thought. But that first thought is not
"viscous" at all; indeed it's more slippery-fast than the words it fetches up.
But Adams does not recognize the usual growth of thought. This is because he
rushes that first watery thought into ink, figures that's that, and gambols
on to his next bubble-thought.
I won't elaborate on this here, but one could write a page on his notion of
"means", which is obviously as befuddled as his notion of "thought".
