I can claim Henry Adams as a cousin since we share 2 distant ancestors (John Alden, Priscilla Mullins). I've read Mont St. Michel but don't remember much of it. His anti--semitism was indeed deplorable. It may stem partially from old English aristocratic views. The Jews were once expelled from England (by Edward 1, prompted by his wife Eleanor of Castille in later 13C) because they had too much money and charged interest. Many aristocrats borrowed from them and so when they were expelled it was very convenient for the indebted aristocrats. As for Henry Adams other failings I'll let Cheerskep have the podium. I'm not sure if Henry was really so dumb. He was smitten by Enlightenment mythology and thus branded by heroic couplets and pithy dinner talk. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, July 26, 2012 12:06:58 PM Subject: Henry Adams quote 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".
