Time traveling with Henry Adams

My big read this summer was The Education of Henry Adams (1918) by Henry Adams.

Henry Adams! My strange “timid gentleman” friend. I had never heard of him until I read a New Yorker piece about this curiously compelling book, whose author (grandson of John Quincy Adams, great grandson of John Adams) writes about his life’s “failure” to find an education that would prepare him for the complexities of the 20th century.

So grateful for the extensive notes in this Oxford edition, without which I would have been totally at sea

He is lovable in that unlovable way—arch, ironic, removed (he writes about himself in the third person!), and self-deprecating to the very last sentence. His breathtaking privilege and proximity to power are the backdrop against which his search plays out. For work (which, as an Adams, he didn’t really need) he tries law, diplomacy, journalism, history, and finally literature, but his real work is witnessing and documenting the modernist rupture, the long moment when “unity” gave way inexorably to “multiplicity,” thanks to the erosion of the church’s influence and the rise of industry, scientific ways of knowing, technological acceleration, and corporations and global finance. A self-described “child of the 18th century” (because of his strong ancestral legacy), he gazes with dazzling perceptual force across time right at us in the 21st. It’s Whitmanesque that way, but even more penetrating because it’s so specific; it’s a gaze that follows rigorous attention and analysis. Here's a taste:

With science or society, he had no quarrel and claimed no share of authority. He had never been able to acquire knowledge, still less to impart it; and if he had, at times, felt serious differences with the American of the nineteenth century, he felt none with the American of the twentieth. For this new creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a pupil, and promised to be docile, for once, even though trodden under foot; for he could see that the new American—the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined—must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived to the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth—equally childlike—and he would only wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much.

I loved it. I learned a fair amount (most historically illuminating, maybe, are the chapters that take place before and during the Civil War; I had either forgotten or never known about English support for the Confederacy, for instance), but its pleasures, for me, are more related to this uncanny, time traveling quality, as well as the periodic beauty of the prose and the vivid sketches of people, places, and change.