The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams, 1918
A president's grandson measures his own life against the century's machines and finds his education never once finished.
Henry Adams
1813–1877
Adams printed it privately in 1907, a hundred copies for friends, and it won the Pulitzer for biography in 1919, the year after his death.
Feels like melancholy, memory and wonder.
The moment a machine stops being a tool and starts being something you worship.
Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it. To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. Books by Henry Adams
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