The year I was graduated from high school was the same one in which all of those end-of-the-century lists started coming out—The AFI’s Top 100 Movies, Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Century, Time’s 100 Most Important People of the Century. Every time a new list appeared on television or in print, I devoured it, continually refashioning the canons of cultural excellence in my seventeen-year-old mind. No lists inspired more enthusiasm in me than the Modern Library’s top 100 novels and works of nonfiction of the twentieth century. I spent a considerable amount of the summer after I graduated from high school reading the number-one books on the Modern Library’s lists—James Joyce’s Ulysses and The Education of Henry Adams.
While Ulysses befuddled me then and befuddles me now (I do love Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, though), Henry Adams’s bildungsroman appealed to me immediately. While he grew up a Boston patrician and I was raised in significantly more modest circumstances in Vermont, I found Adams a relatable character. Like Adams, I was interested in history from an early age and became a professional historian. We both came from what I thought of as historical families. My family was historical in the sense that we read encyclopedias for fun, visited battlefields, and my grandmother ran the museum in my father’s hometown, opened Wednesdays and Sundays from 12 to 4. His family was historical in the sense that his grandfather was John Quincy Adams.
We shared a New England that is as parochial now in the minds of its fellow countrymen as it was then. Like Adams, I feel ill-at-ease with many of the technological changes that have occurred during my lifetime—changes that apparently took place while I was spending my summers reading him. For both Adams and myself, discomfort with gadgetry is not merely a cultural or social stance. Despite efforts to adopt them to our respective ends, Adams was then as I am now genuinely illiterate when it comes to technical know-how. This tension between a quest for old-fashioned erudition and the demands of contemporary savoir faire struck me more than anything in my initial reading of The Education of Henry Adams and may have turned this tendency in my own personality into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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