Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless MindSimon and Schuster, 2010/05/11 - 288 ページ "I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended." -- Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson suffered during his life from periodic bouts of dejection and despair, shadowed intervals during which he was full of "gloomy forebodings" about what lay ahead. Not long before he composed the Declaration of Independence, the young Jefferson lay for six weeks in idleness and ill health at Monticello, paralyzed by a mysterious "malady." Similar lapses were to recur during anxious periods in his life, often accompanied by violent headaches. In Jefferson's Demons, Michael Knox Beran illuminates an optimistic man's darker side -- Jefferson as we have rarely seen him before. The worst of these moments came after his wife died in 1782. But two years later, after being dispatched to Europe, Jefferson recovered nerve and spirit in the salons of Paris, where he fell in love with a beautiful young artist, Maria Cosway. When their affair ended, Jefferson's health again broke down. He set out for the palms and temples of southern Europe, and though he did not know where the therapeutic journey would take him or where it would end, his encounter with the old civilizations of the Mediterranean was transformative. The Greeks and Romans taught him that a man could make productive use of his demons. Jefferson's immersion in the mystic truths of the Old World gave him insights into mysteries of life and art that Enlightenment philosophy had failed to supply. Beran skillfully shows how Jefferson drew on the esoteric lore he encountered to transform anxiety into action. On his return to America, Jefferson entered the most productive period of his life: He created a new political party, was elected president, and doubled the size of the country. His private labors were no less momentous...among them, the artistry of Monticello and the University of Virginia. Jefferson's Demons is an elegantly composed account of the strangeness and originality of one Founder's genius. Michael Knox Beran uncovers the maps Jefferson used to find his way out of dejection and to forge a new democratic culture for America. Here is a Jefferson who, with all his failings, remains one of his country's greatest teachers and prophets. |
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... word for “pursuer,” for the Tories were originally Irish outlaws who had been stripped out of their lands, bogcrawling men who lived by plundering the English invader. But the word has come gradually to denote, not merely a narrow and ...
... word for “pursuer,” for the Tories were originally Irish outlaws who had been stripped out of their lands, bogcrawling men who lived by plundering the English invader. But the word has come gradually to denote, not merely a narrow and ...
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... words, the brighter faith of the Declaration of Independence. He was quoting himself, alluding to the person he had been eleven years before, when he wrote out his draft of the Declaration during the heat of a Philadelphia summer. But ...
... words, the brighter faith of the Declaration of Independence. He was quoting himself, alluding to the person he had been eleven years before, when he wrote out his draft of the Declaration during the heat of a Philadelphia summer. But ...
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... words, as always, with care. He spoke not only of his “sensations of Grief,” that sensitivity to the tears in things ... word hypochondria was not limited, in the eighteenth century, to the morbid apprehension of imaginary diseases; the ...
... words, as always, with care. He spoke not only of his “sensations of Grief,” that sensitivity to the tears in things ... word hypochondria was not limited, in the eighteenth century, to the morbid apprehension of imaginary diseases; the ...
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... words. “What satisfaction can there be in living,” that disappointed Roman had asked, “when day and night we have to reflect that at this or that moment we must die?” Jefferson looked to the meditations of the philosophical Cicero for ...
... words. “What satisfaction can there be in living,” that disappointed Roman had asked, “when day and night we have to reflect that at this or that moment we must die?” Jefferson looked to the meditations of the philosophical Cicero for ...
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... words of love. But he discovered, as soon as he began to speak, that the love poetry he had inwardly rehearsed could not survive the spontaneity of conversation. “I was prepared,” Jefferson said, “to say a great deal. I had dressed up ...
... words of love. But he discovered, as soon as he began to speak, that the love poetry he had inwardly rehearsed could not survive the spontaneity of conversation. “I was prepared,” Jefferson said, “to say a great deal. I had dressed up ...
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