Maira Kalman, over on the NY Times website, has put together a truly extraordinary piece (I’m not even sure what to call it — an essay with drawings? a pictorial thought-piece?) on Thomas Jefferson. Lovely and lyrical, and it captures something about the guy that’s difficult, sometimes, to capture in naked prose.
Jefferson’s undergoing a little bit of a public rehabilitation these days, it seems to me. I’m absurdly biased, I realize; I just spent 12 years of my life writing a book in which he’s the main character, and I developed the deepest admiration for his ideas and his principles and his approach to the world. But I do detect something of a turning of the tide — from a focus on “evil slaveholder” back to one on “profound thinker.” It’s a good move for us all – Jefferson’s got a lot to teach us, and I think a generation or so went by when it was almost impossible to get any of that across because of the ill-regard in which he was held by so many.
Ms. Kalman’s title — “Time Wastes Too Fast” — comes from a deeply poignant episode in Jefferson’s life. I described it this way in my book:
“In the Spring of 1781, Jefferson was finishing up his second term as Governor of Virginia, the office to which he had been appointed following his service with the Continental Congress and his justly-celebrated work drafting the Declaration of Independence. It was a very difficult and unhappy time in his life. His infant daughter Lucy Elizabeth died in April; his wife Martha, who had never quite recovered from the pregnancy (her fifth in seven years), was also, slowly, dyingMartha Jefferson died the following year (September, 1782).
Her deathbed scene is the stuff of legend. Just before she died, she scrawled an excerpt from Laurence Sterne