03.16.04 - 2:09 p.m.

Too many otherwise very different people recommended David McCullough's biography of John Adams to me, and I've finally broken down and started reading it. After a slow start - the first, say, fifty pages were more trial than pleasure - I've finally gotten into the meat of work and am really enjoying it. I had a similar experience with the Krushchev biography I read last year, so maybe I'll pick up one of the other famous biographies of super-famous people eventually again. It's just so fascinating to see people who are otherwise so starched and defined and goddamned historical as actual individual people, and it's so interesting to half-experience the events of the time in places so otherwise familiar to me largely in their contemporary guises or - again - as accomplished facts in a history class through the individualized texture of Adams' experience and life. Also, I think I'm half in love with Benjamin Rush, who, as Adams' friend in Philadelphia and a fellow Continental Congressman, features prominently in the early narrative.

So, yeah. Crushing on Continental Congressman: nothing nerdier than that.

Anyway, McCullough quotes this great passage from a letter Adams wrote to James Warren while Adams was serving as a Commissioner in France alongside Benjamin Franklin in 1777 and 1778, which references Franklin (although he is not mentioned by name) and which captures most of my half-formed thoughts on celebrity, ego, acclaim, and contemporary society that I had to save it here:

The longer I live and the more I see of public men, the more I wish to be a private one. Modesty is a virtue that can never thrive in public. Modest merit! Is there such a thing remaining in public life? It is now become a maxim with some, who are even men of merit, that the world esteems a man in proportion as he esteems himself.... I am often astonished at the boldness with which persons make their pretensions. A man must be his own trumpeter � he must write or dictate paragraphs of praise in the newspapers; he must dress, have a retinue and equipage; he must ostentatiously publish to the world his own writings with his name.... He must get his picture drawn, his statue made, and must hire all the artists in his turn to set about works to spread his name, make the mob stare and gape, and perpetuate his fame.

Mmm. Sing it, brother!

(Oh, this deserves more than a rushed five minutes' consideration, but a rushed five minutes are all I have.)