The Education of Henry Adams...and Myself

When we first began reading “The Education of Henry Adams” for our autobiographies seminar series, I must say I was not excited. When you pick the book up, it doesn’t immediately jump off the shelf as a book you would enjoy reading during your leisure time. The voice of Henry Adams, at times, is not extremely entertaining or interesting, making it a hard one to get through. However, with the visitors that we had speak on the book, it became increasingly more interesting to me and affected how I view my education.

The two conversations that shed new light on this book for me were those with Patrick Deneen and Judge John Heyburn. Deneen spoke about how troubled Adams was as a person because of the ways of thinking, such as Darwinism and an atrophic idea of history. He also struggled with his faith and the ideas of Catholism. He had great anxiety over the fact that past generations were able to do so many extraordinary things without the technology of his time, however, future generations seem to be losing their ability to perform the same things.

Judge Heyburn brought in his journal which he has been keeping since his twenties. In this journal, he keeps a record of every book he reads and makes a few comments about them. I found this to be an amazing idea and was inspired to begin to do this myself. Heyburn identified with Adams on feeling as though he was not educating himself well enough. I identify with this as well. It is easy in our day-to-day actions to forget about the things we have read and what we would like to take from them. This is an attempt to understand what it means to be educated and to remember things so that one can apply them at a later time.

— Taryn Mahanes, Class of 2013