Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

know, they are certainly keen enough to sense that in this war their chief enemy, irritant, and obstacle is the individual voice. For it is the individual voice that is most threatening to every form of tyranny, every attempted mechanization of the soul, every great challenge to civilization, and every assault upon human nature. Copyright is important because it is one of the guarantors of the rights of authorship, and the rights of authorship are important because without them the individual voice would be subsumed in an indistinguishable and instantly malleable mass. Those who have been taken irreparably into the roiling heart of this mass have a missionary zeal for pulling after them anyone and everyone. The red horse upon which they make their progress is immensely powerful, and it does not tire.

CHAPTER 3

NOTES ON VIRGINIA

Reclaiming Jefferson and Taking Care of Macaulay

The Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport is on a flat plain of the Virginia Piedmont, looking out at a long majestic line of the Blue Ridge. When I used to live in Brooklyn Heights, I would notice upon my return from Manhattan that, coming off the bridge or out of the subway onto quiet streets of nineteenth-century houses bedecked with flower boxes, my blood pressure would drop and pulse slow. Upon returning to Charlottesville from Manhattan, blood pressure and pulse seem to decline so precipitously as to suggest that one is dead. It is that beautiful, that tranquil, and it has an ineffable quality that promotes happiness. Perhaps this is a combination of climate, terrain, cultivation, and architecture. It may have been this way (minus architecture and cultivation) long before human settlement. Certainly if we are to believe Thomas Jefferson, it was like this in his time.

If a traveler, or a resident returning to Albemarle County, pauses when exiting the airport terminal and glances up into the rotunda, he will see a Jefferson testament inscribed around the lower rim. It conveys the same longing for tranquility of a Marlborough letter of 1703 (of which Jefferson could not have been aware) in which the English captain-general wrote, “I have no other thoughts of happiness but after all is over…to end my days quietly with my Lady Marlborough.”55 Later, Jefferson: “I am happy nowhere else, and in no other society, and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello. Too many scenes of happiness mingle themselves with all the recollections of my native woods and fields to suffer them to be supplanted in my affection by any other.”

From my house I can see Monticello. That is no accident. More than half a century ago, my father and mother brought me there on a day late in winter. My school’s vacation schedule was misaligned with that of most others, and my father was anyway used to taking me from class at will if he thought it justified—something that I now realize has shaped my view of formal education. Monticello was not the vast enterprise it is today, with long lines, trolleys, shops, and places to eat. Before the interstates and the internet, it was sufficiently isolated so that in part of that morning, askew of school vacations, we were the only visitors.

We found ourselves more or less alone, wandering around the house and grounds. I was able, no doubt illicitly, to touch things that you cannot touch today. I remember my mother’s brown suede coat in the pale winter sunshine. Though she has been dead a long time, she was then not much more than half my age now. I felt that we were guests in this great man’s house, and it seemed as if at any moment he might appear. Just a child, I had not read the Declaration of Independence and I knew hardly anything about Jefferson, but his spirit was so strongly imprinted there—in inventions, views, decoration, the very layout of the rooms—that, later, upon reading what he wrote (or at least a small portion of it) I was not surprised.

When John F. Kennedy welcomed Nobel laureates with the remark that never had the White House seen such a concentration of genius except possibly when Thomas Jefferson dined alone, he was, pace Lincoln, quite right. But for many reasons it is important to note that Jefferson’s genius could not have existed in the absence of its tension with his imperfections. That is, it was a product, above all, of his humanity. His genius was not cold but rather reliably passionate. Who else could have written the first lines of the Declaration, the bedrock upon which this country rests, a document that in form and content is transcendent and unsurpassed?

Leaving out for a moment the issue of slavery, it can be said that he was so engaged with life itself and the world in many of its aspects that he had little time for the hierarchy among men, even if he had to live within it and at times near or at its summit. I believe that the virtue of putting such hierarchy in its place stems from a perspicacious understanding of mortality, which Jefferson surely had. Probably in light of this he did not value the regard of others in the way lesser men do, even those of great or supposedly great achievement. The substance of his life and work makes it clear that he would consider as worthless dross the worship that some people devote their lives to obtaining. He wanted to be seen in full, for it is only the man in full, with all his imperfections, who is truly remembered and who can truly be loved.

We know many of these imperfections. Though we may never know for certain the nature—biological or otherwise—of his personal relations with Sally Hemings, and therefore, despite political wishes and temptations, cannot judge them, we do know that the man who wrote the most powerful and effective declaration of human equality that history has ever known owned slaves throughout his life,