The historian never stopped repeating to himself that he knew nothing about it [Truth]; that he was a mere instrument of measure, a barometer, pedometer, radiometer; and that his whole share in the matter was restricted to the measurement of thought-motion as marked by the accepted thinkers. He took their facts for granted. He knew no more than a firefly about rays — or about race — or sex — or ennui — or a bar of music — or a pang of love — or a grain of musk — or of phosphorous — or conscience — or duty — or the force of Euclidean geometry — or non-Euclidean — or heat — or light — or osmosis — or electrolysis — or the magnet — or ether — or vis inertiae — or gravitation — or cohesion — or elasticity — or surface tension — or capillary attraction — or Brownian motion — or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemical attractions, repulsions or indifferences which were busy within and without him; or in brief, of Force itself, which, he was credibly informed, bore some dozen definitions in the textbooks, mostly contradictory, and all, as he was assured, beyond his intelligence; but summed up in the dictum of the last and highest science, that Motion seems to be Matter and Matter seems to be Motion, yet “we are probably incapable of discovering” what either is.
I love old men’s writing. Henry Adams wrote this passage in the third person towards the end of his life. It appears in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. His prose flows like an old wise river. A common dictum tells a writer to cut words that do not add meaning; but I rather like all the extra words that Adams uses, because they retain the mind’s interest. He could have crossed out the firefly comparison and changed it to “He knew nothing about rays — or race — or sex — or ennui — or a bar of music — or a pang of love — or a grain of musk — or of phosphorous — or conscience — or duty — or the force of Euclidean geometry — or non-Euclidean — or heat — or light — or osmosis”; and heck, the use of or is repetitive, might as well change it to “He knew nothing about rays, race, sex, ennui, music, love, musk, phosphorous, conscience, duty, geometry, heat, light, osmosis…” — but wait a minute, we can generalize the litany a bit, since there are only three unique ideas, so perhaps we ought to compress those eight lines down to “He knew nothing about human difference, emotion, or science.”
Which of course is an awful, soporific sentence, and we ought to crumple it up and toss it into the wastebasket along with that rule about shunning semantically superfluous words, leaving Mr. Adams to write as he pleases.
One phrase of his in particular tickled me; some of its words are logically needless, yet one word is almost humorously necessary. Right at the end of litany:
“…or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemical attractions, repulsions or indifferences…”
Most writers would say “perhaps millions of chemical interactions”; but I like how Mr. Adams builds up to the millions by way of thousands and scores, so that the mind may grapple its way through two, four, and finally seven digits. The most delicious word of the paragraph, though, has to be “indifferences”; not one writer in ten thousand would think to include it in a list of chemical forces — there is attraction and repulsion — a push and a pull — a thing and its opposite — a plus charge and a minus, magnetic north and magnetic south, older even than Mars and Venus, the pure appeal of a pair; and Mr. Adams upsets an otherwise Manichean phrase with “indifferences.” Adams the historian might deny knowing anything about Truth in the first sentence I quoted, but that one word “indifferences” tells me he knows everything; that history is not wrought of theses and antitheses, actions and their equal and opposites; that the universe also contains a whole lot of nothing at all, of indifferences, of random inconsequential walks called lives. Not even keepers of — what did he call it — “the last and highest science” understand what the universe is made of, let alone how it all coheres. What I admire most about Mr. Adams’ writing is that he can escort the mind through a colorful, bounteous array of concepts, like a charming professor emeritus leading us through his personal botanical garden, the universe — but the old man’s biggest ideas lurk inside his humble, subtle phrasing.
