We are what they drink

Talleyrand expressed extreme astonishment at the apathy of Americans in the face of religious sectarians;

. . but he explained it by assuming that the American ardor of the moment was absorbed in money-making.

It was from Talleyrand that our great anti-imperialist picked up Louisiana. If we thought another generation might see the end of Talleyrand's nightmare, we might just send out for more hooch and wait. 


Watch them, then, watching us. We may drink what we want, but they must drink what we show them. Like revelers in Wagner's Venusberg, we seem to await a Tannhaüser we haven't bred ourselves, to interdict our Calvinist bacchanale. 


  

Watch them, the generation to whom we default and yet suppose to be the engine of our emergence from this admirabile commercium at the same time. In Growing Up Digital, a superb work of journalism from The New York Times today, we read of youths in one of the securest and most bucolic neighborhoods on earth, all but unable to sustain the act of reading.


Henry Adams' History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson is Clio's own text for unraveling our hereditary confusion. It comprises 4 volumes. The Library of America has it in 1. Like his Mont St-Michel and Chartres and The Education, it is a non-negotiable American legacy.

Contemplating St Cecilia's Day tomorrow, we remember Daniel Mendelsohn's explanation of Housman's unyielding fidelity to textual comprehension, as of a natural piece with his allegiances in Shropshire Lad. Abdication is not merely the refusal of an inheritance for oneself; it's a refusal to pass it on. Its renunciation wreaks a widening pool of destruction. How, then, can it be asserted that one values anything, without valuing its destiny? The American orgy will not be lifted by the disinherited. Today's scholars are ours in the most inalienable, undeniable way. 


Who will inherit this land? 
Do you love them?

Henry Adams 
The Jeffersonian Transformation
New York Review Books, 2007©


Georg Frideric Händel
What Art Can Teach
Carolyn Sampson, soprano
An Ode for St Cecilia's Day
Robert King, King's Consort
Hyperion, 2004©