Our Chartres, our Louvre

Convention Ctr, Portland, Oregon

.. to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity.. he began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel.. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres.. was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of.. and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist. (Chicago Exposition, 1900)

Only with the instinct of despair could one force oneself into this old thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed at a score of entrances more promising and more popular.. The secret of education still hid itself behind ignorance.. In such labyrinths.. the pen becomes a sort of blind man's dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth, like crystallization..

Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
  The Dynamo and the Virgin
Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918©
Charles Francis Adams, 1946©
Houghton Mifflin, 1961©