Download American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson AudioBook Free
For a guy who insisted that life on the public stage had not been what he previously in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly put in significant amounts of time in the spotlight--and not only during his effective political profession. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a reliable stream of friends and holidaymakers who manufactured from his real estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand words per season, most from strangers, which he insisted on responding to individually. In his twilight years Jefferson was already dealing with the luster of a national icon, that was refined off by his auspicious fatality (on July 4, 1896); and in the next seventeen decades of his celebrity--now verging, because of virulent revisionists and tv documentaries, on notoriety--has been inflated beyond reputation of the initial person.
For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the knowledge of authoring Jefferson was "as if a pathologist, nearly to start an autopsy, has discovered that your body on the operating desk was still breathing." In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the reality shrewdly from the legends and the gossips, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the person who still today "hover[s] in the political picture like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, blinking words of ideas to both teams." For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no more liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He's all things to all or any people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which remaining him deaf to most varieties of irony) has leaked out in to the world at large--a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles.
From Ellis we learn that Jefferson sang incessantly under his breath; that he supplied only two general population speeches in eight years as president, while spending ten hours a trip to his writing table; that sometimes his politics sensibilities collided along with his domestic plan, as when he ordered an expensive piano from London during a boycott (and pledged to "keep it in storage space"). We see him relishing such tasks as the nailery at Monticello that allowed him to connect to his slaves more palatably, as pseudo-employer to pseudo-employees. We increase persuaded that he preferred to meet his fans in the rarefied region of his brain rather than in the actual bedchamber. We watch him exhibiting both great depth and great shallowness, incorporating significant learning with outstanding naïveté, piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest size. We realize why we have to neither beatify him nor consign him to the rubbish heap of history, though our company is by no means necessary to stop adoring him. He's Thomas Jefferson, after all--our individual sphinx.
