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"I've often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson suffered during his life from periodic bouts of dejection and despair, shadowed intervals where he was packed with "gloomy forebodings" about what lay ahead.
Not long before he composed the Declaration of Independence, the young Jefferson lay for six weeks in idleness and ill health at Monticello, paralyzed by a mysterious "malady." Similar lapses were to recur during anxious periods in his life, often accompanied by violent headaches. In Jefferson's Demons, Michael Knox Beran illuminates an optimistic man's darker side -- Jefferson as we have rarely seen him before.
The worst of the occasions came after his wife died in 1782. But two years later, after being dispatched to Europe, Jefferson recovered nerve and spirit in the salons of Paris, where he fell in love with a lovely young artist, Maria Cosway. When their affair ended, Jefferson's health again broke down. He lay out for the palms and temples of southern Europe, and though he did not know where the therapeutic journey would take him or where it would end, his encounter with the old civilizations of the Mediterranean was transformative. The Greeks and Romans taught him that a man could make productive use of his demons.
Jefferson's immersion in the mystic truths of the Old World gave him insights into mysteries of life and art that Enlightenment philosophy had didn't supply. Beran skillfully shows how Jefferson drew on the esoteric lore he encountered to transform anxiety into action. On his go back to America, Jefferson entered the most productive amount of his life: He created a new political party, was elected president, and doubled the size of the united states. His private labors were believe it or not momentous...among them, the artistry of Monticello and the University of Virginia.
Jefferson's Demons is an elegantly composed account of the strangeness and originality of 1 Founder's genius. Michael Knox Beran uncovers the maps Jefferson used to find his way to avoid it of dejection and forge a new democratic culture for America. This is a Jefferson who, with all his failings, remains one of is own country's greatest teachers and prophets.
