It's the birthday of historian and philosopher Henry Adams, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1838). He was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams, and wrote several books on American history, including the nine-volume History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-91).
He's best known for his dark and pessimistic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1918). He said he felt more at home in 17th- and 18th-century America than he did in 20th-century America. He wrote that most Americans he had encountered "had no time for thought; they saw, and could see, nothing beyond their day's work; their attitude to the universe outside them was that of the deep-sea fish."*
It's the birthday of novelist Richard Ford, born in Jackson, Mississippi (1944). Ford has spent most of his adult life moving from city to city with his wife. He's lived in 14 states, as well as France and Mexico. At one point, he divided his time between a townhouse on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, a house in Montana, and a plantation house in Mississippi. He said: "The really central thing is that, no matter where I move, I always write and I'm married to the same girl. All that other stuff is just filigree."
His first novels featured tormented characters, and his wife told him to try writing a book about somebody happy for a change. So he wrote about a normal, likeable guy named Frank Bascombe, who gives up a career as a fiction writer to write for a sports magazine. He wrote about 150 pages and showed them to his editor, who told him to throw the book away. But he decided to ignore his editor and finish the book, which he called The Sportswriter (1986), and it was his first big success. He wrote two more novels about Frank Bascombe, both of them successful: Independence Day (1995), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Lay of the Land (2006).
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https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-sunday-february-95e?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios
*William James wrote a remarkable letter to Adams in his terminal summer of 1910...
"...The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question..."
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