He teaches that grandeur and wonderment abound for those who yearn to better themselves.
He teaches that grandeur and wonderment abound for those who yearn to better themselves.
Y ou know you have lived a life of towering significance when you write your own gravestone by cataloging your three greatest achievements and being a two-term American president fails to make the cut.
There is Jefferson the man with perhaps the greatest résumé in the history of American politics: a revolutionary member of the Second Continental Congress, where he wrote the soaring prose of the Declaration of Independence; an ambassador to France where, he took over for Benjamin Franklin; a consequential governor of Virginia; the first secretary of state; the second vice president and third president.
There is Jefferson the quirky intellectual who was often more enthralled by science than by statecraft, who had a lifetime obsession with North American mammals, specifically the American mastodon, a cousin of the mammoth that he was convinced still roamed somewhere in the American West.
There is Jefferson the extraordinary friend and Jefferson the dogged enemy. The friendship between Jefferson and James Madison is the most consequential coupling in all of American history, spawning everything from the birth of political parties to the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. The enmity between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton endures to this day as a dramatic narrative, its modern apotheosis being a series of hilarious rap battles in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton.
So, what about the “self-help” version of Jefferson? Can he make a useful contribution to our lives today, given his titanic personal flaws? What does this man — who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, whose grasp of the Western canon molded him into a supreme master of civilization, who imagined an America of plenitude built on the springs of agrarianism, who detested cities and lived most of his life among enslaved people — possibly have to offer the average well-meaning American today?
Jefferson was the walking embodiment of the Renaissance spirit, an Americanized version of Leonardo da Vinci whose eclectic interests continue to dazzle the modern student. As an 1874 biography of Jefferson famously noted, he “could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play a violin.”
The writer of the most famous statement of freedom in all of human history understood that the richest and best lives — the lives most likely to not only “pursue happiness,” but actually attain happiness — were filled with a rich abundance of interests, hobbies, and pursuits.
What would it look like to follow in the path of Jefferson today? How would one be a modern Jeffersonian apostle, to live as he lived and champion his habits of the mind and heart?
For starters, it would obviously require a lot of reading and a vast palette of intellectual and artistic curiosity. It would require less screen time, less gazing at Netflix and Hulu, fewer anesthetized amusements, and a more robust commitment to the genuine study of consequential subjects. It would require a preternatural commitment to widening the cerebral circle of one’s mental world. It would encourage us to acquire new skills, collect fresh capacities, and embrace the constant quest of trying to improve the world.
It would not be easy, but the treasures would be abundant. Our lives would be filled with the lush tapestry of an ever-expanding symphony of possibilities — Jefferson’s was filled with wine and passion, books and friendship, math and poetry, achievement and tragedy. The best life rejoices in the glittering infinity of the human experience; it lurches in all directions, entertains any notion, questions any dogma, eats any food, talks to any person, or visits any location. It is a life that welcomes enormity and vastness, celebrates enchantment, levitates at the prospect of traveling to vistas of the unknown.
His assiduous capacity for deep study and endless reflection was the stuff of family lore, for it was said by his relatives that during his years as a student at William & Mary he routinely studied 15 hours a day, often late into the evening. His best friend in college, John Page, lamented that his bibliophile friend “could tear himself away from his dearest friends, to fly to his studies.” Even when he was on vacation, he spent most of his time reading books. As a child, Jefferson studied his Greek grammar book as other kids played around him. Years later, he famously wrote to Adams, “I cannot live without books.”
But he wasn’t one to quietly haunt the corners of libraries in isolation. He could play the violin with great virtuosity and skill, using his musical prowess to woo his future wife, Martha; she would play the harpsichord, Jefferson the violin, singing stanzas of songs together in perfect harmony. As a child, he practiced up to three hours a day and was proficient enough to play weekly concerts at the Governor’s Palace during his years in Williamsburg.
He believed in walking briskly, noting that he never knew a “great walker” who did not live a long and healthy life. He was also a “consummate equestrian,” usually riding in solitude for hours a day, no matter where he was in the world or the weather conditions — Monticello, Paris, or Washington, D.C.
He was a polyglot who could speak four languages — English, French, Italian, and Latin, the language of Cicero. He could read ancient Greek and modern Spanish, mastering Spanish in the course of just a few weeks as he crossed the Atlantic with only a copy of Don Quixote and a book of Spanish grammar.
He harbored a deep and abiding love of mathematics that sprouted in his youth and lasted his entire life. As an older man, he fondly remembered that “mathematics was the passion of my life.” He mastered the calculus of Newton’s Principia Mathematica and the geometry of Euclid’s Elements. When he was almost 70 years old and assisting his grandson in math studies, Jefferson continued to celebrate the satisfaction of mastering mathematics because “no uncertainties remain on the mind; all is demonstration and satisfaction.”
For Jefferson, rational thought was the ultimate ticket into the pantheon of an elevated existence, a plane of being where the noblest elements of life — truth, wisdom, beauty — were always to be found. It was said that on the door of Plato’s Academy were engraved the words “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter.” Like Plato, Jefferson believed that objective reason untethered to subjective experience was the path to capturing the underlying order of the world and cosmos. Such activity of the mind was the apex of human activity.
If there is a real frustration in living such a life, it is found in the begrudging reality of one’s inherent limitations — of books unread and destinations untouched. For we are individual beings living but a single life, endowed with faulty and subjective faculties, forever foiled by a universe guarding its secrets all too well. We are creatures of our time and place, filled with unescapable biases and ever-fleeting capacities, often unaware that our particular lens will seem folly and provincial in just the blink of a historic eye. One life is simply too short to experience even a fraction of the world’s splendors — the banquet of life is inexorably richer than we can possibly understand.
And yet, despite these real limitations, what Jefferson teaches us is that grandeur and wonderment abound for those who yearn to better themselves, who are never content with convention and see every day as an opportunity to enrich our inner fabric.
Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from the author’s recently published book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans.