Ah, good old Thomas Jefferson. His pretty round home on a hill, with warm red brick, rolling fields, sunset on the Blue Ridge. In his final credited reckoning of life, a little university, with its own private language of slow dignity. That he, the writers say, was a genius in an everything sort of way: a philosopher, a scientist, a leader, and more. That he admired France, spoke languages, and loved wine. Most importantly, that he discovered in his lab of curiosity the original, pure formula of American virtue.
Rising from all of these elements, a glowing, hot-spiced-drink-by-the-fire-at-Monticello sort of aura is endemic to his persona in mainstream memory; the cover of the well-applauded Jon Meacham biography of him is blocks of deep, burnt gold on either side of a close up portrait of his gentle, knowing smile. Washington is a tall, strong oak, Adams is a cold cup of coffee, Madison is a stack of well-worn textbooks, but Jefferson is a golden-brown crusty pie, twenty minutes out of the oven.
Maybe this is deserved; maybe he really was a charming genius. Or maybe his sprawling curiosity was innocent on its own, but was twinned with an inability to see, genuinely and habitually, beyond the self’s immediate and constant hunger to see itself everywhere the brain looks.
Because America wasn’t a place to him; America was his art. An eclipse of reality with abstract truth; a contained, complete, and witnessable alignment of both spirit and observation. In it, he could only see what he could fit into the framed canvas of a total worldview, a rubric for all society from the soil to the potent and enduring abstractions we still hunt for behind the stars. That’s why he could say, in all seriousness, that a traveler crossing the continent from the Rockies to the East Coast in his time would ascend the complete ladder of civilization, from an absurdly homogenous imagined state of skin-wearing heathenhood to an equally absurdly homogenous most-advanced state of poor diets and psychological misfirings that were the marks of modern Western life even in this early form.
Or that he could say that everyone but the rich should be a subsistence farmer, because only yeomen were self-reliant, and only a totally self-reliant citizenry was compatible to sufficient perfection with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: So much did he need everything in society in its little place in the political image in his mind, like the background crowds in a giant renaissance painting, or a Mandala, a perfect circle of ideas for the universe and all beings in it.
The painting becomes the point; emergent complexity is only an obstacle to the ecstasy of realizing his vision. Slavery? He reacts with a constant state of weaselly, infuriating denial. Foreign trade? The painting depicts only total, personal material sovereignty. No room for the people who built things, or traded them overseas, or that he owned as his property.
He had the immovable, exciting knowledge about how things could fit together, how things should fit together, that arrives from the bones, and the channeling of which into physical form is the artist’s sacred and selfish duty. We want this when the art is paints and canvass. We don’t want this when the art is a country, a seething mess of changes unforeseeable, complexity unmappable, and human lives in the balance.
I also love wine. I also try to learn new things as much as for any good reason as to further my sense of self in the wider world. And I have my own painting: creativity, higher forms of fulfillment, self-awareness and acceptance, all make calmer, more prosperous, more forward looking citizens; creativity is enabled by platforms that might be universalizing.
What about the whole world? What about people and stories that make my painting less glowing, more muddled?
Does not compute.