A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. *
the case of oliver wendel holmes, jr. just went from ambivalence to poignancy with me.
when i was in grad school i had read mark dewolfe howe's "shaping years" bio of holmes. at the time i thought the book was a little hagiographic but the reality of holmes needed no embellishment. he was brilliant, accomplished, famous, urbane, tall, handsome and a war hero, one who makes you want to just throw up your hands in disgust because he had it all and excelled at everything.
when he enlisted in the civil war he was on a moral crusade. he had been a body guard for one of the most fiery abolitionist orators of the day. after ft. sumter he abruptly dropped out of harvard and when he found out his regiment wasn't slated to head south and fight he joined one that was.
the civil war changed holmes, i knew that. he had been seriously wounded on three different occasions and saw his share of the slaughter that that war is infamous for. he had come out of it steeled, even more rationally inclined than before and he had lost much of his pre-war empathy for people. he never disavowed his abolitionist sentiments but he became cynical about any cause and contemptous of those, like his earlier self, who espoused them.
he was born a boston brahmin and after the war lived the part as intellectual, jurist, well-deserved elite. i remember the later pictures of him in howe's book. he was a very intimidating man even to look at and read about.
i don't know if i knew then about his infamous opinion in the sourth carolina sterilization case ("three generations of idiots are enough") but i remember feeling a coldness and heartlessness in holmes that kept me from placing him in my own personal pantheon of heroes. he and his wife were childless and i wondered about that. howe did not address it. a lack of intimacy with his wife? she was HOT but that didn't necessarily mean anything. maybe he disliked children, which would go along with his coldness.
thus my ambivalence. he was a titan in every way but i don't like elitists even elitists with cause, i don't like mean people, and i don't like people who don't like kids.
now i read louis menand's account of him (1).
menand's book is about the men, holmes being one of them, who instantiate pragmatism, a philosophy that is uniquely and distinctively american and which is criticized as being without a moral center, where "eternal values" are instead seen as historically contingent and where there are many, or no, truths. it is a philosophy that could be created by a brilliant man who had just seen his own values and truths, and so many lives, shattered by war. what i did not know was that the war shattered holmes too.
"he told me, a friend said, "that after the civil war the world never seemed quite right again."
why did he not have children? because "this is not the kind of world i want to bring anyone else into."
sixty-seven years after the war, when he was 93 years old "holmes tried to read aloud to marion frankfurter, felix frankfurter's wife, a poem he liked about the civil war, but he broke down in tears before he could finish it."
holmes never got over the civil war. as he once wrote to his father, "i am not the same man.' the truth is that man was dead now, and the corporeal holmes, the "remains," mourned him every day for the rest of his life. as menand says, the tears he shed before marion frankfurter "were tears for what the war had destroyed." he had to remain aloof. his coldness was his way of coping. "he doesn't show emotion, not because he doesn't feel, but because he feels so deeply."
in the late winter of 1934, holmes began quietly getting his affairs in order. he thought much of the war, of henry abbott, of ball's bluff and antietam, of his wounding and his terror and his resolve never to let it show. he sat in his library thinking of these things and he scratched out something on a small piece of paper. he then rose unsteadily and walked over to the small closet in the library where they were kept and pinned the piece of paper to them:
"these uniforms were worn by me in the civil war and the stains upon them are my blood."
*dickens, a tale of two cities.
-benjamin harris
(1) the metaphysical club
PUBLIC OCCURRENCES
when i was in grad school i had read mark dewolfe howe's "shaping years" bio of holmes. at the time i thought the book was a little hagiographic but the reality of holmes needed no embellishment. he was brilliant, accomplished, famous, urbane, tall, handsome and a war hero, one who makes you want to just throw up your hands in disgust because he had it all and excelled at everything.
when he enlisted in the civil war he was on a moral crusade. he had been a body guard for one of the most fiery abolitionist orators of the day. after ft. sumter he abruptly dropped out of harvard and when he found out his regiment wasn't slated to head south and fight he joined one that was.
the civil war changed holmes, i knew that. he had been seriously wounded on three different occasions and saw his share of the slaughter that that war is infamous for. he had come out of it steeled, even more rationally inclined than before and he had lost much of his pre-war empathy for people. he never disavowed his abolitionist sentiments but he became cynical about any cause and contemptous of those, like his earlier self, who espoused them.
he was born a boston brahmin and after the war lived the part as intellectual, jurist, well-deserved elite. i remember the later pictures of him in howe's book. he was a very intimidating man even to look at and read about.
i don't know if i knew then about his infamous opinion in the sourth carolina sterilization case ("three generations of idiots are enough") but i remember feeling a coldness and heartlessness in holmes that kept me from placing him in my own personal pantheon of heroes. he and his wife were childless and i wondered about that. howe did not address it. a lack of intimacy with his wife? she was HOT but that didn't necessarily mean anything. maybe he disliked children, which would go along with his coldness.
thus my ambivalence. he was a titan in every way but i don't like elitists even elitists with cause, i don't like mean people, and i don't like people who don't like kids.
now i read louis menand's account of him (1).
menand's book is about the men, holmes being one of them, who instantiate pragmatism, a philosophy that is uniquely and distinctively american and which is criticized as being without a moral center, where "eternal values" are instead seen as historically contingent and where there are many, or no, truths. it is a philosophy that could be created by a brilliant man who had just seen his own values and truths, and so many lives, shattered by war. what i did not know was that the war shattered holmes too.
"he told me, a friend said, "that after the civil war the world never seemed quite right again."
why did he not have children? because "this is not the kind of world i want to bring anyone else into."
sixty-seven years after the war, when he was 93 years old "holmes tried to read aloud to marion frankfurter, felix frankfurter's wife, a poem he liked about the civil war, but he broke down in tears before he could finish it."
holmes never got over the civil war. as he once wrote to his father, "i am not the same man.' the truth is that man was dead now, and the corporeal holmes, the "remains," mourned him every day for the rest of his life. as menand says, the tears he shed before marion frankfurter "were tears for what the war had destroyed." he had to remain aloof. his coldness was his way of coping. "he doesn't show emotion, not because he doesn't feel, but because he feels so deeply."
in the late winter of 1934, holmes began quietly getting his affairs in order. he thought much of the war, of henry abbott, of ball's bluff and antietam, of his wounding and his terror and his resolve never to let it show. he sat in his library thinking of these things and he scratched out something on a small piece of paper. he then rose unsteadily and walked over to the small closet in the library where they were kept and pinned the piece of paper to them:
"these uniforms were worn by me in the civil war and the stains upon them are my blood."
*dickens, a tale of two cities.
-benjamin harris
(1) the metaphysical club
PUBLIC OCCURRENCES
