extra post - what I am embarassed to know about Henry Adams

Though my eyes glaze over at long stretches of The Education of Henry Adams, I am glad to see a consistent trend at least in the narrative. Is it absolutely ridiculous that Henry Adams writes about his life in grandiose, retrospective third person? Yes, it is absurd. I can only imagine Henry Adams the old man hunched over his writing pad, fondly remembering Mrs. Frank Baxter for the first time in nearly sixty years, and how he never quite forgave her for her marriage, and painting a session in Rome as a “bewildering complex of ideas, experiments, ambitions, energies…” (93). Henry Adams breaks every rule to make a text approachable in Stephen King’s guide “On Writing” that I had to read in the eleventh grade, including extensive and (now) obscure historical references, sentences a mile long, and untranslated quotes of another language. (“Quantula sapientia naundus regitur”? - Google helped me with that one: “With how little wisdom is the world governed”) Henry Adams, how does your impenetrable story supersede the conventions of the modern attention span? Why is it that with minimal aid of spark notes and google, I still have a story that I can enjoy on my own?
The reason that I like the Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, is because I find how hard the author tries to be extremely endearing. Also, his youth and development is nothing new. Henry Adams is a restless, inquisitive boy who was not challenged by the standardized procession of public education. This is how he rationalizes making bad grades, and that is how I do the same thing. (“It’s the system!”) Society frowns then and now on breaks from formal education and careers to do something as selfish as “become a tourist”, but Adams is not afraid to quell his own unrest at breaking from public pressure by giving being bum the legitimacy of “absorbing knowledge.” (93). He has ambitious dreams with no particular direction, so he stretches half-heartedly for greatness (or dramatics) by talking of joining the Army or by writing invective letters. Constant analysis of himself, his location, and others is most touchingly human, along with the author’s preference for big words. Freud wrote about this very thing and called it “scientification”, a coping mechanism to remove yourself from society and its pressures by becoming superior to the whole thing.
I most like Henry Adams the person for these reasons because he is just like me. I say this reluctantly, because I know that Henry Adams is quite boring. With the benefit of having his whole life bound in my hands, and if mine and his lives are any indication of the future, I can continue reading this autobiography with the knowledge that I also will grow to be quite boring. This is what I have thus gathered from The Education of Henry Adams.

(I have a different version of the book, so my page quotes might be off.)