Founding Fathers ... of Self-Improvement

It has been said that America is a place for new beginnings and second chances. Americans, more than perhaps any other people, are obsessed with the ideal life, with the improvement of their very selves. The Europeans first to land in the new world, and the waves of immigrants ever since, have been people who were by definition looking for the grass to be greener on the other side … of the ocean in this case.

It should be no surprise then to find elements of this nationally characteristic – self-involvement? - fixed from the very beginning, evident even in the hearts and minds of the framers and founders. But reading David McCollough’s superb biography of John Adams recently, I was pleasantly surprised and somewhat amused to find the honesty and vulnerability of the subject as portrayed in his own diaries and letters.

“Oh! that I could wear out of my mind every mean and base affectation,” Adams once vented to his diary. And “conquer my natural pride and conceit.”

McCullough goes on to describe Adams’s frustrated state of mind: “Why was he constantly forming yet never executing good resolutions? Why was he so absent-minded, so lazy, so prone to daydreaming his life away? He vowed to read more seriously. He vowed to quit chewing tobacco. ….

On July 21, 1756, he wrote:

'I am resolved to rise with the sun and to study Scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other three mornings. Noons and nights I intend to read English authors .... I will rouse up my mind and fix my attention. I will stand collected within myself and think upon what I read and what I see. I will strive with all my soul to be something more than persons who have had less advantages than myself.'” (McCullough, p. 41)

Then, the next day, as one just might expect, Adams records that he had slept in late and accomplished nothing.

Oh! That this portrayal did not ring so true and cut so deep!

I don’t know how many similar reading plans and lists of goals I’ve formulated, but I do know roughly what percentage have met a fate similar to Adams’s. It’s pretty near to 100.

Perhaps it’s poetic then that this book has inspired yet another attempt on the part of yours truly, and only fair that I record it in this space – also being a product of an attempt at refocusing energies. This time, I’m renewing my goal to read more thematically, less sporadically. Yes, if you’ve been in my house lately and perused my shelves, I am already aware that I have stacks of unread books, representing half a dozen different reading programs, strewn about and gathering dust. But this one has inspiration.

I’ve already stated that McCullough’s biography is superb, and indeed it is. The story is transporting and the writing is transfixing. But that is just the means, the result is an in-depth look at the conversation of ideas alive in this one time and place told through the (mostly) men who moved them, and it is beyond fascinating. It’s, well, inspiring. Inspiration enough for a new reading plan of my own at least. Besides, I have needed for some time to return to study the Enlightenment so famously moved past in this day of obsessive ‘post’ prefixes. What better vehicle than a companion study of one of the clearest and most relevant outcomes: the society and government of the United States?

In this still-first week of the New Year, with resolutions everywhere already waning and falling by the wayside, I lustily and fool-heartedly toss my hat into the ring. Let it be resolved, therefore, that I do commit, here and now, to read at least one dozen books on, about or written during the 18th century having to do with the philosophy, politics or history of the time before reading anything else … much … anything else much. That is, maybe I could allow one or two books on the side, if need be and occasion arise.

(I already have a list of 20 and have started number three. Anyone care to take odds?)