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1 Moments More Concentrated than Hours Grief and the Textures of Time “I cannot be serious!” John Adams announced in a March 2, 1816, letter to Thomas Jefferson. “I am about to write You, the most frivolous letter, you ever read.”1 Inspired by recollections of his remarkable era prompted by Baron von Grimm’s Correspondance Litteraire, Philosophique et Critique, Adams wondered whether his friend Jefferson, given the chance, would choose to live his entire life over again, just as he had experienced it the first time. In Jefferson’s April 6 reply, which he proclaimed a “full match” for Adams’s frivolity , the third president of the United States assured its second that he would gladly relive his own life.2 Declaring himself in sympathy with Adams ’s belief in benevolence, Jefferson represented the possibility of repetition as a source of no little satisfaction. He contrasted his optimistic and “sanguine” embrace of Adams’s proposal to the negativity of those who would forgo the opportunity to relive their lives; these he scorned as pessimists , possessing “gloomy and hypocondriac [sic] minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future.”3 But the lighthearted tone marking the two statesmen’s playful indulgence of this temporal fantasy vanished as the question of grief entered into the dialogue. An acknowledgment that sorrow came even to the optimistic prompted Jefferson to interrogate the moral purpose of pain: I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object. And the perfection of the moral character is, not in a Stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so unjustly too, because impossible , but in a just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote.4 25 Adams’s response to his friend’s question, in a letter dated May 6, 1816, followed Jefferson in abandoning the playful tone of previous missives to pursue the serious matter of grief. Adams theorized that grief signaled a “mechanical and inseparable” connection between pleasure and pain, so that the disruption of any continuity of pleasure—whether the death of a loved one or the failure of a business—must inevitably produce the pain we experience as grief.5 But this pain, in his view, was fundamentally productive. Insofar as it tempered the love for pleasure, discouraged excesses of “Imagination and Avarice,” and “compelled [mourners] to reflect on the Vanity of human Wishes and Expectations,” grief taught both resignation and virtue. Observing that all portraits of great men revealed “Furrows . . . ploughed in the Countenance, by Grief,” Adams proposed that the most effective legislators and judges were those who had been disciplined by sorrow.6 The mournful were best suited to governance, perhaps, because grief itself served a governing function in the ex-president’s assessment; he argued that it “compells [men] to arrouse their Reason, to assert its Empire over their Passions [,] Propensities and Prejudices.”7 Yet even as he saw grief working to abet reason by “sharpen[ing] the Understanding,” he also maintained that it “softens the heart,” supplementing that rationality with a well-managed capacity for feeling.8 Grief, that is, taught not only discipline but also sympathy ; balancing reason with emotion, it produced both citizens and subjects. For Adams, then, the role grief played in the “just equilibrium” of the passions Jefferson idealized was that of maintaining the balance. We can glimpse, in this epistolary conversation, the key terms organizing grief’s cultural significance at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The emergence of the subject immediately reigns in the imaginative play associated with the dream of reliving a revolutionary life, indicating that grief emphasized the limits posed by time, summoning the specter of loss and, with it, time’s irreversibility. Kept within these limits, however, grief possessed a significant degree of social productivity. Adams and Jefferson’s discussion suggests that as a “natural” impulse, the body’s automatic response to the vicissitudes of time as they took the form of loss, grief could provide both the sympathetic responsiveness and the impetus to self-governance that shaped the model American. For Adams, a lifetime of concentration on grief’s discipline perfected the moral, legislative, and economic capacities that protected against transience, “elevat[ing] [men] to a Superiority over all human...

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