First Response to "The Education of Henry Adams"

I have to say that this was, hands down, the hardest thing I have ever read. As I read this my head was swimming, trying to make sense of what I was reading. I felt like I was just tossed into the deep end of the pool with out first being taught how to swim, waving my arms and screaming just to stay afloat. I screamed and shouted the whole time I read this trying to make sense of what was going on and trying no to feel like a complete moron.

As I read this essay I kept coming back to the idea of inertia. Inertia is ,"a property of matter, by which matter tends, when at rest, to remain so, and , when in motion, to move on in a straight line."(pg. 52.) As I read this definition, I struggled, as Henry Adams did, to see how this fit in with what was going on around him. What did inertia have to do with women's rights? How did what was going in in Russia deal with the idea of inertia. Then slowly I began to see that inertia can apply to more then just matter. It can apply to ideas and ways of living.

When Adams first goes to school at Harvard he feels that it is pointless. He had found in his life, up to that point, that school teaching would profit him little, if anything, but that others and life where the real teachers. That what others thought of you was really what mattered, not what you got on your report card. The inertia of this though pushed him though Harvard with little book learning, because it told him to keep moving in the direction that he already knew, but it caused him to make friends and to influence people.

As Adams grew older he found that not only his thoughts were being challenged but that the thoughts of the world where being challenged. As just as mass likes to stay at rest when it is, so do thoughts like to stay the way they are. As he traveled he began to open his mind to knew ideas. The inertia of his youth was slowly starting to change in some areas. His travels abroad slowly begain to change the direction that his inertia was moving.

As he came home he soon found that though his point of view had changed, America had remained unmoved. Its inertia was stubbornly moving in the same way it was when he left. One big issue that he sees trying to break this inertia was the struggle for women's rights. He saw that women where starting to emerge, but that the inertia of America was forcing them to stay were they where. Unable to change he say that the struggle to find a new identity caused the women to loose there old identity, even if they didn't want to. He sees that struggle to show others that, even though it is hard, things can change.

I think that this was a hard to understand essay that talks about change in a person and in a nation. And how it is not easy and that it takes lots of work to even move an opinion an little.