(I could not defeat a formatting idiosyncrasy of WordPress, no matter how many times I tried to reformat this. Please pardon the unintentionally messed up. crowded, jumbled look of this post, even if I can’t. It makes me sick.)
A fellow won a prestigious award a few years ago, if memory serves, for adding a NY Times best-selling hagiography, American Sphinx, to bookshelves bulging with mostly laudatory accounts of the life of the Author of Liberty, Thomas Jefferson.
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I recall reading American Sphinx with a bent brow, not getting what I was looking for, except for another account of the mild, quiet, supremely controlled Founding Father coming back from his daily horseback rides with his horse whipped bloody, foam on the animal’s lips and terror in her eyes. It was left to a slave groom to calm the traumatized animal. This was, apparently, a regular occurrence on the plantation of our supreme advocate of Reason, Liberty and Freedom. Even biographers who extolled Jefferson as a renaissance man and philosopher centuries ahead of his time sometimes mention the unaccountable fury he regularly vented on his horses.
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But it is other American sphinxes I am thinking of now.
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Though I wonder less about them these days, and am less bothered by their mysterious individual and collective silences, I confess a certain puzzlement. If someone takes the time to send me something they’re working on I’m not likely to let it fall into silence.
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That’s just me, I suppose, thinking it only takes a minute to find something interesting to comment on by way of encouragement, or if not, it takes even less time to tap “yup!” or “droll” or “groovy, dood.”
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“That is just you,” goes a familiar refrain, “not everyone sits at their computer all day, thoughtfully writing and carefully reading emails. Most people are too busy to even click on links people send them, let alone read them.” She looks at her Blackberry and taps a few keys, laughs, hits “send”.
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“Publish something in the New York Times, then see how many of your buddies ignore your emailed op ed,” says my dead father, not unreasonably.
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