# The Education of Henry Adams: An Australian Context



## RonPrice (Jun 21, 2009)

The famous work* The Education of Henry Adams*, a text that appears and reappears periodically in the literature of our age, is an autobiographical work noted for its frankness, its elegance and its view of a man who saw his own life as the microcosm of his age. My work, my educational experience and story, is far less frank, far less splenetic, far less elegant and hardly representative of my age. Like Shakespeare, though, I feel I am holding up a faithful mirror of the manners and life of my society, in this case Australia, thus reflecting reality through my writing.

I'm informed that a meaning of the word reflect, obsolete by 1677, was to 'turn back.' I do a good deal of that in my memoirs, however obsolete that meaning may be. Holding up a mirror to oneself also has another meaning in our visual iconography-vanity or pride, Narcissus admiring his own beauty by means of reflection. The demon of vanity, Nobel prize winner Roger Martin du Gard pointed out, is never completely silenced. It whispers its flattering presumptions to us all. I am warned.

Adams often used exaggeration to make his case as do many a literary figure and as most of us do in one way or another in everyday life. Leo Tolstoi, that great Russian writer, wrote that Shakespeare's characters are exaggerated and not realistic. Real people would not have spoken the way they do in Shakespeare's plays or sonnets,Tolstoi emphasizes. And this is true of the language in my narrative. As far as mirrors are concerned, in Shakespeare's day they did not faithfully replicate reality.

The skill in making mirrors had some distance to go in 1600. The words of St. Paul are also relevant here: "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face." Human knowledge is always partial and obscured. That is certainly true insofar as much of my autobiography is concerned, indeed, anyone's autobiography. Like the mirrors in Shakespeare's time, the mirror I hold up to life, society's and mine, is far from free of distortion, however honest and clear I strive to be. In addition, literary histories and autobiographies have mirrors with a specific pattern of reception and usage determined by the ideological bias, the epistemological limitations and the specific concerns of their authors.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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