[Systematically re-reading past conversations is proving to be as illuminating as it is engaging.]
Meriwether Lewis seconds the motion
Monday, December 6, 2021
6:45 a.m. Meriwether Lewis’s birthday reflections at 31 have a certain relevance for members of our list, given recent thoughts from TGU.
“[August 18, 1805] This day I completed my thirty-first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended, but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least endeavor to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”
[From The Journals of Lewis and Clark, p. 206, with spelling silently cleaned up.]
Captain Lewis wrote this near the continental divide on the way to the Pacific. Even as he lamented not having done anything much, he was more than 2,500 miles and 15 months into one of the most successful expeditions known to history. And, instead of another 30 years of life, he was to receive but four, dying in 1809 either a suicide or the victim of murder. But of course he couldn’t know any of this in advance. Life doesn’t come at us that way.
His lament over past waste of time is so familiar. Julius Caesar is said to have wept when he reached the age Alexander the Great had died, because he himself had not accomplished anything to equal the conquering Macedonian. Young Emerson a few years later would make journal essays much like this one from Lewis. I could make a list, and of course I and most of you would be on that list.) Goes to prove, among other things, that you never know. You don’t know what’s coming, and you don’t necessarily know what you have already done. It’s all a mystery.