Monticello: Coming to Washington
June 19, 2005
Monticello seems too small, too fussy, for the streams of people that now traipse through its rooms. Jefferson experimented.. and the visitor is shown the automatically shutting glass door, the clock that tells the day of the week, the machine that allowed him to make copies of all his letters.. but his experiments never led to an ever expanding house. The floor space for the home is not too much larger than one would expect for a newly constructed suburban house, but the visitors keep coming. As soon as one large 20 person group moves on to another room, the next group promptly takes its place.
Listening to Jefferson’s efforts to live well, it struck me: he was an artist. Not by virtue of a large body of creative work, but by virtue of his memoranda books. Two volumes of the collected memoranda books are on sale in the gift shop, and they show Jefferson making notes to himself about money and this, that, and another thing.. for $200 you can see the day-to-day details of his life. The goal was not to strive and create a book to last as a monument, but rather to create a way of life. In the end that life was his greatest creation.. certainly more so than his fact-filled Notes to the State of Virginia. Monticello embodies his life, with all its tinkering to get it just right.. if you could set it all in words and fit it between two hard covers, then it would be the perfect book..
Jefferson’s grave is today marked by a large obelisk. Coming from his modest-sized house it is somewhat surprising.. until one reads on the information plaque that this was not Jefferson’s creation, but a marker that in 1883 replaced his own more modest grave marker. But the words on the present obelisk were chosen by him, and they reflect the three accomplishments Jefferson held most dear.. you can see them for yourself in the picture: the Declaration of Independence, the statute on religious freedom for the state of Virginia, and the founding of the University of Virginia. The grave is in its own way a declaration of what was important to Jefferson. The power of ideas trumps the privilege of office.
I thought of a line from Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys.. a line that frequently comes back to me: “How can I tell them that their lives could be much better?” Jefferson similarly seems to whisper to the visitor: “your life could be much better. You have not yet really thought about your life.”
These daily entries are my own way of thinking about life, and how to live up to some Jeffersonian values in a nation that today.. I have three goals: 1) think about what it means to live today as an American, 2) to present Washington DC through photographs, and 3) to catch just a few fragments of this passing life.