Genius

Monticello

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Jefferson’s entryway is like a science museum. The wind vane connects to a display on the ceiling outside, the clock connects to a series of weights that display the day of the week. The antlers on the wall show American megafauna, and the Native American artifacts represent various tribes. There’s a concave mirror which reflects your image upside down, and there are various maps, as one would expect from the sponsor of Lewis & Clark’s expedition. The rest of the house also includes various gadgets and experimental devices, so he apparently enjoyed being seen as a wizard.

To call the house symmetrical is an understatement. The other side also has columns, well, just look at the back of a nickel. There are long wing-like patios connecting outbuildings, a tunnel running the transverse length underneath, and a winding garden path. Monticello means ‘little hill’ in Italian, but the views are impressive. Jefferson used to peer down through his telescope at the University of Virginia, which he also designed and founded and which is also part of this World Heritage site.

Jefferson is unpopular today, due to his treatment of slaves, and today’s Monticello does an excellent job of describing the hard life of the hundreds of enslaved people who worked here. The house tour includes the slave tour, and the docents are knowledgeable and answer a whole range of difficult questions. DNA testing revealed many secrets of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings—a child when it began—, and much more research has been done to unearth fascinating and desperate stories of slavery and a few of liberation. Jefferson knew slavery was wrong, and he had argued against it as a younger man. Some of his friends and colleagues freed their slaves and urged Jefferson to do the same, but with only a few exceptions, such as his own biracial children, he refused even in his will.

It is not wise to condemn the man entirely, however. If you believe that all men are created equal, that we all deserve freedom of religion without government interference, and many other American ideals, then you agree with Jefferson, who enshrined those ideals in our nation’s founding. We should hate the man for his racism and for perpetuating slavery instead of helping end it, but we should also admire his genius, as an architect, a revolutionary, and a renaissance man. Jefferson knew that the most memorable characters of the ancient classical ages all had tragic flaws that often destroyed them in the end, but that’s why we remember their stories—both good and evil—, to learn from them.

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site

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What anxiety or misgivings troubled me so incessantly today, I know not. Perhaps the unseasonable heatwaves dragging on interminably through the nights have robbed me of my wits by denying me the respite of unconsciousness, no matter how much gin I consumed. Even staying in the drafty old seaside cottage that I once played in as an eccentric child, only served to remind me of my age, my lack of gainful employment, my failed marriage, and the solitary road ahead of me. The storms of late have struck frequently with bizarre intensity, with lightning barrages casting ghoulish flashes on the faces of my now elderly acquaintances, as if to taunt me with signs of my own mortality.

The inexorable tides reach higher on the barnacled rocks with each passing year, and the great lawn, strained with drought, is over-crowded with groundhogs, rabbits and even passing deer seeking refuge, so desperate for food that they eat any flowering bud of beauty, no matter how small or hidden. I have long been tormented by the certainty of impending doom that renders me humorless and unappreciative of the banal social events that my family includes me in vain to soothe my awkward, sulking gloom. But now, some fiery rage is stoked in my soul, as avarice and willful neglect threaten all species with mass extinction while casual citizens busily immerse themselves in the capricious and mundane.

Certainly, knowing the tragic and unexplained death that befell the strange man whose steps I follow from Boston to Philadelphia weighs heavily on my brooding mood. A poet, critic and editor whose genius never quite paid the bills nor protected him from loss. His wife died of consumption at 24, perhaps pre-cognizant of her fate, visualizing her flower surroundings she would not smell. All of their furnishings of course are long gone, so there’s nothing left to do but study the cracks in the walls, read his disturbing writings and let your imagination call you into the basement, where his fevered dreams dwelled too long. The crazed rantings of his characters echo in the cobwebbed corners, some quietly creaking like the stairs too treacherous to climb and some screaming in my head like the gasoline fueled monstrosities on the roads outside. How was one genius able to create the Detective, Horror and Science Fiction genres, I wonder, before once again losing myself in the melancholic realization that our future may yet become a deviously difficult to solve dystopian hell-scape of our own pollution. This is one of my favorite sites, if only in my imagination.