1. The Essential The Essential Holmes.
In 1912 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. remembered his grandmother remembering “moving out of Boston when the British troops came in, before the Revolution.” Holmes fought in the Civil War; he shouted (allegedly!) “Get down, you damn fool!” to Abraham Lincoln during the Battle of Fort Stevens; he of course and famously judged on the Supreme Court; and he died in 1935, when my grandparents and one of my uncles were young. The past is not that far away. If, in midlife, the prospect of your death has begun to weigh on you, Holmes had advice: “I dare say that the best way is not to bother about death until it comes, but just crack ahead. I often say that to live sublimely the line of one’s life must end outside the frame like a Japanese drawing.” I visited that uncle of mine a couple of years ago, shortly before he died, when he was eighty-nine and his health was failing, and beside his chair lay a recent biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which ran to over one thousand pages, and I thought: what an act of optimism. But maybe he had a Holmesian attitude, and dove right in, never stopping to wonder if he would manage to finish it, that question being outside the brackets of his deliberation. Holmes himself gave Thackeray’s long novel Vanity Fair its “first adequate reading” at the age of ninety. On the question of what the meaning of life was, Holmes had a skeptical take:
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