For weeks he lived
in silence.
His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of
John La Farge. At that moment, contact with La Farge had a new
value. Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since
1850 John La Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry
Adams, who had sat at his feet since 1872, the question how much
he owed to La Farge could be answered only by admitting that he
had no standard to measure it by. Of all his friends La Farge
alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast against the
commonplaces of American uniformity, and in the process had
vastly perplexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The
American mind -- the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western
-- likes to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny
something that it takes for a fact; it has a conventional
approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion,
as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly
asserting its unconventionality. The most disconcerting trait of
John La Farge was his reversal of the process. His approach was
quiet and indirect; he moved round an object, and never separated
it from its surroundings; he prided himself on faithfulness to
tradition and convention; he was never abrupt and abhorred
dispute. His manners and attitude towards the universe were the
same, whether tossing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean
sketching the trade-wind from a whale-boat in the blast of
sea-sickness, or drinking the cha-no-yu in the formal rites of
Japan, or sipping his cocoanut cup of kava in the ceremonial of
Samoan chiefs, or reflecting under the sacred bo-tree at
Anaradjpura.
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