The Diary of Quincy Adams

2006-11-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

I Am In An Apartment House

2006-10-31T08:43:00.000-08:00

May 12th - 30th, 1945

I looked out the window. I see the wooded earth spread out before me; I am at a great height. Why are dreams written in the past tense? I walked in shining terror to view the city's shadow, wound the city with my glance. This is a good place for contemplation and creative work, though, because each one here is almost isolated from the present chaos by his past. An equally obscene sense of bewilderment and all visions and all values are suspended, at least temporarily, because they are simply and decisively out of place. This is where i can be a serious danger to mankind.

We Have Come 7 Leagues to day. We have come 7 leagues to day.

2006-10-27T19:04:00.000-07:00

Monday, January 10th 1780

We dined at a little village the name of which is not necessary to mention and at about half after five arrived at Sellada el Camino where we shall lodge to night. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. It is 7 Leagues from Torre quemada.

We had nothing worth remarking to day except we kept ascending all day and we are now at the very top of the mountains. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas. The guide says that this is the worst day that we shall have the whole journey. We came 7 Leagues to day.

In my next Volume of my Diary I will give the description of several things which I have not done in this Volume. I hoped for a building empathy between me and these faces, these hairdos, these smirks and styled or style-less jackets and shoes.

Nothing Remarkable Today

2006-10-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

Wednesday June 14th, 1973

I ate toast today. With Butter. Left the house with breadcrumbs in my beard and wished they were seeds as I continuously scratched my face and watched them fall. So that future thinkers could stare at the same piece of toast I stared at today, thinking about the non-existence of toast.

It Can Only Start from a Situation which is Mirrored but Cannot Be Understood

2006-09-25T07:04:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, December 7th 1779

Last night about nine o clock we saw a number of fish. We could not tell what they were; some say they are dolphins some say they are porpoises but it being dark we could not perceive them well only the path they made in the water. If this is so, it is permissible to ask whether the union between the soul and body is, in essence, really different between the soul and other existing things. I have been up the main crosstrees and have seen Land. It appears to be very high and looks as if it was a great ways off. 11 o clock. Very Foggy. We can't see Land now. 4 o clock. It has clear'd up. We can see Land very plain now. In other words, does not a certain experience of the self, as tied up with the universe, underlie all affirmation of existence?

Staring Down Upon Pages After Hitting My Head On the Machine I'm Attached To

2006-09-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

After dinner, we sat for a few hours by the fire. The wind moaned in the chimney, mother sighed on the sofa, and father, whom I’ve never seen seated except at a table, paced up and down the enormous dining hall until it was time for bed. He wore a white woolen shaggy robe, and a cap of the same material. Once he was a certain distance from the center of the hall, lit only by the flickering fire in the hearth and a solitary candle, he began to disappear in the shadows, and, once he was completely immersed in the darkness, all I could hear was his footfall until he came back like a ghost, in his peculiar attire.

Now, they are so small that I provide them with shade whenever I step between them and the sun. But one day, when they have grown, they will give shade to me, and look after me in my old age much as I looked after them in their youth. I feel a bond unites me with these words; they are like children, I know them all like a bird knows the shady spot of the tree from which its song emits, and my only desire is that I should end my days amongst them.

Friday – January 31^st, 1779

We had nothing worth remarking to day except we kept ascending all day and we are now at the very top of the mountains. The guide says that this is the worst day that we shall have the whole journey.

It is dark inside the house and I am here. Lightening flashes outside the window – there is silence, raindrops, I am waiting for the clap of thunder.

In the kitchen the light turns on. I walk through and go outside for a smoke. The rain drips from the wood boards above my head – I stare at a brick wall, a window.

I hear the train rumble by through the open windows. One of many houses in a long line backed up to the tracks, each one of us wakes up to its presence. Just rumbling, no light. I am within this house that is inside of nothing. And inside of me there are dreams which are memories which are nothing.

My mind sounds like a voice next to the beat of my heart. A voice that will never live inside words. The rain picks up. An early fall breeze enters through the window. Who is sleeping on this night that I write instead of dream? Not the sky, not the train conductor, not the bartender not the drinker, not the rats under the shelter of the neighbor’s air-conditioning unit, not the bus drivers on ephedrine plummeting down Western Avenue forgetting their children’s first day of school starts in five hours, not the man whose room in Greektown was broken into the night before nor the Oaxacan dishwasher whose two boys he sent to see their abuelos but cannot afford to fly them home.

I do not know why I cannot sleep – the ripple through time that bends the world back to me, ugly and unforgiving of my vulnerabilities.

Tuesday – November 30^th, 1779

To day a middling breeze from the S.E. or SSE. At 12 o clock to day being at the Pump there being very little water the beam struck my head and hurt me a little.[1]

[1] The remainder of the page in the Diary contains a drawing of a bird.

And why do thoughts about another place take me to that place?

2006-09-15T00:24:00.000-07:00

He pulls a pair of gray pants off the hanger, picks up his white undershirt off the floor and throws it over his shoulder. The room still dark he exits, turns into the bathroom, pees, does not flush, steps into the kitchen still holding his clothes, flips on the light and begins to dress.

Sitting on a bench waiting for the train tonight, after meeting a couple of friends in a neighborhood a few stops away, I began to hear two voices on the street, talking and making their way up to me. No taller than I, much skinnier, loose second-hand button-down shirts, slacks, they climbed the stairs, their voices back and forth lively but not excited in a language I do not know. The younger of the two sat down on the bench next to me and patted the wood motioning for the elder man to take a seat – he standing with his arms held behind him staring down the tracks, up the tracks, watching all that was around him. I did not move much but with their presence became more focused on what it was that surrounded me – the white moth landing on the platform, waiting, then flying above the tracks towards the lightpost, the half moon off to the east cut into the surrounding blackness, the distance in the three sets of eyes lined up on the bench. I thought to ask them what country they were born in, but did not, content with just being in their presence. The train came and I motioned for them to step on before me. I found a seat as the door closed across from a bag of croissants and a man who quickly tucked them into his thigh. The voices of a Polish man and woman, the man in factory uniform, behind me. The elder man who I had waited with sat a few seats away from his younger friend, having ended their conversation, and I had the chance to look at his face – the rats, the pavement, the black fences of his eyes. What he has seen, drawn close next to my body, the mind left to remember it all, began to push across my emotions, my posture. He sat with his legs loosely crossed, one hand at his ear, the other elbow upon his thigh, his shoulders slouched into his chest each joint relaxed – I felt a simple joy to live where foreign histories come to me. The brown wrinkles of his face rippled a sense of time, of the absence of time, a believe in the moment before us – our bodies as objects which ground us amongst the turmoil of so many other existing worlds. Everything other shed from my consciousness and I sat riding through a nighttime of gorgeous, kaleidoscopic memories which was a bag of croissants, a conversation still in ear, a uniform from a day’s work, a relaxing of the shoulders, of the hips into the life that has befallen us. Sad to see that no one else stood up at my stop, I descended the stairs and came out on the street. I walked past a cab driver screaming out his window at nothing, cut through an alley to reach my street and was met with a trail of rabbits which I have come to believe symbolizes a death, and became caught up by my walking breath with each white tail I saw moving away from me in the shadows of this night.

It happened again last night.
Woke up hourly buzzing.

Wanted to escape my limbs.
And the certitude of death.

Which Direction to Dig? (I shall ask my Grandson)

2006-09-14T07:33:00.000-07:00

I have made a firm resolve to continue my metaphysical diary, perhaps in the form of a series of consecutive lifetimes.

The way you ask something
Is as important as what you ask.
I am lost in my handwriting
Thinking of what others have said
Ornaments upon the body
To push the feud line (in inevitable directions
Such power in adding an e
Spelling it with an x – all simply ink
At first thought, but is not
Is more, is time bulging into the physical world
Cracking inside your walls sending plaster to the basement
An inchworm pulling itself into the future
Emerging from your ear during burial
A y the addition or subtraction of
Can be the difference between a lick
Or a kiss upon a king’s hand
Why do we do and let it be done to us?
At what door do we give over our power of living?
What will the punishment be when I
Ask for it back – pulling it nightly from my dreams
Into the day and standing on the streets
Unable to witness my transmigration as well as
Unable to ride the trains with the rest.

Rain great part of the day which confined me to the house.

An interesting point. Is responsibility, or rather the need to attribute responsibility – the need to have someone to fix it on – at the root of all causal explanation.

Mr. Force and Mr. Laurence came as a committee from the National Institution for the Promotion of Science, and stated that they proposed to hold a meeting of the society on the first Monday, the 4th of January next, when a discourse is to be delivered by Mr. Poinsett. The Society are desirous of obtaining the use of the Hall of the House of Representatives that evening for that purpose and wished me to offer the resolution that it be granted, which I promised to do. They said the Institution was likely to flourish, and that great interest was taken in it by the people here. Mr. Force left with me a memorandum of two books which I borrowed of him more than three years since and which I have not yet returned.

Circular Ruins ( after contemplating the tilt of my neck)

2006-09-13T09:56:00.000-07:00

And this is where I’m from. And I never thought I’d be here – a scythe, a plow, a hieroglyph.

At 1/2 past 5. A. M. I took the cars from Hartford to New Haven. My tavern bill at Hartford had been paid. The night had been frosty and the morning was bitter cold. But the sun rose bright and the whole day was fair. In the cars two passengers introduced themselves to me. Mr. Hopkins of Buffalo New York, and Mr. Curtis, the sheriff of the County of New Haven--I talked again too much. At 2 a.m. we arrived at New Haven, and I took lodgings at the Tontine Hotel--Breakfast--immediately after.

Scum wind bleed at the ankles
And keep swimming. I am not
Available to the ugly demon.

Sugar teeth deteriorate
in her mouth. My tongue
wrapped around a radio.

Horror time on her wrist each
Ant is alive. Late at night
My face feels broad.

Numbing in my mouth, tongue and
Gums tingle with neurosis. Seems
I never told anyone about my meowing.

O tenderness in the middle of time
He started writing his father letters
Ten years before he was arrested

Personages in the sacred drama of each other’s lives

And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together, cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. Secondly, it will be objected that there is a great difference betwixt real fire and the idea of fire, between dreaming or imaging oneself burnt, and actually being so.

John Quincy Adams

2006-09-12T16:37:00.000-07:00

The first President who was the son of a President, John Quincy Adams in many respects paralleled the career as well as the temperament and viewpoints of his illustrious father. Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1767, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from the top of Penn's Hill above the family farm. As secretary to his father in Europe, he became an accomplished linguist and assiduous diarist.

Well aware that he would face hostility in Congress, Adams nevertheless proclaimed in his first Annual Message a spectacular national program. He proposed that the Federal Government bring the sections together with a network of highways and canals, and that it develop and conserve the public domain, using funds from the sale of public lands. In 1828, he broke ground for the 185-mile C & 0 Canal.

Adams also urged the United States to take a lead in the development of the arts and sciences through the establishment of a national university, the financing of scientific expeditions, and the erection of an observatory. His critics declared such measures transcended constitutional limitations.

The campaign of 1828, in which his Jacksonian opponents charged him with corruption and public plunder, was an ordeal Adams did not easily bear. After his defeat he returned to Massachusetts, expecting to spend the remainder of his life enjoying his farm and his books.

In 1848, he collapsed on the floor of the House from a stroke and was carried to the Speaker's Room, where two days later he died. He was buried--as were his father, mother, and wife--at First Parish Church in Quincy. To the end, "Old Man Eloquent" had fought for what he considered right. His long and detailed Diary gives a unique picture of the personalities and physics of his undying mind.