Thomas Jefferson: A Private Life

1825, Monticello

The room has filled up with paper again. Bills, letters, accounts, invitations refused too late, requests for opinions from men who would rather borrow my name than hear my answer, and drafts set aside because the hand had begun to fail before the thought was properly set down. Monticello is quiet only at a distance. Up close one hears servants crossing boards that need mending, doors shifted by the weather, my grandson moving through the house with the careful tread of a man already managing what he hopes not yet to inherit. I am tired in the body, more than I say, and when I rise there are moments of uncertainty I do not care to have observed. Outside, the mountain keeps its composure. Inside, everything depends upon delay, another day granted, another creditor put off, another memory held long enough to be fixed. The Republic has begun preserving me in sentences too clean for any man who actually lived, and I have no wish to be finished by cleanliness.