Lessons from TJ

So, I love Thomas Jefferson. I have written many papers about him, read about him, read his papers, and he will be my thesis topic. I am slightly obsessed, I will admit that. Everybody I know, knows that. I have a big fat crush on TJ. Every now and again, I am able to apply something I found in his papers to my life and I just had this experience.

While in France, Jefferson fell in love with Maria Cosway, a married artist. There is no proof at all that anything aside from a deep friendship developed between the two, but when Maria went with her husband to England TJ was heartbroken and wrote his famous "Dialogue Between My Head and My Heart." In this his head is cursing his heart for causing him despair once more. The heart always makes him hurt and never learns not to grow close to people. The heart then accuses the head of avoiding relationships and sentiments. That the head has often kept TJ from helping others, due to its rationality, etc. The heart ends up victorious, but says there are times in which the head should prevail.

On to my life example of this in action. I was having a conversation with a friend and they said something about assessing their feelings before being able to realize if they really were upset about a situation. I then said that when you start trying to rationalize your feelings or assessing the situation, or talk yourself out of feeling a certain way, it's your head trying to alter the original emotion felt by the situation. Once that begins the feeling isn't true emotion, but rationalized emotion. I granted that this was necessary in order to live in society, because people couldn't run around acting out their true emotions all of the time.

I suppose I just enjoyed that it was halfway through this conversation that I realized I had internalized one of Jefferson's writings. You can totally tell I've been reading about his view of people and government and human nature haha.

P.S. On a completely unrelated sidenote....I watched Kick-Ass tonight and it was a very entertaining film. If you like to laugh, like super heroes, or like Nicholas Cage, you should see the film :)