Miserable Night

A miserable night last night. I don’t think I was able to enjoy a continuous sleep lasting more than a few minutes until about four in the morning. Sammy and Coco now take turns to yowl away their distress over not being able to prowl around in the moonlight. I almost remembered a dream that might have been interesting, but I lost my grasp on it. The night was totally botched. I didn’t even get more reading done, since I felt too beaten up. I just lie there thinking that death must be sweeter - that sleep that cannot be disturbed.

It’s kind of funny, not in a ha ha way, but in a scratch-your-head way, because the cats were wonderful on their first night inside, and the old pattern was that they would be worse on the first night and then seem to become more reconciled to being indoors, albeit still remaining very restless. This new order of things makes more sense to me: on the first night, the change in routine might be something to welcome, but then becomes tiring very quickly. In any case, we have at least one more night of this. It’s not supposed to rain anymore, but we are pretty soaked and muddy, though I do feel some temptation to let them out tonight anyway, just to improve my chances on getting a decent night’s sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream ...

John Adams and Jefferson

Although John Adams was not part of the south’s slaveholding oligarchy, he agreed with Adams about evils of banks.

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In later years, Adams told Jefferson that “an aristocracy of bank paper is as bad as the nobility of France or England.” For Adams, a banking system was a confidence trick by which the rich exploited the poor. “Every bank in America is an enormous tax upon the people for the profit of individuals,” he remarked, dismissing bankers as “swindlers and thieves.” “Our whole banking system I ever abhorred,” he declared another time. “I continue to abhor and shall die abhorring … every bank by which interest is to be paid or profit of any kind made by the deponent.” [...] Both Jefferson and Adams detested people who earned a living shuffling financial paper, and when Adams launched a bitter tirade in later years against the iniquitous banking system, Jefferson agreed that the business was “an infinity of successive felonious larcenies.”

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

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Mr. Chernow bids us to remember that when Jefferson and Adams write extremely sourly of Hamilton, it is with these dark suspicions of banks and high finance in general that they write.

The Natural World

Random Pictures

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