Review: The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I really wanted to enjoy this and be very impressed by it. No less than Mark Twain said in A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens: "I told him you & I used the Autocrat as a courting book & marked it all through ..."

However, I found much of tedious and really had to push myself through it. I think I can partly blame this one the publisher. The numerous footnotes and parenthetic passages could be made readable with a better layout: more whitespace and larger font. Perhaps I will try again some day. Many of the allusions, foreign phrases, and references are so dated that I often interrupted my reading to Google for more info. Such explanations could be part of an annotated text.

Still, much (20%?) sparkles here. Only one poem does for me, and I already knew of that: "The Deacon’s Masterpiece or, the Wonderful "One-hoss Shay": A Logical Story"

Here are some quotes that sparkled to me. I copied the text out of the Gutenberg version, although I believe the text the same:

"There is no elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it never yields a hair's breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes in collision with it."

"...the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy..."

Interesting the classist issues arising back them, then 1% I suppose:

"We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,—not a gratiâ-Dei, nor a juredivino one,—but a de-facto upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves,—very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe this. Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race,—I don’t mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton."

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