Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. believed in hard work and knowledge. He remarked, “most things in this world, half their terrors vanish when you walk up and tackle them.” The anxious thoughts about what “might” happen were often worse than the actual situation. Once “you lay hold of the lion’s skin it comes off and the same old donkey is underneath.”
As he edged toward turning ninety, he wrote:
My old formula is that a man should be an enthusiast in the front of his head and a sceptic in the back. Do his damndest without believing that the cosmos would collapse if he failed. One should have the same courage for failure that many have for death.
When Chief Justice Melville Fuller delayed in getting the cases assigned to Holmes over to him, Holmes wrote him a note:
Will you let me know as soon as convenient the cases you assign to me. I worry until I know. Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum.
The Latin was a quote from Lucanus’s poem about Caesar: “He believed nothing done, so long as anything remained undone.”
Holmes had an unbelievable work ethic. In total, he wrote 873 opinions, a Supreme Court record. “He brought that same zest for duty to everything,” Budiansky wrote. “In 1865, at age twenty-one, he began keeping a list of every book he read, noting them down in tiny handwriting in a small leather…book, known to his secretaries as the ‘Black Book.’ By the time of his death the list exceeded four thousand, which worked out to more than a book a week for seventy years. The range was extraordinary: law, philosophy, sociology, literature, religion, history, economics, murder mysteries, poetry, science.”
In his opinions, Holmes rarely used legal jargon. The quality of his prose demonstrated clear thinking. Learned Hand praised in Holmes’s opinions his “deadly eye” for “question-begging words” that disguised shallow thinking. “To Holmes, the act of writing was above all the act of thinking. Finding the right words was not rhetorical ornamentation: it was the very essence of his work of thinking though complex legal jargon.”
Note: What people mean by writing is thinking. It forces you to come up with words that describe what’s in your head. The mismatch between the words you use and the thoughts in your head is the actual process of your thinking being refined. You’re being forced to put a thought which contains many words and many meanings into a few words that each just have one meaning. That is thinking.
Boston in the 1800s was a town full of pompous, educated men and women seeking to make their mark on the world through their words and books. Pretty much everyone was Unitarian. “Unitarianisms’s fundamental tenet was that God had given man a rational nature and a moral conscience, and expected him to use them. Salvation was no longer to be found in outward conformity to rigid doctrine or unquestioning obedience to an unknowable God, but lay rather within each man’s own conscience.”
This philosophy “now channeled into a faith that made self-improvement, the cultivation of virtue, and social conscience the ultimate expression of God’s will.”
Edward Everett Hale put it best: “There was the real impression that the kingdom of heaven was to be brought in…if we only knew enough”
This was the culture Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born into, and came to love.
From a young age, Holmes showed an act for words and conversing. His report card at age six said, “Talk’s too much.” His brother Edward explained, “Wendell ends every sentence with a ‘but’ so as to hold the floor till he can think of something else to say.”
Holmes understood the importance of focus. He wrote in a letter about his father:
If he [his father] had the patience to concentrate all his energy on a single subject, which perhaps is saying if he had been a different man, he would have been less popular, but he might have produced a great work. I often am struck by his insight in things that he lightly touched. But, as I said, it is the last five percent that makes the difference between the great and the clever.
As a boy, Holmes had a “futile shrinking from new things” that kept him from learning to ride or drive a horse or ice skate. But this was not a “physical timidity; it was rather that he already had a sense of what it took to truly master a subject, and an inkling of the dissatisfactions of half-knowledge.”
Holmes did not value academics. In 1913, he warned Felix Frankfurter that academic life is…
a withdrawl from the fight in order to utter smart things that cost you nothing except thinking them from a cloister…Business in the world is unhappy, often seems mean, and always challenges your power to idealize the brute fact but it hardens the fibre and I think is likely to make more of a man of one who turns it to success
For Holmes, the war taught him “early on to face with courage and calmness the inevitable hardships of life.” In 1917, he told Harold Laski “I am converting misfortune into a source of satisfaction.” The author explains, “His limitless capacity for work was undoubtedly an emotional escape but it was also a need that he shared with many who had been through the intense experiences of war: civilian life just did not seem that exciting by comparison.” “Repose,” Holmes wrote, “is not the destiny of man.” “Life is a struggle,” the author observes, “and it is the struggle that gives it meaning. The only thing to do was to give one’s all, and leave the consequences to fate.”
In a great quote about opportunity costs, Holmes said, “Remember, my friend, that every good costs something. Don’t forget that to have anything means to go without something else. Even to be a person, to be this means to be not that.”
During his first year of law school, a professor said he “had never known of anyone in the law who studied anything like as hard as Wendell.” “From the start,” the author wrote, “he took heart in the belief that mastery of a subject, and thorough professional expertise, was the only way to accomplish anything significant in life. A year and a half after receiving his degree, and still thoroughly immersed in a now self-directed program of voluminous readings in the law, he wrote William James of his ‘ever increasing conviction that law as well as any other series of facts in this world may be approached in the interests of science and may be studied, yes, and practiced, with the preservation of one’s ideals. I should even say that they grew robust under the regimen.'”
Holmes’ father’s dilettantism worked out well for Holmes, because it showed him what not to do. He wrote:
Since I wrote in December I have worked at nothing but the law. Philosophy has hibernated in torpid slumber, and I have lain “slutishly soaking and gurgling in the devil’s pickle,” as Carlye says. It has been necessary,—if a man chooses a profession he cannot forever content himself in picking out the plums with fastidious dilettantism and give the rest of the loaf to the poor, but must easy his way manfully through crust and crumb—soft, unpleasant inner parts which, within one, swell, causing discomfort in the bowels.
Holmes became friends with both William and Henry James. William, while Holmes and he were close, was in a deep depression about the nature of the universe. In a world without a God, why did anything matter, James explained. Holmes, ever the realist, didn’t understand. He advised William (with words that a lot of us should take into account today re: politics and the “world” and everyone having an opinion on everything): “It seems to me that the only promising activity is to make my universe coherent and livable, not to babble about the universe.” This quote revealed Holmes’ philosophy about life: it doesn’t care about you, so get on with it and do your duty! (Or, rather, that’s my interpretation.)
One night after working late in the law library, Holmes and a younger lawyer, George Upham, walked home together. Recounting their conversation sixty years later, Upham said Holmes:
told me he had a theory that anyone could accomplish anything he wished, if only he wished it hard enough, continuously, morning, noon, and night, and perhaps subconsciously while sleeping
A half century after that conversation, Holmes told John Wu that to achieve anything of importance “takes time, the capacity to want something fiercely and want it all the time, and sticking to the rugged course.”
Holmes followed his own advice.
While editing a new edition of Kent’s Commentaries, Holmes became utterly absorbed in the work. “I have as you know given up all my time to Kent’s Commentaries and during the past year especially have hardly touched any other business,” he wrote in July 1872.
He kept his manuscript in a green back, and he took it everywhere with him. After dining one night with Henry James’s mother, she wrote a letter to Henry:
Wendell Holmes dined with us a few days ago. His whole life, soul and body, is utterly absorbed in his last work upon his Kent. He carries about his manuscript in his green bag and never loses sight of it for a moment. He started to go to Will’s room to wash his hands, but came back for his bag, and when we went to dinner, Will said, “Don’t you want to take your bag with you?” He said, “Yes, I always do so at home.”
This “green bag” was so precious to him that, once a month, he conducted fire drills with the servants and staff of his house and ensured they knew their first mission if flames were to ensue: rescue the green bag.
Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes thought Holmes’ work on Kent is what allowed him to draft opinions faster than everyone else. The time Holmes spent in total immersion of the law “had given him an unusual and complete mastery of common law decisions and history. The effect of this in his habit as [a] judge was that, where others would be compelled to devote an enormous amount of time to the rediscovery of law, Holmes needed to make no re-examination—the law was at his fingertips.”
This is a great example of Dead Time and Alive Time.
The time in-between jobs he studied a ton, so that when he finally did get a court appointment, he was better prepared and smarter than everyone else. Such is how one should spend their days “waiting.” [[Notes/Active Patience|Active Patience]]
The author writes, “Success to Holmes above all meant accomplishing something original and of intellectual merit.” I relate to that strongly.
On the bench, Holmes had little patience for lawyers, remarking that they take 5 to ten minutes to say things that could easily be said in one. To pass the time, he wrote letters while lawyers were presenting their cases. This gave him the reputation of attentiveness, because, naturally, people thought he was taking notes on the case.
On writing, Holmes said, “One has to strike the jugular and let the rest go.”