My eventual mentor in graduate school, Edmund S. Morgan, even had a huge Jefferson portrait on his office wall, the luminous Rembrandt Peale likeness of 1800, which looked down on our seminar sessions with otherworldly authority that I found oddly reassuring. Jefferson and I were kindred spirits, I told myself, allies in this alien world where a southern accent seemed inversely correlated with one’s seriousness of purpose. This youthful infatuation for Jefferson eventually went the way of my southern accent, never completely gone altogether but relegated to the blurry margins, where it lost its distinctive character. Like any young love

我在研究生院的最终导师，埃德蒙S。摩根，甚至在他办公室的墙上有一幅杰斐逊的巨幅肖像画，那是1800年伦勃朗·皮尔的肖像画，它以超凡脱俗的权威俯视着我们的研讨会，我感到奇怪的安心。我告诉自己，杰斐逊和我是志同道合的人，在这个陌生的世界里，南方口音似乎与一个人的严肃目标成反比。年轻时对杰斐逊的这种迷恋最终与我的南方口音如出一辙，从来没有完全消失，而是被降到了模糊的边缘，在那里它失去了独特的个性。就像任何年轻的爱情一样