Chapter 21 Twenty Years After (1892) Summary

Adams skips ahead by twenty years. This book is a story of education, and his, he says, ended in 1871; he has spent the last twenty years of his life applying it.

He is lying in bed in London, ill. He has nothing about which to complain, regarding his last years. Even though he continues to think deeply, he doesn't want to begin a new education at his age - the old one, he says, was "poor and difficult enough." Making a new education even more difficult is the fact that, to Adams, the world is no longer simple, and thus cannot be expressed simply. Whether in art or in science, a more complex and varied description is now necessary.

He travels back to the U.S. on the steamer "Teutonic," which he holds as a technological marvel...