Elder Harold B. Lee, Part Three: The Hermit of Mount Vernon Who Maybe Existed

 For Part One, Part Two, Part Four, or Part Five, click on that part to go there.

In the next part of Elder Harold B. Lee's talk "The Iron Rod", he talks about someone I've literally never heard of:

 

The Quote

"I read recently from a column in the Washington Post, by George Moore, 

who styled himself as the “hermit of Mount Vernon.” 

(Mount Vernon, of course, was the ancestral home of George Washington.) 

In this article he said, 

“I have spent the last twenty years of my life at Mount Vernon 

reducing my ignorance.” 

He claimed that a person never learns anything 

until he realizes how little he knows. 

In this article he makes this most illuminating observation about George Washington:

“Washington never went to school. 

That’s why he was an educated man, he never quit learning.”

What George Moore said of himself 

I suppose could be said of many of you and of myself: 

“I have spent more than three score years of my life reducing my ignorance.”"

 

Never has a person been so forgotten as this one... no trace of him anywhere online. Sadness.

The thought of being a hermit for 20 years at Mount Vernon, I will say, is a terribly attractive one to someone as introverted as I.  There would be plenty of places to hide on a 500-acre estate, no doubt. Who was he? How did he do it? Why did he never write a Walden-style book? What a story that would have been! I'm still on the hunt for the Washington Post article about him, but I may not be able to find it.

And I do fully concur with the idea that we should never stop learning. Sometimes attending school and then not attending school leaves us with the idea that schooling should end, but it never does. At least, it never should.

As soon as I discovered public libraries around the age of three, my education began, and it continues to this day.  I use my library card more often than any other card in my wallet. 

There's definitely a kinship between me, George Washington, and the elusive George Moore in this regard:

"Remember, as George Moore said of Washington, 

“We can become educated persons, regardless of our stations in life,

 if we never quit learning.”"