he compared himself to Job and wondered, “Is there any such thing as happiness in this world?” His answer: “No.”65 About a month later, in January 1763, writing from Shadwell, Jefferson was still gloomy. “All things here appear to me to trudge on in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner and supper and go to bed again that we may get up the next morning and do the same: so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day,” he wrote John Page.
