Jefferson, amazingly energetic, scarcely wasted a moment of his eighty-three years. His boast was that in fifty years the sun had never caught him in bed. He was an obsessive record keeper. He had seven notebooks on the go at any one time, and into each of these he recorded the most microscopic details of daily life. He fully noted each day’s weather, the migratory patterns of birds, the dates on which flowers blossomed. He not only kept copies of eighteen thousand letters he wrote, and saved the five thousand he was sent, but also diligently logged them all in an “Epistolary Record” that
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