You go, A.L.!

What am I thankful for?  Lots of things.  Here's Abe Lincoln explaining the merits of one of them:

"Writing -- the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye -- is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it -- great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions. . . . Its utility may be conceived, by the reflection, that to it we owe everything which distinguishes us from savages. Take it from us, and the Bible, all history, all science, all government, all commerce, and nearly all social intercourse go with it."


I knew I liked him. 


What a strange, intensely literate miracle Lincoln was.  I mean, there was actually a period in American history in which the president of the United States was actually one of the country's best writers—even with figures such as Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Hawthorne writing at (more or less)
the same time! 

Probably this will never happen again, but it could be that our current president-elect is the closest thing, in terms of writerly potential, to Lincoln that we have ever had since.  But I doubt that the culture will allow him to shine as Lincoln did.  Obama knows how to milk any speech for the best effect, but underneath his speaking prowess, the language of his speeches has been very disappointingly bland.  Even his famous racism speech given shortly after the Wright debacle doesn't measure up to the least of Lincoln's texts.  Or even to the speeches on The West Wing, for that matter.  The language is just so denatured and dull, probably because it's thought that the
American people would react with suspicion to a perceived excess of eloquence from their commander-in-chief. 

There will never be another Gettysburg Address as long as this kind of oratorical timidity continues.  And that is a loss that saddens me. 

Blogged with the Flock Browser