Gabor Boritt The Lincoln Enigma, The Changin

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.Why, with his obvious longing for it, did Lincoln withhold any explicit statement of faith in an afterlife his contemporaries took for granted? Though he admitted to being superstitious in small matters, he had an unusually questioning and analytical temperament, had practiced law for many years, and showed an admiring interest in the progress of science.To believe, he must have wanted evidence of an afterlife, and he could find none.Indeed, he had personal evidence to the contrary.Though he did not say so, he may have been mindful of that boyhood kick from a horse, when he was “apparently killed for a time,” as he later wrote.Accounts of the incident vary, but they agree that when he came to after several hours he completed a remark that had been interrupted by the kick.Quasi-death had been total oblivion, without so much as a consciousness of time’s passing.If Lincoln found the annihilation of the self an intolerable prospect, and if he could not achieve faith in an afterlife, what other refuge might he have found? How might he have dealt with the presumption that the war he prosecuted consigned its dead to the oblivion he dreaded? Those questions lead to the third major element in this analysis.We know ourselves, in large part, through the responses of others.To that extent they are the mirror of our being, the medium of our self-recognition and self-definition.If, then, our pale images should linger in that mirror after our physical deaths, we cannot help but feel that in some degree we would still live.Conversely, others, when absent or dead, live for us in our mental images of them.This reinforces our feeling that remembrance is survival.Such a feeling was strong in Abraham Lincoln.In Lincoln’s three letters of consolation quoted earlier, the key word, the bedrock of consolation, is not “Heaven” but “memory.”To see memory as the essence of life came naturally to Lincoln.“Of the earth, earthy” though he seems in legend, he lived less through the physical senses than do most of us.Lincoln seemed to live most intensely through the process of thought, the expression of thought, and the exchange of thought with others.His definition of life was Carte-sian: I think, therefore I exist.142T h e L i n c o l n E n i g m aAnd he carried this to a corollary: when my thoughts die, so shall I.Fully half of Lincoln’s poem of 1846 on childhood scenes deals with a childhood friend who had gone mad:.an object more of dread,Than aught the grave contains—A human-form, with reason fled,While wretched life remains.Allusion in these verses to “pangs that kill the mind,” to “the funeral dirge of reason dead and gone,” imply that to Lincoln mere phys-ical functions and animal consciousness were no life at all.34 Thus tending more than most to locate life in the mind rather than the body, Lincoln would more readily than most have turned to the idea of survival by proxy in the minds of others.In 1841, at the time of Lincoln’s most desperate bout with depression, he confided to Joshua Speed that “he had ‘done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived,’ and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would rebound to the interest of his fellow man, was what he desired to live for.” 35 This self-revelation links his strong feelings about death and his doubts of an afterlife not only to his chronic melancholy but also to another conspicuous element of his character: his powerful, almost obsessive ambition.In that, as in his melancholy, the fear of oblivion may not have been the only or even the most important factor.But it does seem more than probable that it helped fuel the ambition which Herndoncalled “a little engine that knew no rest.”36In 1856 Lincoln made a private note with respect to his old rival Stephen Douglas:With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even in foreign lands.I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached.So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.37T h e R i d d l e o f D e a t h143Publicly, in debating Douglas in 1858, he said: “I claim no extraordinary exemption from personal ambition.But I protest I have not entered upon this hard contest solely, or even chiefly, for a mere per-sonal object.”38 He lost the senatorial contest, but it gave him some comfort nevertheless.In a speech of 1859 he said: “Men will pass away—die—die, politically, and naturally; but the principle will live, and live forever.” 39His elevation to the presidency gave Lincoln’s mind still more ease in this respect.“Fellow-citizens,” he said in 1862, “we cannot escape history.We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves.No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” 40 To Secretary of War Edwin M.Stanton he read aloud Fitz-Greene Halleck’s poem “Marco Bozzaris,” the theme of which is the victory of fame over death.The poet says to the hero:For thou art Freedom’s now, and Fame’sOne of the few, the immortal namesThat were not born to die.41If Lincoln did not believe that those who died for the Union would afterward live in a blissful Valhalla, he could at least believe that, as he said at Gettysburg, they would live in everlasting memory.And he cherished that hope for himself as well [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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