Abraham Lincoln Letter

Abraham Lincoln on Living with Loss: His Magnificent Letter of Consolation to a Grief-stricken Young Woman 

by Maria Popova of "Brain Pickings"

One of the noblest leaders in Western civilization, Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865) led a difficult life punctuated by tragedy — his mother’s death when he was only nine, the death of two sons in his lifetime, and his own assassination at the dawn of his second term as president, slain by a Confederate fundamentalist shortly after a speech announcing Lincoln’s intention to advance African Americans’ right to vote.

In February of 1862, just as Lincoln was making major progress on the abolition of slavery, his beloved eleven-year-old son Willie died of typhoid fever — a plague-like bacterial infection the vaccine for which was still decades away. Elizabeth Keckly, a former slave then employed as chief designer for Mrs. Lincoln’s wardrobe and close to the family, would later recall watching the president stand “in silent, awe-stricken wonder” at the foot of the enormous rosewood bed where the boy lay lifeless, Lincoln’s “genius and greatness weeping over love’s idol lost.”

That December, just after the Emancipation Proclamation for which Lincoln had fought so hard was finally issued, loss struck again when one of his dearest friends, William McCullough, was killed during a night charge in Mississippi.

A vital characteristic of a great spiritual, civic, or political leader is the ability — or is it the unrelenting willingness? — to transcend one’s own experience, even at its most acute, and rise from the depths of personal pain in the service of another’s welfare. That’s precisely what Lincoln did for his country, and what he did in his magnificent letter of consolation to Fanny McCullough, William’s daughter. Later included in the altogether indispensable Library of America anthology Lincoln: Speeches and Writings (public library), the letter is a masterwork of sympathetic solace on par with Einstein’s moving letter to the bereaved queen of Belgium.

Drawing on his own lifelong dance with love and loss, 53-year-old Lincoln writes to the bereaved young woman on December 23, 1862:

Dear Fanny
It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.
Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.
Your sincere friend
A. Lincoln

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Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

This book was so much more than I expected it would be - I love when that happens. 

"Laughable Loves" is a collection of about 7 short stories.  Short stories can be an amazing art form, but I do think it's hard to find a writer who does well with them.  The challenge is that a short story writer must fashion a strong story with a lot less than a novelist.  A short story writer must dive right in & grab hold of the plot quickly while seizing the details/images that pack the most punch.   I believe some writers thrive under that added pressure or challenge, while others overestimate themselves.  Well, Milan Kundera can definitely perform with the added constraints of the short story.  As a reader I didn't feel short-changed, like there wasn't enough there or that the story quit before it was really complete.

Kundera can create a viable world, situation, personalities, and conflict with only 30 pages.  I was kind of in awe of how well he did this, actually.  The highlight for me was The Hitchhiking Game - a short story about a 20-something boyfriend and girlfriend who are on a two-week holiday road trip.  Their relationship was not strong prior to this holiday but both are trying to make of the opportunity a special occasion.  Somehow, after a bathroom stop on the highway, a role-playing game evolves.  Instead of being themselves they are now playing a man who has picked up a strange, beautiful female hitchhiker.  The role-playing game coincidentally helps the young woman bypass her shyness concerning her sexuality - and suddenly she becomes a precocious, relaxed person.  However, she is achieving this by not being herself, it is not growth but playacting.  And her boyfriend becomes meaner to her as this goes on - frustrated with this fake shift in her.  It's a mean little corner that Kundera paints these people into - but it is a very believable and interesting story.

All of these stories are primarily concerned with sexuality - Kundera calls them sexual comedies.  If the story doesn't include an affair, a marriage or a courtship - than it is concerned with the lusting after something even if that something is not sex.

The epigraph to my second favorite story, The Eternal Apple of Desire, is:

"...they do not know that they seek only the chase and not the quarry."

~Blaise Pascal

In this story two male friends, one of whom is happily married, chase women.  They do so very scientifically - if they get a name and an address of a woman they call that a "registration" & even if they don't "make contact" with the "registration," they may follow up with that woman some time in the future.  What makes this game strange is that there seems to be no point to their aimless seeking.  One man is happily married and wants no one else.  He pretends he is playing for the benefit of his single friend, however his friend doesn't really believe anything will come of this game.  Playing definitely seems to satisfy something in each of these men that needs satisfying, but still for the most part it all seems senseless.  I suppose that was the unsettling quality of this story.  Desire is so central to our lives and it's really important that that is so.  And yet, we are not meant to become hollow beings ruled by our passions.  And so the question becomes how do we show due respect to the desire we feel without letting it lead us around by the nose? 

So these are the themes & issues of Laughable Loves and Kundera creates memorable characters through which to explore them.   A great read. 

Find Unforgettable Art In A Most Unlikely Place: A Pittsburgh Mattress Factory

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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

*************THERE ARE SOME SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW****************

The last of the Millenium Trilogy & the last penned by Larsson before he died.

The climax of The Girl Who Played With Fire has Zalachenko, Lisbeth's father, shooting her.  In a trilogy concerned with hard-core misogyny, so the father trying to kill the daughter carries that theme about as far as it can go.  And Larsson pulls no punches in that scene - it is violent, cold, and horrible.  To highlight what I mean - once her father and half-brother have buried Lisbeth (not knowing she's still alive), a fox comes over to the newly disturbed earth and pisses on it.  The world seems to have no use for Lisbeth Salander.

It was difficult to conceive of how Larsson was going to proceed from the final scene of the second novel.  Lisbeth's story seemed pretty complete - she had recovered from her tryst with Blomkvist, become financially independent, returned to Sweden and set up a new home for herself, discovered who she came from and, finally, had fought back against the father who had killed her mother.  Also, she and Blomkvist finally reunite after spending all of The Girl Who Played With Fire in different places.  The one issue brought up in the second book that is not really resolved by its end is the media war against Salander.  By the end of Fire, all of Sweden had assumed that she murdered the two reporters, her old guardian, and was exactly what the media labeled her as: a violent, mentally unbalanced, lesbian psycho who was capable of anything.   Essentially, in Fire, Salander is living in a country that is seeking her arrest and presupposes her guilt.  The police force doesn't even seek other suspects.  She avoids detection, but a lot of articles are written about her and why she committed the murders she's accused of - her reputation is destroyed. 

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest backtracks to that - Salander is no longer on the run & existing outside of society.  She has been captured and now her country is putting her on trial and the trial is rigged.  The verdict is a foregone conclusion because Salander's opponents are powerful policitical figures who will stop at nothing to keep their secrets hidden and the prosecutor has aligned himself with them and seeks to get Lisbeth committed to the psych ward. 

Lisbeth's opponents are members of the Section, a rogue section of the Swedish intelligence agency otherwise known as, Säpo.  The Section benefited from secrets Salander's father revealed when he defected to Sweden during the Cold War.  Salander cannot be allowed a fair trial without exposing the existence of this rogue section and the unconstitutional deeds it has committed.  The rights of a individual are nothing compared to hiding/maintaining these secrets.  That is the horror explored in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. 

So, Salander can no longer escape what she has been ignoring/evading/trying to rectify through illegal methods.  She is now at the mercy of "social justice."  Can society at large deliver that justice?  What are the limiting factors? The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest explores that in various ways:

• Who monitors the intelligence agencies? Are they held accountable to any higher authority?

• what society can label you as based on your behavior/circumstances

• how society is capable of assuming the worst of its "minorities" while failing to question the motives of its established, sanctioned and powerful authorities

• Journalism as a watchdog in a healthy democracy exposing errant corporate/political/medical/radical/policing interests and advocating for transparency.  Also, how much misinformation exists in our media?  How does that happen and how can we protect the media from inaccuracies?

• How can the individual censure an authority when the formal channels for doing so are designed to help that authority avoid censure of any kind?  Is there any legal way to reproach the system - or is Salander correct that hacking/spying/beating the system at its own game is the only way to bring the powers-that-be to justice?

                              ***On that final point, Blomkvist is a good measure.  He begins the series with faith that journalists can expose the truth.  By this book - when he realizes that the Section is bugging his apartment and will use any means necessary to destroy him/Salander/the Truth - he is a proponent of the "spread of misinformation."  In other words, Blomkvist is willing to create the wrong impression, willing to lie, and willing to resort to illegal methods.  This trilogy began with his banishment for writing a story that was inaccurate, and by this book he is allowing the publication of untruths in his own magazine, Millenium.

Consequently, I felt that this book had a lot more of Larsson himself than just a satisfying fictional narrative.  The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest brings in more of his conclusions/philosophy than the other two books and I think that was the strength/weakness of this novel.  A reader can see the social consciousness and aspiration to truly strive for a well-functioning democracy in this book.  But there is also a lot of pessimism, paranoia, and conspiracy theorizing in it as well.  For me, it was too heavy handed in many places and deviated from its strength - substantial characters and telling their stories.  By the end of the trilogy he began speaking a little too directly to the reader instead of writing the story of these fictional people.

While I see that as a downside to this book I still feel I can appreciate it because these are issues that we should all be concerned about.  If we're living in a democracy that is actually deceiving its members and is more concerned about protecting its secrets from its own constituents than we are all living in a lie.  And what should concern any of us more than that?  It reminds me of a lyric from an Eminem song, "Medicine Ball."  The lyric is, "Let's begin, now hand me the pen/how should I begin it and where does it all end/the world is just my medicine ball you're all in/my medicine ball, you're in my medicine ball, friends."   To be in a sphere where every point is manufactured by the powers that be and where every point is a lie.  

One final point of criticism about this book, it refers to events in Swedish history and uses them in the plot.  Anyone unfamiliar with Swedish history will be confused and forced to find background information on the people and events referenced by Larsson.  The book might have benefited from footnotes or endnotes. 

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

The best book I've read in a while.  It accomplishes so much for a very small book.

This book is very difficult to discuss without giving away its plot..but here goes.  Firstly, it's a great example of a true work of art.  This is because everything that it sparingly creates (story, characters, setting) it accounts for and nothing is wasted.  This can be tricky to do with books - often the reader can get picked up and dragged along like a piece of driftwood on the tide only to feel when they've reached the end of the book that they've gone nowhere & wasted their time.  Many books fall victim to this - in fact I can only name a handful of books I've read that I felt delivered in the end on the promise set forth in their beginning.  Ha, it's not unlike life in general in that respect, I guess.  How many of us never learn to pace ourselves, or fall into a deathly trap, or get sucked into a downward spiral somewhere along the way and consequently our life gets drained of the energy, vitality, honesty, true sense of itself that it/we began with.  So yeah, as with life so it is with the life of a book and the process of crafting it.  And, therefore, it is very difficult to craft something that doesn't suffer from waste or that is taut - like a healthy/functioning muscle.  Well, this book does that. 

So, this thrifty creation that doesn't seek to just dazzle you is something I read at a time when I found that refreshing and very soothing.

So what's it about?  That, as I said, is a harder question to answer without ruining the book.  Well, it's a story about a man who is a fugitive from the law and finds himself alone on an island.  It is a very small island with only a few man made structures (see the map above) that is subject to strong tides over most of its surface each day.  It is a very isolated island - apparently far away from any other bits of land and difficult for boats to approach, because of these riptides, even if the sight it.  However, suddenly, other people do appear on the island and the fugitive hides from them as he's terrified they are going to turn him in to the law.  He observes them from a distance for some time and discovers a woman among the newly arrived group that captivates him.  He wants to get her attention and her favor but is it possible to achieve this given the circumstances?  How could he achieve this if he did break his silence?  Eventually his desire overwhelms his fear and he breaks his silence.  At that point it turns out that the task is more difficult than he could have imagined - nothing on the island is what it seems.  Not to sound melodramatic or fluffy romance-y - because, in fact, that's not at all what this book is like.  It's just complicated...  So that's plot.

This book is also an example of Latin American "magical realism."  If you know nothing of this trend in literature - essentially there are "magical" twists to realistic images, life events, people, etc - so things are recognizable and yet slightly different, otherworldly.  Casares was very good at creating a character/a world in this way.

If one thinks of fantasy novels - those are usually steeped in excursions from reality (i.e. the author has changed natural laws like defying gravity, or created people who are telepathic, or created whole new types of animals than those we know to exist, or finally, he/she may have created a whole new world apart from Earth).  If fantasy is a bold departure from reality as we know it, "magical realism" is a gentle, quiet amble that takes only a few steps towards the fantastic every once in a while and then proceeds to return to the main path.

"The Invention of Morel" is a classic example of this.  For the majority of the book nothing happens that suggests that there is anything out of the ordinary occurring.  The reader wonders how the fugitive survived to make it as far as he has and wonders why the narrator provides little detail about this.  But that's it.

Then, slowly, strange things begin to happen like suddenly the narrator observes two suns in the sky.  Or when he finally musters the courage to speak to the woman he's attracted to he realizes that she isn't responding to his words.  It's as if she doesn't see or hear him standing right next to her.  Why?

I cannot mention any more specifics at this point for fear of giving away the plot of the book.  However, I can say that the effect of being in the mind of a narrator who is dubious of what his senses are perceiving is unnerving and confusing.  The reader is confused because the narrator is confused.

If you are like me, and tend to like narrators who are unreliable, even devious you may/may not like this book.  If you prefer books that do not test your reading skills to that degree - you will not enjoy this book.  That is, if you like narrators who you can take at their word.  I agree that having such a narrator makes reading an easier/more pleasant/less active experience.  And sometimes you just want to read a good story.  Even good stories can challenge a reader's skills.  But nothing is more challenging to a reader than when their ambassador, the narrator, is a tricky sort - someone that observes their environment poorly, has biases, or even lies to themselves and therefore to the reader.  It makes a reader work a lot harder than one usually has to.  But, as this book is testament to, it can also bring rewards beyond that of those books that challenge you less. 

So I hope that I have given you the bare bones of the story along with a good sense of the flavor of the book.  It was an impressive read & I'm definitely glad that I read it.