Saturday, November 5, 2011

Everywhere He Went, He Carried a Book With Him

2009_lincoln_rev2“Everywhere he went, Lincoln carried a book with him.  He thumbed through page after page while his horse rested at the end of a long row of planting.  Whenever he could escape work, he would like with his head against a tree and read.  Though he acquired only a handful of volumes, they were seminal works of the English language.  Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president.  With remarkable energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to remember.  ‘When he came across a passage that Struck him, ‘ his stepmother recalled, ‘he would write it down on boards if he had no paper,’ and ‘when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.’  Then once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a scrapbook so that it could be memorized.  Word thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used.”

(Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006, p 52.)

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