What’ll you settle for?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Oct. 3, 2024 – Once a person has consumed their biblical share of three score and ten years wandering the temporal, earthly plain, they’ll be able to tell you that the zeitgeist rests like a stray fox in the lap of the powerful, who look with furious intent for someplace to put it.
By the time a subsequent class of historians arrives to autopsy yesterday’s fox, they see that, although the lamp of life has been snuffed out, which make its teeth and claws more fit for ornament than ordnance, yet the corpse remains welded to the examination table.
Outside appear passersby, perpetual recorders of the passing scene. To the hoi polloi, to whomever it concerns, these people appear to be distracted – sometimes amused, sometimes anxious. As birds are prisoners of the sky, they are pinned in place by the question, why?
Or, as Emerson puts it, “…the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact.”
By the time of Abraham Lincoln’s visit, for such immortals only ever visit earth and never act as if earth belongs to them or they to it, America already had produced her own religion, poetry, and literature.
Nestled safely between the great Atlantic and Pacific oceans, by 1860, she had nurtured Emerson, Cooper, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, and scores more men and women whose written works will enrich humanity, so long as humanity has the sense to read them.
In fact, by Lincoln’s time, America already had produced her own Renaissance man in Samuel F. B. Morse, not only a first ballot hall-of-famer as painter, but as the great granddaddy of BigTek, for the invention of Morse Code!
Because it is dead easy to get fat and happy without knowing that unless guided by the light of honesty, people move toward hell instead of heaven, we stumble toward our semiquincentennial with the lamp of American liberty flickering like a firefly late on a summer’s night.
Today, half the people of the land that Lincoln loved to death, would kill him once again for emancipating America’s enslaved. While we await the arrival of someone possessed of a measure of his great goodness, today’s contest to follow him into the highest office on earth, is stark as the eternal choice between good and evil.