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I am a slow reader, but I made it through my current
New Yorker well before the scheduled arrival of the next
and then went on to read an entire non-fiction book in
two days, some of it at the dining table and some
at another comfortable location in my home.
Nearly three hundred pages, but with wide margins
and many of those pages bearing but a few lines of type,
this is a 1943 edition my teenaged daughter picked up
for twenty-five cents at a yard sale some many months ago,
The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln As Reflected in
His Briefer Letters and Speeches, edited by H. Jack Lang.
The hardbound book, its jacket nibbled long ago by
silverfish, its rough page edges yellowed by age and
speckled by mildew, lay in the company of clutter on my
daughter’s desk in my former home, sometimes noticed but
not perused. How it happened to get packed with my belongings
and cross an ocean and half a continent to appear this week where
I live now (in Wisconsin, without my daughter), I am not sure.
In the quiet of this stone-clad, closed-up dwelling, by gray November
window light, I went over the words of Lincoln as he is said to have
composed them: aloud. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence and his evident magnanimity
more than once moved me to tears. I suppose, however, that moist eyes and
a dry throat may not provide a meaningful measure of this book, for I
should disclose, as well, that the reported words of a more recent
American wartime president have also often made me weep.
♦
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