Geordie Walker, Rest in Peace

One of my favorite guitarists, Geordie Walker, has passed.

"Wardance"

Music to march to ...

Priest, "Trial By Fire"

It's 2023 and here's the latest from Judas Priest ...

Responsible.

Grimshaw, Eveleigh, Forge Valley, 1877

Read a great deal. You can’t learn to write unless you are well-read. Like I say to poets; You are responsible for reading all the world’s poetry because how else will you learn to be a poet? Just like a novelist, you must read the best novels of all.  People should get out and travel at random everywhere. I don’t see the point of sitting around campus like a full can of worms all stuck together.

Jim Harrison

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. 

Walter Lippmann

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Leaden-Headed.

Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar.

Charles Dickens, from Bleak House

Necessary.

Joy Williams remembers Harrison ...

This eye, the poor one, the bad one that rolled in its milky socket like a moon, was accomplice to his visions of commanding dreams as well as the dreams he dreamed awake. It’s a good eye to have for a poet. Necessary in fact, though many don’t have it and can’t perceive the loss.

Jim described his poems as “flowers for the void,” writing them made him “soar along a foot / from the ground.” The super-masculine tough-guy selves, the reckless gourmands and intellectual wild men of the woods and prairies who populated his famous fictions were only a feather’s breadth remove from the genuinely bold, larger-than-life article. So it is that there is still amazement among his readers that he wrote poetry, that he felt that only in poetry had he found “the right pen” to write what he wanted to say.

Immediately.

Watts, November Evening in a Welsh Wood, 1893

This month taxes a walker’s resources more than any other. For my part, I should sooner think of going into quarters in November than in winter. If you do feel any fire at this season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own.  It is but a short time these afternoons before the night cometh in which no man can walk. If you delay to start till three o-clock, there will be hardly time left for a long and rich adventure, to get fairly out of town. November Eat-heart, is that the name of it? Not only the fingers cease to do their office, but there is often a benumbing of the faculties generally. You can hardly screw up your courage to take a walk when all is thus tightly locked or frozen up, and so little is to be seen in field or wood. I am inclined to take to the swamps or woods as the warmest place, and the former are still the openest. Nature has herself become like the few fruits she still affords, a very thick-shelled nut with a shrunken meat within. If I find anything to excite a warming thought abroad, it is an agreeable disappointment, for I am obliged to go willfully and against my inclination at first, the prospect looks so barren, so many springs are frozen up, not a flower, perchance, and few birds left, not a companion abroad in all these fields for me. I seem to anticipate a fruitless walk. I think to myself hesitatingly, shall I go there, or there, or there? And cannot make up my mind to any route, all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind, so that I have to force myself to it often, and at random.

But then I am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July. I may meet with something that interests me, and immediately it is as warm as in July, as if it were the south instead of the northwest wind that blew. 

Henry David Thoreau, from his journal, 25 November 1857

Happy Birthday, Churchill

The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them. The country possesses in the Royal Academy an institution of wealth and power for the purpose of encouraging the arts of painting and sculpture….

The Prime Minister, who spoke with so much feeling and thought on this subject, has reminded us of the old saying that it is by art man gets nearest to the angels and farthest from the animals. Indeed it is a pregnant thought. Here you have a man with a brush and palette. With a dozen blobs of pigment he makes a certain pattern on one or two square yards of canvas, and something is created which carries its shining message of inspiration not only to all who are living with him on the world, but across hundreds of years to generations unborn. It lights the path and links the thought of one generation with another, and in the realm of price holds its own in intrinsic value with an ingot of gold. Evidently we are in the presence of a mystery which strikes down to the deepest foundations of human genius and of human glory. Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.

Winston Churchill, born on this day in 1874, from a speech given at The Royal Academy of Arts, 30 April 1938

John Francis Flynn, "Shallow Brown"

Smelt.

Grimshaw, Twilight, The Vegetable Garden, 1869

It was autumn, when there were no debates to vex the evening air; and I remember how the leaves smelt like our garden at Blunderstone as we trod them under foot, and how the old, unhappy feeling, seemed to go by, on the sighing wind.

Charles Dickens, from David Copperfield

Charlie Munger, Rest in Peace

Charlie Munger has passed.

Kurt remembers ...

“You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite,” he said.

“And staying cheerful ... because it’s a wise thing to do. Is that so hard? And can you be cheerful when you’re absolutely mired in deep hatred and resentment? Of course you can’t. So why would you take it on?”

Happy Birthday, Lewis

Parkinson. C.S. Lewis, 1951

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. ‘I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.’ Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

C.S. Lewis, born on this day in 1898, from The Four Loves, "Charity"

Happy Birthday, Blake

Linnell, William Blake, 1821

ETERNITY

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sun rise.

William Blake, born on this day in 1757

Together.

I've always wondered ... have you noticed that there is no photograph of Lloyd Carr and Werner Herzog together?

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Interlude.

The time of autumn's death which ushers the birth pangs of winter is a strange interlude in the cycle of life and, so I believe, just as this in-between period has power to imbue a man with a feeling of inadequacy, so it can invade into the being of all wild things. For a short time the birds and animals of the wilderness are subdued and more than usually timid; the deer walk much and are restless, the squirrels spend more time just sitting, dozing on their favourite perches; the winter birds fly more busily but their voices are softer.

R. D. Lawrence, from The Place in the Forest

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Cowper

Abbott, William Cowper, 1793

Hark! ’tis the twanging horn! o’er yonder bridge,

That with its wearisome but needful length

Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon

Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright;

He comes, the herald of a noisy world,

With spatter’d boots, strapp’d waist, and frozen locks,

News from all nations lumb’ring at his back.

True to his charge, the close-pack’d load behind,

Yet careless what he brings, his one concern

Is to conduct it to the destin’d inn:

And having dropp’d th’ expected bag—pass on.

He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,

Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief

Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some,

To him indiff’rent whether grief or joy.

Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,

Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet

With tears, that trickled down the writer’s cheeks,

Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,

Or charg’d with am’rous sighs of absent swains,

Or nymphs responsive, equally affect

His horse and him, unconscious of them all.

But oh th’ important budget! usher’d in

With such heart-shaking music, who can say

What are its tidings? have our troops awak’d?

Or do they still, as if with opium drugg’d,

Snore to the murmurs of th’ Atlantic wave?

Is India free? and does she wear her plum’d

And jewell’d turban with a smile of peace,

Or do we grind her still? The grand debate,

The popular harangue, the tart reply,

The logic, and the wisdom, and the wit,

And the loud laugh—I long to know them all;

I burn to set th’ imprison’d wranglers free,

And give them voice and utt’rance once again.

   Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in.

Not such his ev’ning, who with shining face

Sweats in the crowded theatre, and squeez’d

And bor’d with elbow-points through both his sides,

Out-scolds the ranting actor on the stage:

Nor his, who patient stands till his feet throb,

And his head thumps, to feed upon the breath

Of patriots, bursting with heroic rage,

Or placemen, all tranquility and smiles.

This folio of four pages, happy work!

Which not ev’n critics criticise; that holds

Inquisitive attention, while I read,

Fast bound in chains of silence, which the fair,

Though eloquent themselves, yet fear to break;

What is it but a map of busy life,

Its fluctuations, and its vast concerns?

. . .

   Oh Winter! ruler of th’ inverted year,

Thy scatter’d hair with sleet like ashes fill’d,

Thy breath congeal’d upon thy lips, thy cheeks

Fring’d with a beard made white with other snows

Than those of age; thy forehead wrapt in clouds,

A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne

A sliding car, indebted to no wheels,

But urg’d by storms along its slipp’ry way;

I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem’st,

And dreaded as thou art!  Thou hold’st the sun

A pris’ner in the yet undawning East,

Short’ning his journey between morn and noon,

And hurrying him, impatient of his stay,

Down to the rosy West; but kindly still

Compensating his loss with added hours

Of social converse and instructive ease,

And gathering at short notice, in one group,

The family dispers’d, and fixing thought,

Not less dispers’d by day-light and its cares.

I crown thee King of intimate delights,

Fire-side enjoyments, home-born happiness,

And all the comforts that the lowly roof

Of undisturb’d retirement, and the hours

Of long uninterrupted evening, know.

No ratt’ling wheels stop short before these gates;

No powder’d pert proficient in the art

Of sounding an alarm, assaults these doors

Till the street rings; no stationary steeds

Cough their own knell, while, heedless of the sound,

The silent circle fan themselves, and quake:

But here the needle plies its busy task,

The pattern grows, the well-depicted flow’r,

Wrought patiently into the snowy lawn,

Unfolds its bosom; buds, and leaves, and sprigs,

And curling tendrils, gracefully dispos’d,

Follow the nimble finger of the fair;

A wreath that cannot fade, or flow’rs that blow

With most success when all besides decay.

The poet’s or historian’s page, by one

Made vocal for th’ amusement of the rest;

The sprightly lyre, whose treasure of sweet sounds

The touch from many a trembling chord shakes out;

And the clear voice symphonious, yet distinct,

And in the charming strife triumphant still,

Beguile the night, and set a keener edge

On female industry; the threaded steel

Flies swiftly, and unfelt the task proceeds.

The volume clos’d, the customary rites

Of the last meal commence.  A Roman meal;

Such as the mistress of the world once found

Delicious, when her patriots of high note,

Perhaps by moonlight, at their humble doors,

And under an old oak’s domestic shade,

Enjoy’d, spare feast! a radish and an egg.

Discourse ensues, not trivial, yet not dull,

Nor such as with a frown forbids the play

Of fancy, or proscribes the sound of mirth:

Nor do we madly, like an impious world,

Who deem religion frenzy, and the God

That made them an intruder on their joys,

Start at his awful name, or deem his praise

A jarring note.  Themes of a graver tone,

Exciting oft our gratitude and love,

While we retrace with mem’ry’s pointing wand,

That calls the past to our exact review,

The dangers we have ’scap’d, the broken snare,

The disappointed foe, deliv’rance found

Unlook’d for, life preserv’d and peace restor’d,

Fruits of omnipotent eternal love.

Oh ev’nings worthy of the Gods! exclaim’d

The Sabine bard.  Oh ev’nings, I reply,

More to be priz’d and coveted than yours,

As more illumin’d, and with nobler truths,

That I and mine, and those we love, enjoy.

William Cowper, born on this day in 1731, from "The Winter Evening"

Music.

MLive on Coach Moore "emptying the tank" ...

“Coach Moore has said from the get-go he was going to call his most aggressive game he’s ever called,” Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy said. “For the big boys, for Blake (Corum), for myself — it was music to our ears.”

Michigan (12-0, 9-0 Big Ten) had largely featured a one-dimensional offense in recent weeks, scoring victories over Penn State and Maryland via the ground. At one point against the Nittany Lions, the Moore-led offense ran the football 32 straight times. And while the run-game dominated the menu again on Saturday, Moore ratcheted up the aggressiveness, too.

After Will Johnson jumped a route and intercepted a Kyle McCord pass in the first quarter, Michigan’s offense set up inside the Ohio State 10-yard line and responded by running it three straight times. On fourth-and-goal from inside the 1, Moore made the call to give it Corum one more time — and the program’s No. 1 back answered it.

“(He said) he’s emptying the tank — and that’s what he did,” Corum, who rushed 22 times for 88 yards and two touchdowns. “When we get in those fourth-and-1s, coach Moore always says ‘smash.’ Then you have AJ Barner over there screaming in his Triple H voice, ‘It’s time to play the game.’"

Away.

Channeling Bob Ufer from 1969 ...

Ohio came to bury Michigan

All wrapped in maize and blue

The words were said the prayers were read and everybody cried

But when they closed the coffin, it was someone else inside

The Buckeyes came to bury Michigan -- 

But Michigan wasn't dead

For when the game was over

It was someone else instead

Twenty-two Michigan Wolverines put on the gloves of gray

And as the organ played "The Victors"

They laid Ryan Day away.

Prepared.

Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory. 

Miguel de Cervantes

GO BLUE!

Hacienda.

Hang.

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to this ... RUSH, "Headlong Flight" ...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Nerf.

0:22 ...

Benefits.

You should drink what you like, in the quantities that you like. It may hasten your death, but this small cost will be offset by the benefits to everyone around you. You should not, through your drinking, inflict pain on others: drink as much as you like, but put away the bottle before gaiety gives way to gloom.

Sir Roger Scruton, from I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine

Jerry Jeff

Jerry Jeff Walker at Dixie Bar & Bus Stop ...

Banner.

John Hadl enjoyed a banner day in 1975 when he passed for 275 yards and two touchdowns against the Giants and performed an a cappella version of Scarborough Fair in the huddle that brought two offensive linemen to tears. pic.twitter.com/zgiueEgznY

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) March 11, 2023

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Excellent.

Excellent albums ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Lucky.

Evans, Hoar Frost, 2022

FOR the CHIPMUNK in MY YARD

I think he knows I'm alive, having come down

The three steps of the back porch

And given me a good once over. All afternoon

He's been moving back and forth,

Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,

While all about him the great fields tumble

To the blades of the thresher. He's lucky

To be where he is, wild with all that happens.

He's lucky he's not one of the shadows

Living in the blond heart of the wheat.

This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires

Of starlight, he'll curl among their roots,

Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter

On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.

Robert Gibb

Greatest.

On this day in 1898, Louis Elbel composed the greatest fight song ever written, "The Victors."

The University of Michigan Men's Glee Club gettin' work done on "Varsity" and "The Victors" ...

Joy.

Herring is joy in a jar.

Your indoctrination begins ...

• From My Jewish Learning: Purists maintain that the best way to eat herring is straight out of the jar with a thick slice of rye bread and butter.
• Each week David Zabar, the third generation of Zabars working in the family business, travels to Greenpoint to choose barrels of herring and, more important in today's market, smoked fish.  "When I stick my hand in the barrels to feel the plumpness of the herring, I feel like I am going back to the time of my grandfather,'' he said.
• Acme has a glossary.

Thanks, Pop.  The tradition continues.

Telemann, Violin Fantasia No. 1 in B-Flat Major,TWV 40:14

Xavier Díaz-Latorre performs ...

Barry.

Blessings.

Still.

On russet floors, by waters idle,

The pine lets fall its cone;

The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing

In leafy dells alone;

And traveller’s joy beguiles in autumn

Hearts that have lost their own.

On acres of the seeded grasses

The changing burnish heaves;

Or marshalled under moons of harvest

Stand still all night the sheaves;

Or beeches strip in storms for winter

And stain the wind with leaves.

A. E. Housman, from "Tell Me Not Here, It Needs Not Saying"

Glory.

Wyeth, Swifts – First Version, 1991

GOD'S WORLD

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

   Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!

   Thy mists, that roll and rise!

Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag

And all but cry with colour!   That gaunt crag

To crush!   To lift the lean of that black bluff!

World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,

         But never knew I this;

         Here such a passion is

As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear

Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;

My soul is all but out of me,—let fall

No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Blessing.

Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914

lt was answered that all great and honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages. It was granted the dangers were great, but not desperate. The difficulties were many, but not invincible. For though there were many of them likely, yet they were not certain. It might be sundry of the things feared might never befall; others by provident care and the use of good means might in a great measure be prevented; and all of them, through the help of God, by fortitude and patience might either be borne or overcome. True it was that such attempts were not to he made and undertaken without good ground and reason, not rashly or lightly as many have done for curiosity or hope of gain, etc. But their condition was not ordinary, their ends were good and honourable, their calling lawful and urgent; and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding. 

William Bradford, from "Of Plymouth Plantation"

Asleep.

Sargent, Peter Harrison Asleep, 1905

Happy Birthday, Adams

Blythe, Abigail Adams, 1766

Some Author that I have met with compares a judicious traveller, to a river that increases its stream the farther it flows from its source, or to certain springs which running through rich veins of minerals improve their qualities as they pass along. It will be expected of you my son that as you are favourd with superiour advantages under the instructive Eye of a tender parent, that your improvements should bear some proportion to your advantages. Nothing is wanting with you, but attention, dilligence and steady application, Nature has not been deficient.

These are times in which a Genious would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. Would Cicero have shone so distinguished an orater, if he had not been roused, kindled and enflamed by the Tyranny of Catiline, Millo,2 Verres and Mark Anthony. The Habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All History will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruits of experience, not the Lessons of retirement and leisure.

Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the Heart, then those qualities which would otherways lay dormant, wake into Life, and form the Character of the Hero and the Statesman.

Abigail Adams, born on this day in 1744, from a letter to John Quincy Adams, 19 January 1780

Deep Purple, "Burn"

"Nice people" listening to Deep Purple ...

Genesis, "Dusk"

Released.

Steely Dan released Gaucho on this day in 1980.

El era del terzo mondo ...

Spiky.

"[I]n the spiky fall season, days like today with the little chill that makes one feel freshly laundered ..."

William F. Buckley Jr., from Overdrive: A Personal Documentary

Godless.

Leyendecker, Thanksgiving, 1928

 The American Spectator looks at our Godless Thanksgiving ...

I was recently alerted to a Thanksgiving Day lesson at the website education.com, a go-to source for teachers. On the main page was a 60-minute lesson plan titled, “Giving Thanks for Thanksgiving.” “Thanksgiving offers an opportunity to teach young students about early days in the original colonies,” the plan informs us. “Students will discover the purpose and people involved in the first Thanksgiving.”

So far, so good. But read on.

The introduction instructs the teacher: “Call students together. Ask students to think about some of their favorite holidays and what they like to do on these holidays. Tell students that Thanksgiving is coming up. Ask students what some of their favorite Thanksgiving traditions are. Read Thanksgiving Day.”

Thanksgiving Day is one of three books recommended, none of which — notably — mention God or religion. Not one. There are, however, bountiful references to Native Americans, various tribes, corn, stuffing, potatoes, popcorn, yams, jelly, and turkeys. The Creator even gets trumped by cranberry sauce.

The “review and closing” portion of the “Thanksgiving” lesson concludes with these exciting guidelines: “Have students line up to present their Thanksgiving fact and what they are thankful for. Congratulate the students on their hard work. Encourage everyone to dig into the yummy food and enjoy having a Thanksgiving feast together!”

Dig in, kids, without a thought of thanking the Almighty.

Welcome, pilgrim, to the new world — a place, incidentally, that the Pilgrims long ago fled to for religious reasons.

Away.

Choices.

Trust me, as a person who has failed in nearly every way possible ...

The future is not like the weather.  It doesn't just happen to us.  We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.

Don't ever allow yourself to become a victim.  Own your choices, but remember: control of anything beyond the end your nose is an illusion.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Consecrated.

Brady, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863

Justin Lee on the need for the constant refounding of America ...

President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 at the consecration ceremony for the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, nearly five months after the bloodiest episode of the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg had halted General Lee’s second and final push into the North—at the cost of as many as 51,000 casualties, roughly 8,000 of which were deaths.  

The war was not yet won, but General Lee’s army was scattered and demoralized, and the Union’s victory seemed imminent. Already Lincoln was looking ahead to the impossible task of knitting together the nation’s wounds. The war—and the barbaric institution of chattel slavery that necessitated it—had called into question the very possibility of republican government. 

Lincoln was convinced that the future of popular sovereignty the world over rested on not just the outcome of the war, but on what must follow it: the repair of those “mystic chords of memory,” and the restoration of faith in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln knew he must refound the republic. 

Blaise Pascal understood that all regimes are founded on violence: the strong establish themselves over the weak, and in time the usurpation is forgotten. “The truth about the usurpation must not be made apparent,” wrote Pascal: “it came about organically without reason and has become reasonable.” What was arbitrary in origin may be developed along rational lines—just as monarchic Rome matured into a republic. 

Harry V. Jaffa, riffing on Pascal in A New Birth of Freedom (2000), observes that Lincoln refused to arrogate to himself unconstitutional power during the war because doing so would undermine his authority to refound the nation. This is why Lincoln delayed so long in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves and allowed them to fight in the Union army. 

“Military necessity had enabled the federal government to do lawfully what the Constitution hitherto had prevented it from doing,” writes Jaffa. “For that government to have acted against slavery in the states except under the exigencies of the war would … have meant usurping powers to which the people of the United States had not given their consent. It would thus, [Lincoln] thought, have defeated the very ends of human freedom.” The Gettysburg Address served as an apologia for the Proclamation and paved the way for the Thirteenth Amendment by recalling the nation to its founding ideals in the only context in which such a refounding was possible. 

In his remarkable study The Dominion of the Dead (2003), Robert Pogue Harrison argues that all human habitation and culture—the home, the city, even the nation—are founded upon the marked grave. “It is not for nothing that the Greek word for ‘sign,’ sema, is also the word for ‘grave,” writes Harrison: the memorial to the dead is the wellspring and focal point of all meaning. Lincoln’s genius at Gettysburg was his recognition that the living are incapable of founding anything on their own. “We cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground,” he proclaimed. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”