Mr. Lincoln

I mentioned before this was to be the year of Lincoln. Little did I know how true that would be. I dragged all my Lincoln books I hadn't read yet up to my den and made a "wall of Lincoln" in front of my chair. There are 51 books. I vowed to read them all year until I've read them all. I've never undertaken a specific reading project this big. I worried I'd lose interest and move on. I haven't. I'm completely taken over by Brother Lincoln. I say Brother Lincoln because he was baptized by proxy in the St. George Temple by Wilford Woodruff when he, Washington, Franklin, and many of the other signers of the Declaration of Independance came and "waited up him" to ascertain why they had been ignored in the great work of redeeming the dead. So Lincoln's work was done and he and Washington were ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood and made High Priests though the reast were made Elders. So it's Brother Lincoln; as well it should be.

The biggest project is Abraham Lincoln: A Life, vols. 1 & 2 containing about 2.000 pages. I'm am progressing but have to read other things in between since it is so huge and comprehensive. I'm at page 235 in first volume but am loving it.

I just finished two books that are exceptional. A. Lincoln by Ronald White is the best Lincoln biography since Carl Sandberg's back at the turn of the century. It is very well written and contains very new and fresh material. A must read for all.

The other that I could not put down was Lincoln, The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan. Wow. Great insight into this aspect of Lincoln's life and really how he became Lincoln; by his voracious reading and then ability to write brilliantly. I am haunted and can't get the words out of my mind from his second inagural address. They are imbedded and play through every time I have a moment when my mind isn't focussed on anything else. And when I'm thinking of other things they are faintly repeating in the background. Some day I want to just take the words and turn them into a book. I think I could do it because of there power and the myriad thoughts and feelings they invoke. They are really poetry at there essence. They are:

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living hearth and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of out nature."

Lincoln provided orchestration to the bare notes of the words. And by invoking the "better angels of our nature" he rejected the 19th century secterian notions of guardian angels doing for us what we can and should do for ourselves.

Now I am plowing into The Age of Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: Great Historians On Our 16th President, The Best American History Essays on Lincoln, The Lincoln Anthology, and Lincoln: President-Elect, to name a few.

Good luck with whatever terrestrial project you are working on whomever is reading this. For myself I will continue to dabble the celestial.