Month: May 2004

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Man, that Abe fellow could write!

Lynn Sislo links a Terry Teachout post that contrasts two bits of writing, both from the exact same source. The first is from Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, as originally written by William Seward:

“I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren….The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.”

Then, Terry gives the actual version as rewritten by President Lincoln himself:

“I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies….The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart 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 our nature.”

Terry says that Lincoln’s formulation is more elegant while Seward’s is clunky; Lynn feels it’s the reverse, referring to Lincoln’s version as a “dumbed-down” variation of Seward’s. For my part, I agree with Terry, and here are a couple of reasons why.

1. The difference in the first sentences. Seward writes, “I close”, but Lincoln says “I am loth to close”. This is essential to the theme of the whole speech; if we truly are “not enemies, but friends” — or “fellow countrymen and brethren” — then by making this simple alteration Lincoln is saying, “You are my friends, my brothers, my countrymen, and I do not want to leave your company.” What Lincoln has done by changing Seward’s words is to strengthen the overall theme of the address (i.e., that the United States is a Union that must not be pulled apart).

2. By pulling “We must not be enemies” into its own sentence, Lincoln amplifies the moral imperative implied by the preceding “We are not enemies, but friends”. In one sentence he states what is the case; in the next, he states what must continue to be the case. This is missed in Seward’s awkward formulation.

3. Seward takes a stab at a musical metaphor in that long blow of a sentence ending things, but it doesn’t quite work. What “mystic chords” are these? What is this “ancient music” those chords produce? It’s very unclear, but Lincoln strongly ties that metaphor back into his theme of Union.

4. Lincoln adds small clauses like “as they surely will be” which create a mood of optimism not present in the Seward.

5. The phrase “the better angels of our nature” implies a more active role for the citizenry in preserving the Union; Seward’s formulation is a pretty passive one in which we rely on “the guardian angel of our nation”. Lincoln preserves the image of angelic providence, but aligns it with the people whom he has already called “friends”.

6. Finally, this is hard to gauge, but Lincoln’s rewrite has better cadence for a bit of writing that is intended to be read aloud. That long sentence of Seward’s has no natural breaking points, no obvious places where one thought ends and another begins, and it contains one clause that could seriously trip up a speaker (“…through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent…”). Lincoln fixes this by changing that clause to add a single syllable (…”to every living heart and hearthstone…”)

So, in Lincoln’s formulation, I find a stronger statement of theme and a stronger relation of that theme to his intended audience, I find the imagery likewise recast to better reflect the theme of the address, and I find a better sense of rhythm and cadence. And all that in just three fewer words than in Seward’s original, which is really a remarkable thing: just reading the two versions back-to-back, I got the impression that Seward’s was significantly longer than Lincoln’s. Not so.

In his post, Terry Teachout makes a musical metaphor to what Lincoln has done here, and I’d like to make another one. Any trained musician knows that a complex passage of fast music will actually sound faster if played cleanly at a slower tempo than if it is played sloppily at a brisker tempo. Here, Abraham Lincoln accomplishes the literary equivalent.

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The Not-so-ancient Marriner

Norman Lebrecht on Sir Neville Marriner, on the occasion of Marriner’s eightieth birthday:

“Ask him for his greatest thrill, and it might be seeing his daughter married in the church of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, or playing in the back desk of the Philharmonia with Toscanini on the rostrum. Neville Marriner is a rare specimen in the musical jungle, a maestro without enemies. He took hold of a tradition, improved it beyond previous recognition and preserved it in transmissible form for all eternity.”

Marriner is a very self-effacing conductor: he is responsible for a number of my very favorite recordings — this Vaughan Williams disc of his is one of favorite recordings ever, in any musical genre — but I don’t know much about him at all. Reading Lebrecht’s tribute, it seems this is at least partly by Marriner’s own design.

Mainstream audiences will most likely have encountered Marriner’s work via the film Amadeus, for which Marriner recorded all of the music with his orchestra, the Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields. I used to read articles that lamented the passing of the age when a single conductor was indelibly associated with a single orchestra — Stokowski with Philadelphia, say, or Koussevitzky with Boston — but it still does happen. Marriner and the ASMTF is a prime example.

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Nick Berg’s Murder

Overnight I had a bunch of search engine hits about the beheading of Nick Berg in Iraq. Presumably people are looking for the video of the event. Yes, I have seen it; yes, I believe such things should be made public; yes, it is ghastly and horrifying. I got the video from Ogrish.com (warning: if you haven’t seen this site before, it is neither safe for work nor for those who are in any way squeamish).

Also, Oliver Willis linked another blog that was hosting the video (as of yesterday, at least).

If you do watch this, remember: that’s a real human being there, and he’s been murdered by other real human beings. This isn’t an outtake from 24.

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Where’s the outrage?

Via Pandagon, I see that apparently a blogger named Vodkapundit (whom I have never read until just a few minutes ago) has decided that insufficient outrage has been expressed over today’s beheading of an American citizen at the hands of Al Qaeda.

Well, for one thing, it seems to me that he might wait a bit for the outrage. I mean, I didn’t even learn about this incident until I got home from work around 4:00, and even then, blogging wasn’t the top thing on my plate, and even considering all that, I rarely blog an emotion the second I feel it. (Regular readers will note that I have yet to say anything about the business in the Iraqi prisons, mainly because there’s damned little that I can say that hasn’t been said by anyone else. The world just doesn’t need one more blogger expressing sorrow and disappointment in our leaders, in whom I would really rather feel pride and admiration.)

But my larger point is this: I’m not really outraged by this. At least, not in the sense of being shocked by this event. Sad to say, but the murder of hostages really doesn’t strike me as something unexpected from Al Qaeda. Nor is there a sense of disappointment, in the way I’m keenly disappointed in our own leaders for allowing the Iraqi prison abuse to happen. Let’s face it, folks: Al Qaeda can do many things, but they have long since lost the ability to disappoint me.

So what do I feel about this? Anger, mostly — fierce anger at these cowards who strike a pose in their video as if to say, “Look at us, the Big! Bad! Militant! Terrorists!”, who don’t even have the guts to pose without hoods. And there’s a bit of hatred toward that small subset of Islam that has allowed such people to find each other, feed off each other, and pool their disgusting resources for their own disgusting ends that I suspect have far less to do with furthering the will of Allah and far more to do with just a bunch of guys getting kicks off murdering people (Americans preferred, generic Westerners acceptable).

I don’t know if that qualifies as “outrage”, but it seems to me that “outrage” better describes what I feel about us acting like the bad guys than what I feel about the bad guys acting like the bad guys.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, revisited

OK, in my best mercurial nature, I have reinstated YACCS as my commenting system. Things will once again look hinky until I can get the entire blog to republish.

So there.

(And, once again, any comments that were left in the interim have once again been scotched, but the older comments have been restored. I promise that sooner or later, all this navel-gaze posting will stop.)

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