Imagining the End by Jonathan Lear

Author:Jonathan Lear
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press

5

Good Mourning in Gettysburg and Hollywood

Introduction

When I was a boy, I learned the Gettysburg Address by heart. A teacher had assigned the task of memorizing it and speaking it out loud in front of the class. There are two aspects of that experience that I can articulate more clearly now. First, it felt good. There is a bodily dimension in declaiming another person’s words, and when the prose is aspirational and has a nice cadence, one can feel pleasure in filling one’s lungs and then pushing the words out into the social world. Second, I had only a dim understanding of what I was saying. “Four score and seven years ago” is a beautiful phrase, but I did not know what a score was. That did not matter much to me. Even now, when I say “four score and seven” it takes a moment to know what I am saying, in a way that saying “eighty-seven” does not. And there is still a kernel of pleasure when I recite that phrase in my mind.

This early memorization makes it such that I cannot go back to the Gettysburg Address without resonances of my childhood. This was a time just before the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and others, before anyone in the suburb had heard of a place called Vietnam. Whatever the injustices running through the country, it was a time and a neighborhood in which patriotism came easily. Many families had in recent generations escaped persecution in Europe, and they were eager to assimilate as Americans. We had no idea that the vindication we felt for being on the right side of the Civil War—and indeed in favor of the civil rights movement—facilitated blindness to racism in our midst. I am not a Civil War buff. So, that was it for me and Gettysburg until almost forty years later when I received a shock. Drew Faust gave me a copy of her book, This Republic of Suffering, and I read it.

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