The world will little note, nor long remember...

The keystone of the beautiful arch that is the Gettysburg Address, making the whole thing possible, is the small self-conscious note, ‘the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.’ It has the ring of a politician grown tired of trying to please public opinion, of a man who has found it’s simply easier to do his job, both professionally and personally, putting himself aside.

Lincoln invested his small speech with the meaning he had found in the overarching ideals behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He regarded them as pure documents by which to measure the national course, finding within a cause to be joyful, a salvation from acting on selfish interest in a merely capitalist society, as slavery had obvious economic sense to the plantation owner. Professionally, such ideals had given him purpose where he had struggled in his career and found himself lost. And now he brought the delivery together with the ideal so that there would no longer be an interference pattern between speech and thought, but a deep sounding harmony.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”


No wise thing, independent of topical commentary, one can say before putting himself aside. Every man knows, he, being himself, such as he is, is not wise enough, that wisdom must come, if at all, from beyond his own driving personal concerns.

Any book then, if is possesses any dignity at all, must be so written, without a celebration of powers to add or detract. He who has channeled the book from his own experience and wisdom would crave a fitting dignity for his work. He would wish for it a proper burial, like the Marquis de Sade wished his body left in the woods.

Contrary to any marketing plan, a man desires no dust jacket blurb of praise, no reading at Books-A-Million, no word of approval. A book comes about like a tree and does not live for any praise. He would wish for his book, quite honestly, to be forgotten, tossed into a gutter, fireplace, into a stream, page by page, in accordance with the science by which he worked. Then will it receive the dignity that speaks of the selfless beyond from which it came.

Marketing invites consumerism and interest. A poem exists independently of such concerns, being a thing of nature. Poems work because of the thoughts and recognitions that readers bring to them. A poem sounds good when it is a truthful observation, a comparison that works, that has a fitting harmony to the world as it is, even as the poem is purely a work of the imagination and the mind.


Lincoln stood there at Gettysburg, finding the words to speak of an unspeakable situation in those that came from beyond the situation itself, a small short poem that bore some truth as best could be known. He came up with some gently dignified, fitting and proper words, along with a small eulogy for the very words he had found, before burying them gently in the national ground.

He had figured out the physics, put an equation on a blackboard for a time to come, smiling, perhaps, as a small bit of science he felt he’d gotten right, having been an observer of nature his whole life, strengthened for it by the stream, by the pig stuck in the mud, by the fallen bird, by his own hand upon a stone, feeling its weighty lightness and how all things fit together, hearing his father calling him from thoughtful bookish reverie even as knew his work when he saw it.