My Highlights from the book
For example, depressed people are often unable to get out of bed, feeling a kind of paralysis that seems physical and involuntary, even though, on some level, it’s known to be mental and volitional. Truly, for those in thrall to mental agony, as Andrew Solomon has observed, merely going to brush one’s teeth can feel like a Herculean task. A common argument today has two people standing over the bed. One says, “He can’t help it. He has an illness and should be treated with deference.” The other disputes this, muttering, “He just needs a swift kick in the butt.” Lincoln’s story allows us to see that both points may be true. First, when overcome by mental agony, he allowed himself to be overcome, and for no small time. He let himself sink to the bottom and feel the scrape. Those who say that we must always buck up should see how Lincoln’s time of illness proved also to be a time of gestation and growth. Those who say we must always frame mental suffering in terms of illness must see how vital it was that Lincoln roused himself when the time came. How might Lincoln have endangered his future, and his potential, had he denied himself the reality of his suffering? How, too, might he have stagnated had he not realized that life waits for those who choose to live it? When a depressed person does get out of bed, it’s usually not with a sudden insight that life is rich and valuable, but out of some creeping sense of duty or instinct for survival. If collapsing is sometimes vital, so is the brute force of will. To William James we owe the insight that, in the absence of real health, we sometimes must act as if we are healthy. Buoyed by such discipline and habit, we might achieve actual well-being. As Lincoln advised a grumbling general who felt humiliated at having only three thousand men under his command, “‘Act well your part, there all the honor lies.’ He who does something at the head of one Regiment, will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred.” Two decades before he wrote these words, after the winter of a great depression, Lincoln understood doing something to be as simple as going to work, or just making preparations for it, which he gamely advised Joshua Speed to do if his “mind were not right.” In the small battles of life, brushing one’s teeth, taking a walk—these can be movements in preparation for victory.
This is what it’s like: to feel not only miserable but the most miserable; to feel a strange, muted sense of awful power; to believe plainly that either the misery must end or life will—and yet to fear the misery will not end.
Lincoln added, “die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.”
In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.
Addressing the people of the South, he said, “You say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.”
He concluded his speech by citing an old parable, of an Eastern monarch who charged his wise men to invent a sentence that would apply to all times and in all situations. The wise men returned with “And this too shall pass away.” Lincoln lingered over the line. “How much it expresses!” he exclaimed. “How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depths of affliction! And this, too, shall pass away.” Still, to the wisdom of these wise men from the East he had something to add. “And yet,” he said, “let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.” In the face of present disappointments, Lincoln first articulated acknowledgment, then serene resignation, and finally the sad, sweet hope that better times would someday come.
The point of exertion was not to win a contest and then relax. Work, Lincoln suggested, was its own end, for when one worked for a proper end, neither victory nor defeat could remain; rather, both led to the need for continued effort and diligence.
Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted for as an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is not a story of transformation but one of integration. Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.
