by Adam Gopnik
“And Now It's Happening to Me!”—it could be the title of an allegory of modern life. The space between the two kinds of experience has become the irony of our condition. The error of the scientifically minded is to think that objective truths about the common experience can temper the irrationalities brought on by the core experience; the error of the religionist is to think that the intensity of the core experience can negate objective truths about the common fate. Science lets us think big, but we still feel small. No cosmologist has ever felt more serenely about his tenure case by contemplating the vastness of the universe. We get the big picture, but it's not where we live.
People have always been unique in perceiving this gap, and in the knowledge of their mortality; the aggregate experience and our understanding of it make almost no difference to the individual experience and our experience of it. But in modern times, science has made that divide larger than it has ever been before. No one has ever put it better than Van Gogh, in the last of our little epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter, and the point he made is subtler than it may at first seem. It is true, certainly, he tells us, that the world is round, but that doesn't alter our experience of it as flat when we walk from central Paris to the suburb of Asnières. The world is round and feels flat; our lives are flat and feel round. The flatness we experience on foot is nonetheless real for being part of a round fact; the roundness we feel is no less dear for taking place on a flat plane. We live horizontally, still hoping ahead.
This is a truth that can't be explained, or explained away. It can only be asserted, as it can only be experienced. Most societies bound by tribe or religion bridge the space between the common and the core with ritual and dogma, and they do it successfully, for a while anyway. There's a beautiful poem by Yehuda Amichai about the Jewish prayer shawl that captures the profundity of this feeling so well:
Whoever put on a tallis when he was young will never forget: taking it out of the soft velvet bag, opening the folded shawl, spreading it out, kissing the length of the neckband (embroidered or trimmed in gold). Then swinging it in a great swoop overhead like a sky, a wedding canopy, a parachute. And then winding it around his head as in hide- and- seek, wrapping his whole body in it, close and slow, snuggling into it like the cocoon of a butterfly, then opening would- be wings to fly.
For religious people, the snuggle and the flight are one. Individual experience feeds into the collective experience as a river flows into the ocean, and as the ocean makes the rain that makes the rivers. Living modern lives means that we don't want, or can't have, that simple comfort. Living a modern life means being “doubly conscious,” as Herndon said that Lincoln was; it means being both the first of the moderns and the first of the anti-moderns, as Darwin's son said of his father. It means walking flat and living round, as Vincent insisted to Émile Bernard.
Both Lincoln and Darwin are princes of our disorder in this way, too, symptoms of the syndrome: they were family men but not social men. They lived lives that touched millions—and, in Lincoln's case, brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands— but their lives were lived almost outside the traditional bounds of community. Lincoln was a politician with supporters and partners, but he had at most one or two real friends, and even they felt they never really knew him. Darwin, as his son knew, was of the same kind; if anything, they both retreated from the clan life, whether of the frontier or the British upper classes, into the family life of the great pan- national bourgeoisie.
The values of that doubly conscious class were called by Kenneth Clark “heroic materialism,” the materialism that rose between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the First World War, the materialism of bridges and empires. Humane materialism might be a better name for it—the recognition that there is a space between what we know and what we feel, and that our lives have to be lived as best we can live them within that space. We are all at one level molecule, at another level monkeys, or at another, men, and all these at once.
Angels and ages, and both at once. The finest tunings of emotion are real, and the big indifferent waves of nature are real too. The splash and the tide both happen at the same time; from the pebble's point of view the splash is louder and the tide merely a background. The pebble's experience is smaller than the ocean's, but it is no less real. We each wear our hats differently on our heads, within a world of culture finely tuned and nuanced. Liberalism accepts a plurality of hats in order to arrive at a working majority of hearts. It asks us to accept a very broad range of radically different kinds and types of people, bringing them to live together. The proper limits of tolerance will remain unsure, but we all have a common interest in their being as broad as we can make them. Our souls are our own; our hats, the world's. Man is neither ape nor angel, but a creature of ages that allow him to be both.
Enchantment, Utopia, epiphany, sublime insight—the grand words of Romanticism are not Darwinian words. (In fact, they never occur anywhere in his writing.) Slight, small, varied, struggle, helpful, hopeful, natural, selection, modification (not revolutionary change)— these are the words of Darwinism, and they have become the words of liberalism. By giving us a new set of words, Darwin changed our minds.
And if we expand the set to include the words that Lincoln made part of the inheritance of liberal democracy? “Government of the people, by the people;” “with malice toward none; with charity for all;” “the law of religion;” “the mystic chords of memory;” “the better angels of our nature;” “full measure of devotion;” “the dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.” The materialist certitudes and rationalist confidence of undiluted Enlightenment thought are absent—no “give me liberty, or give me death” or even “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But the arguments of law and observation aren't less eloquent than the rhetoric of honor and imagination once was, or less able to move us. They show that we can argue from evidence and still evoke ideals.
What all the first modern artists, from Whitman to van Gogh, have believed is that, for whatever reason, and however it came to be, we are capable of witnessing and experiencing the world as more than the sum of our instincts and appetites. Our altruism is not simply our appetites compounded; our appetites are not simply our altruism exposed. “Reason … must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense,” Lincoln said, and reason alone can point us to its limits. We can argue about anything, even about the nature and meaning of our mysticisms. Clark called our liberal faith “heroic materialism” and said it wouldn't be enough. Humane materialism, or mystical materialism, is closer to it, and it remains the best we have. Intimations of the numinous may begin and end in us, but they are as real as descriptions of the natural; Sunday feelings are as real as Monday facts. On this point, Darwin and Lincoln, along with all the other poets of modern life, would have agreed. There is more to man than the breath in his body, if only the hat on his head, and the hope in his heart.
A BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
Hundreds, no, thousands, of good books have been written about both of these men, their lives, and their work. I have read only some of them and have tried to keep the essay form pure and amateur in the right way by not overloading this book with scholarly machinery. However, I hope to have made my debts, enormous as they are, to original scholars pretty clear in the pages, where shout- outs are given as required, and hope that this note in addition will do double work— not only pointing to debts more clearly, but also, and just as important, helping readers go deeper into this material, to find original sources and more voices than just my own.
DARWIN
Any student of Darwin should begin with his own books. The four most important, On the Origin of Species;The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; The Voyage of the H.M.S. “Beagle;” and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, are best available in E. O. Wilson's edition, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin (Norton, 2006). The Autobiography of Charles Darwin is just
as important, and I like the Norton edition from 1969, completely restored, and with notes by his granddaughter. The most valuable resource for amateur Darwinians is http://darwin-online.org.uk/, which is placing the complete works of Darwin online.
The Cambridge University Press has sponsored the enormous, necessary, multivolume edition of Darwin's correspondence. It is available in useful, small editions, which I've often read with pleasure and drawn from at ease, particularly Evolution: Selected Letters of Charles Darwin 1860–1870 (Frederick Burkhardt, Samantha Evans, Alison M. Pearn, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Origins: Selected Letters of Charles Darwin, 1822–1859 (Frederick Burkhardt, ed., with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, Cambridge University Press, 2008). Even better, and one of the really golden books, is Metaphysics, Materialism and the Evolution of Mind: The Early Writings of Charles Darwin (Paul H. Barrett and Howard E. Gruber, eds., University of Chicago Press, 1980). (The notebooks from 1838 are also available now online.)
The standard biographies of Darwin, which I have read and reread with pleasure (though with occasional differences of interpretation) are Janet Browne's authoritative two volumes Charles Darwin: Voyaging (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin (Penguin, 1992), a terrific read with a strong emphasis on the social history of Darwin's time as a key to his thought and its reception. The “domestic reading” of Annie, and her role in Darwin's life, we owe to Randal Keynes's Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution (Riverhead, 2002). I have drawn on all three of these texts for ideas and inspiration throughout. Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots (Cambridge University Press, 1983) was a pioneering effort to place Darwin in a literary context, while Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (first published by Macmillan and Co. in 1863, then Penguin, 2008) is an entertaining postscript. David Dobbs's Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (Pantheon, 2005) is a fascinating study of an unknown story of Darwin's theoretical mind, which I have drawn from with pleasure. Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks (Little, Brown, 2006) was particularly revelatory on Darwin's relation to the amateur bird- breeders, and Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch (Knopf, 1994) is both a fine account of the birth of the theory and an explanation of its continuing power. (In a more specialized mode, Frank Sulloway's debunking of the old myth of evolution's birth can be found in his article “Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend” in Journal of the History of Biology 15:1-53.)
Steve Jones's Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated (Dou-bleday 1999) is an extraordinary attempt to combine Darwin's original text with what has been learned since. The writings of Ernst Mayr, particularly his The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Belknap Press, 1985), Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays (Belknap Press, 1997), and One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Harvard University Press, 2007), as well as his introduction to the 1964 Harvard University Press edition of Darwin's Origin, have all been central to my own understanding of what Darwin really “means.” (Many years ago, Kirk Varnedoe and I concluded our High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture with a quote from Mayr.) Mayr's emphasis on the revolutionary nature of Darwin's opposition to the “typos,” and to essentialist thinking generally, is the bedrock of a philosophical approach to evolution.
No modern student of Darwin interpretation can do without the work of Daniel C. Dennett, particularly his Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), any more than she can do without the very different work of the late and much-lamented Stephen Jay Gould— recognizing that they represent two different readings of Darwin's life, work, and importance (though a student of both might suggest that the areas of agreement are larger than the arguers might always allow). Gould's collections of essays are all essential, but one might pick out, as having changed my own views of the world, his The Panda's Thumb (paperback edition, Norton, 1992) and Ever Since Darwin (Norton, 1992), while more ambitious students will want to try his daunting The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Belknap, 2002). Richard Dawkins's own, very contrary views have also always been worth reading—see for instance his Unweaving the Rainbow (Penguin Press, 1998)—while Matt Ridley's books (for instance, his Genome [Fourth Estate, 1999]) have been an invaluable help to me.
The secondary “philosophical” literature, attempting to reconcile Darwin and the humanities, and evolutionary thought with questions of faith, is also enormous: let me single out David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (Norton, 2006) both as a brief life and an interpretation, George Levine's Darwin Loves You (Princeton University Press, 2008), Philip Kitcher's Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design and the Future of Faith (Oxford University Press, 2007), and, in a slightly different but humane key, Gerald Weissmann's Darwin's Audubon (Perseus, 1998).
As I finished this book, someone drew my attention to Stanley Edgar Hyman's long-out-of-print but worthwhile The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers (Atheneum, 1961), which has many fine things to say about Darwin's vocabulary particularly his ever-balanced use of “beauty” and “fatal.”
LINCOLN
The Darwin literature is merely immeasurable; the Lincoln literature is infinite. When you are already up to your armpits in it, you realize you have hardly dipped a toe. To single out some of the countless books worth reading: David Herbert Donald's Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 1996) is standard, and so will be the newer version by Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (Knopf, 2006). The older lives of Lincoln include Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, The War Years, recently reprinted in a paperback edition (Harvest Books, 2002)—though long out of fashion, this was the first one many of us ever read, and a recent rereading didn't disappoint. His chapter on Lincoln's humor is worth the price of admission, and while the account of Lincoln's relationship with Ann Rutledge, of which Sandburg makes much, following Herndon, has long been mocked by academics, it has recently been restored to the story as at least a plausible possibility by Joshua Wolf Shenk in his provocative and stimulating Lincoln's Melancholy (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)—a reminder never to count out the poet's intuition in writing history. I have also drawn much on William C. Harris's Lincoln's Rise to the Presidency (University Press of Kansas, 2007), on Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller (Knopf, 2002), as well as on Daniel Mark Epstein's The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage (Ballantine, 2008).
An excellent collection of the newest lines in Lincoln lore can be found in Lincoln Revisited (John Y. Simon, Harold Holzer, Dawn Vogel, eds., Fordham University Press, 2007). Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 2005) got me started on the Lincoln path, along with James L. Swan-son's Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer (Harper Collins, 2006) and Jay Winik's April, 1865: The Month That Saved America (HarperCollins, 2001). Both Goodwin and Winik spoke to me at length about their work, and I thank them for that. Lincoln's own speeches and writings are also best available now in a multivolume series from the Library of America.
My own thoughts on Lincoln's Lyceum address, and the code of honor, were first expressed at the Oxford University Press and New York Public Library lectures, on the romance of violence in America, which I gave in New York in the spring of 1995 but, for various reasons, have never published. Kenneth S. Greenberg's Honor & Slavery (Princeton University Press, 1996) is a superb discussion of the subject. David S. Reynolds's John Brown, Abolitionist (Knopf, 2005) was the occasion for a long review of my own in The New Yorker, which I have borrowed from for this book. I learned from every page, as I did from John Stauffer's The Black Hearts of Men (Harvard University Press, 2002).
On Lincoln's words and rhetoric, everyone begins with Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg (Touchstone
, 1992). I have also been influenced by Van Wyck Brooks on Lincoln in his The Times of Melville & Whitman (Dutton, 1947), by Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore (Oxford University Press, 1962), and by Alfred Kazin's God and the American Writer (Knopf, 1997). Harold Holzer's Lincoln at Cooper Union (Simon & Schuster, 2004) is indispensable, as is Lincoln's Sword by Douglas L. Wilson (Knopf, 2006). Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (HarperCollins, 2008), which seems full of insight, appeared just after this book was finished. And, for the context of a rhetorical society, one should see also The Age of Lincoln by OrvilleVernon Burton (Hill &Wang, 2007).
On Lincoln and the law, see Julie M. Fenster's The Case of Abraham Lincoln (Palgrave, 2007) and Brian Dirck's Lincoln the Lawyer (University of Illinois Press, 2007). On the Civil War, and its profound transformation of mourning and feeling, I have obviously been much influenced by Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008), which I wrote about at length in The New Yorker, as well as by Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death (Cornell University Press, 2008) by Mark S. Schantz. On Lincoln, slavery, and racism, and his relations with Frederick Douglass, see James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican (Norton, 2007) and John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln (Twelve Books, 2008). On Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home, see Lincoln's Sanctuary by Matthew Pinsker (Oxford University Press, 2003). On Lincoln and Shakespeare, I'm grateful to conversations with John Andrews, who promises a book on Shakespeare and the Lincoln assassination, as well as with Barry Edelstein, Stephen Greenblatt, Tony Kushner, and Ramie Targoff. Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff's work on the invention of theory and the making of the human mind can be found in their books, most notably Words, Thoughts and Theories (MIT Press, 1997).