Of Reason and Rhetoric

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was reading Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages, A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. I hope to share parts of it with you as the months advance.

Perhaps it is just that I have fallen for Gopnik as a writer, observer, and thinker in the same way he has for Darwin and Lincoln.

For us, teachers and students, the particular value of the following passages from the book is both the craft of Gopnik's writing and the pivotal role that he argues writing played in the greatness of these two men.

I share these passages from the introduction of his book:

"We must be realistic about what they were like; not saints nor heroes nor gods but people. Darwin and Lincoln are admirable ans, in there way, even lovable men. But Lincoln, we have always to remember, was a war commander, who had men shot and boy-deserters hanged after sitting on their coffins in the sun. We would, I think, be taken aback at a meeting. Lincoln summed up in one word was shrewd, a backwoods lawyer with a keen sense of human weakness and knack for clever argument, colder than we would think, and more of a pol and even more ofa wise guy than we would like him to be. Winning is the probity of politics, and a good pol is more concerned with winning - elections, cases, and arguments - than with looking noble. Lincoln was smart, shrewd, and ambitious before he was, as he became, wise, farseeing, and self-sacrificing. If we had been around to watch him walk across a room, instead of stride through history, what we would have seen were the normal feet that left the noble prints."

...

"The real common stuff, and the really significant subject, though, lies at a deeper level - in the kinds of words both men used, and in a new kind of liberal language that they helped to invent. They matter most because they wrote so well."

...

"Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason. Good writing is mostly good seeing and good thinking, too. It involves a whole view<>Good writers have always argued from the facts, but few before ad taken such narrow paths of reason toward the broad road of truth. They shared logic as a form of eloquence, argument as style of virtue, close reasoning as a form of uplift."