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How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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From a young age, Lincoln experienced psychological pain and distress, to the point that he believed himself temperamentally inclined to suffer to an unusual degree. He learned how to articulate his suffering, find succor, endure, and adapt. Finally, he forged meaning from his affliction so that it became not merely an obstacle
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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d2926d6
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A creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. "These fears are at least fifty percent of what it is to be melancholy," --
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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His reason and his logic," said his friend James Matheny, "swallowed up all his being."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords of memory which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed u..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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In 1779, Jefferson proposed, for his state of Virginia, a guarantee of equality for citizens of all beliefs, and nonbeliefs--"meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection," Jefferson wrote, "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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1303443
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That solitude promotes insight as well as change," Storr continues, "has been recognized by the great religious leaders"--including the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed--"who have usually retreated from the world before returning to it to share what has been revealed to them."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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48fa5a3
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Though major depression is often associated with lethargy to the point of being frozen, many people with chronic depression not only work well but devote more energy to their vocation than to any other endeavor.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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b79ec6b
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Of all the paradoxes of Lincoln's life, none is more powerful than the fact that the man who would come to be known throughout the world--from American schoolrooms to the tribal councils of the Caucasus Mountains--was deeply mysterious to the people who knew him best. "Those who have spoken most confidently of their knowledge of his personal qualities," wrote the Pennsylvania Republican Alexander McClure, "are, as a rule, those who saw leas..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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3e90cee
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Lincoln was raised in the thick of Old School Calvinism. In Kentucky and Indiana, his parents belonged to a fire-breathing sect called Separate Baptism, in which congregants heard--in the tradition of Jonathan Edward's famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"--that they were bound for eternal hellfire, and nothing they could do or say or think would change their fate. Preachers did allow that a chosen few were ordained for grace..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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1a8c4c3
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High-level creative exchange depends on both hierarchical and fluid power relationships.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH LET US TO THE END DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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e67350a
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As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal. We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and wit..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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552a26a
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As decisively as Lincoln left the rural life, he left the Baptist church as well. In New Salem he became widely known as an infidel. He rejected eternal damnation, innate sin, the divinity of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible. For a time it seemed that there was nothing sacred that Lincoln didn't reject. He recited the poetry of Robert Burns, the notorious Scottish freethinker. He carried around a Bible, reading passages and arguing..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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95afee2
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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." Late"
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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1242c24
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Put plainly, Lincoln was a politician, building a public life on points that could be sustained by popular opinion--or, in extreme cases, sustained despite popular opinion. Doing good depended on winning elections. Not incidentally, his work as a lawyer nurtured this perspective, bringing him before panels that decided guilt and innocence, truth and falsehood. Lincoln had to constantly keep in mind the predilections and prejudices of ordina..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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4c36599
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He said gloomily, despairing, sadly: 'How hard, oh, how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived for it.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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As president, he explained why he would pardon soldiers who deserted for cowardice: "It would frighten the poor devils to death to shoot them."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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Did you know that Lincoln liked popcorn, and oysters, and a good strong cup of coffee?
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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edb669b
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Desiring a woman he was not free to approach, bound to a woman he had decided he didn't love--facing all the while the crack-up of his political career--Lincoln now faced a direct challenge to the one asset that mattered to him above all others, his reputation. He fell apart. "Lincoln went Crazy," Speed said,"--had to remove razors from his room--take away all Knives and other such dangerous things--&c--it was terrible-- was during the Spec..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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d97c878
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The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical next step.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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f2eb33c
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The distinction is essential. Fault implies a failure or weakness for which a person should be held to account, if not outright blamed. Misfortune is an unhappy circumstance, something bad that has happened to a blameless good person.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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In particular, he named three kinds of troubles that could beset a person with a nervous temperament: poor weather, isolation or idleness, and stressful events.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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355abf7
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Suffering was not a punishment from beyond or a malevolent infestation of the soul. Like the earth turning on its axis or energy passing through a conductor, it was a part of the natural world, to be studied, understood, and, when possible, managed.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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3104386
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Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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cd0b6d7
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In a modern dictionary, the noun "melancholy" has two definitions. First, it means "thoughtful or gentle sadness."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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af42e09
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Lincoln once noted how the printing press spread knowledge by making works widely available that had previously been the province of a privileged few. The same is true when primary sources are collected, transcribed, and published; when exhaustive reference works are produced; when scholars leave published books and carefully organized research files; and when interest in a subject grows to the point that entire institutions--libraries, jou..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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390cac7
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Perhaps," observes James McPherson, "McClellan's career had been too successful. He had never known . . . the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversity and humility." Lincoln had clearly learned those lessons."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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0fa6248
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As late as 1820, families made three quarters of all goods--food, clothing, tools--for their own use.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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0bd99cd
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Yet a period's character does affect individual character. Psychology, the study of what happens in our minds, is tightly interwoven with culture, the name we give to our beliefs, practices, and social behaviors. The scholar Andrew Delbanco goes so far as to define culture as a collective psychological notion. "Human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days--pain, desire, pleasure, fear--into a story," Del..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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d8010ae
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In the early nineteenth century, a new culture--a new idea about what to hope for--emerged for many Americans, centered around the independent self, under nation and God.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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0d2e9e2
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Today, many people not only take the self for granted but struggle mightily to connect it to anything larger. In Lincoln's time, the idea of the self had the power--tinged with uncertainty, even with danger--of something emerging and ascending.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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The Perspectives of Psychiatry, Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney identify four approaches to a suffering person.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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1f50768
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At the same time that "self-made" entered the nation's lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode--"I made a failure," a merchant would say after losing his shop--"failure" in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase "I feel like a failure" ..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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d3a9a56
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People expected too much, pushed themselves too hard, and therefore brought strains upon their minds that they were constitutionally incapable of withstanding.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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sickness of hope deferred,
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. "These fears are at least fifty percent of what it is to be melancholy," says Lauren Slater, a clinical psychologist who has written about her struggles with mental illness. "If you were to be really, really depressed but know that it was going to end in..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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8012233
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Her brother-in-law Ninian Edwards said bluntly, "She could make a bishop forget his prayers."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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because of them, he worked all the harder in his thirties and forties to "make himself," emotionally as well as materially, and go on to do the special work he longed for. Perseverance and forbearance became core aspects of Lincoln's character, and he would one day give the same advice his law partner Stephen Logan gave him, that what matters is whether a person "keeps up his labors and efforts until middle life."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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78e6a12
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ONE OF THE REASONS that depression is so problematic--and deadly, leading to many of the forty thousand suicides in the United States each year--is that people are often loath to admit they are suffering, let alone explore it in detail.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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5449b13
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In the fourth century, John Cassian described a condition among his fellow monks that he called "acedia": a "weariness or distress of heart . . . akin to dejection" that took "possession" of unhappy souls and left them lazy, sluggish, restless, and solitary. Later, acedia became widely translated as sloth, one of the seven deadly sins, and blended with melancholy in the popular mind. Both required, at the very least, confession and penitenc..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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0bd7911
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Indeed, nothing less than the understanding of God's earth was in flux. For centuries, the church had censored scientific ideas that were contrary to Christian doctrine. When censorship ended, new questions flourished. For example, biblical scholars had long said with confidence that the world was about six thousand years old--that it had been created in six days, beginning at 9 A.M. on October 23, 4004 B.C. Then geologists showed that the ..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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8f69249
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Yet, to the wigwam audience in Decatur, Lincoln presented a strange figure. He didn't seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. To the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, "I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw."
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |
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da3c2ce
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am loth to close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies, but fellow countrymen and brethren friends. We must not be enemies. AlThough passion may have has strained, it must not break our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords of memory, stretching which proceeding from every so many battle-fields, and so many patriot graves, to every living pass through all the hearts and all ..
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Joshua Wolf Shenk |