Happy Birthdays

Today we celebrate the 198th birthdays of two men whose lives touched the lives of every person reading this post. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, through the rare serendipity of history, were born Feb. 12, 1809 – Darwin in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England; Lincoln, three miles south of Hogdenville, Ky., U.S.A. I have visited the latter, and the homeliness of the surroundings is conspicuous and appropriate. Both men epitomize their homelands. Both were prey to melancholy, and both were exceptional writers and readers. Of how many scientists and statesmen can we say that today?

Here’s Darwin, in his Autobiography, on his reading habits:

"Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that its nauseated me….On the other hand, novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily – against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.”

Lincoln’s taste for Shakespeare and Robert Burns, appropriate for an American of his time, is well documented. Likewise, we know he read the King James Bible, Robinson Crusoe, and Blackstone’s lecture on English law. He is supposed to have said, “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read,” but I’ve not been able to trace the source. It sounds too folksy to be true, as though scripted by one of our current president’s handlers. Another story, possibly apocryphal, claims Lincoln, after he became president, was asked for the story of his life, and he is supposed to have said: "It is contained in one line of [Thomas] Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard': 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'"