“The
inclination to exchange thoughts with one another is probably an original
impulse of our nature. If I be in pain I wish to let you know it, and to ask
your sympathy and assistance; and my pleasurable emotions also, I wish to
communicate to, and share with you.”
Not
what you might expect two years before the country would tear itself in half.
Much given to silence, to soundless inward-dwelling, Lincoln was a master of
speech who loved a good story and a responsive audience. He says, on Feb. 11,
1859, celebrating the medium in his message:
“…if
a mode of communication had been left to invention, speech must have been the
first, from the superior adaptation to the end, of the organs of speech, over
every other means within the whole range of nature. Of the organs of speech the
tongue is the principal; and if we shall test it, we shall find the capacities
of the tongue, in the utterance of articulate sounds, absolutely wonderful.”
In
Darwinian terms, the first lie must have been uttered soon after the “superior
adaptation” of human speech evolved (Lincoln’s talk, delivered one day before
his fiftieth birthday, and Darwin’s, comes nine months before On the Origin of Species would be
published). Even in the most propinquitous of relationships, honesty doesn’t
always follow with celerity. Philip Larkin reminds us in “Talking in Bed”:
“It
becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.”
1 comment:
My friend Eva used to say: Familiarity breeds attempt.
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