A mizzly Saturday morning
Dear Francis,
Contrary to the promises I made to you only a few weeks ago, I have been dilatory in writing to you in the Year of Our Lord 2024. My only consolation is that even prolific epistolists like Adam Smith were negligent from time to time in their correspondences, and so I am in good company.
In 1744, Smith, living in Oxford, wrote the following to his mother:
I am quite inexcusable for not writing to you oftener. I think of you every day, but always defer writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or company, but oftener laziness, hinders me.
You are not my mother, Francis, but you are very dear to me. It is, indeed, inexcusable that I do not write you oftener (I would like to claim that an endless outpouring of friends and acquaintances is what keeps me from picking up my pen and spilling my thoughts to you, but I think we both know that laziness is the wrong 'un here).
I am writing to you on a mizzly Saturday morning. The world is wet and glistening in the wan light emanating from a slate-gray sky. The weather has been abominable lately—but then again, it is January, is it not? I don't care for January, or February, or even March. I would prefer that winter last approximately a month, between Thanksgiving and the New Year, and then end forthwith on January 2. The months between the start of the year and the beginning of April, when spring begins to make its presence known, however embryonically, are inevitably dreary and tedious and cold, and one day is quite indistinguishable from another.
I know not everyone will agree, but that doesn't make them right and me wrong.
I spent the morning reading in my favorite chair, Francis. At the end of a laborious workweek, I like nothing more than to awake early, light a candle, grab a mug of hot coffee, and settle down for an hour or two with a good book as the sun rises.
I am making my way through Gore Vidal's Lincoln, which is a brilliantly conceived work of historical fiction. I am realizing that I have forgotten much of what I learned in years past about the Civil War era, and am now determined to remedy the lacunae in my knowledge. The book is providing a helpful starting point, though it is, of course, a dramatization.
Vidal's novel is a character study of Abraham Lincoln, who comes off as less self-assured than I would have imagined, and the men who surrounded him in his administration. The war itself takes place mostly in the background. A concurrent plot line involves David Harold, an assistant pharmacist in D.C. and a Confederate sympathizer, who eventually meets one John Wilkes Booth.
Vidal succeeds in capturing the ignoble nature of politics—the skullduggery, the vainglory, the temporizing, the scheming and plotting and backstabbing. Vidal's Lincoln is not the righteous and fatherlike figure the civic textbooks like to describe; rather, he is a man beset by uncertainty about his role as president, determined to hold the Union together and willing to sacrifice the slaves to do so if necessary. As the book progresses, though, Lincoln gains in confidence and resolve, an arc that is, I imagine, true to history.
I would like to write more to you about Lincoln in the future. This is my first time reading Vidal, and I intend on reading more in his Narratives of Empire series. Vidal is a crackerjack writer, and I appreciate his ability to convincingly transport readers to a different period.
I will let you get on with your day, Francis.
With love, SEW