Monday October 18, 2021; 8:12 PM EDT
- Just got off the highway and I'm eager to sit down here and try to make a column of sentences pass an idea down the screen, transforming it as it goes.#
- Is that what sentences in a sequence do? Maybe they hand a few key words down the screen, holding them under different lights along the way, until they arrive at the end of the sequence, where for a while they shimmer differently than before.#
- Lincoln did something like this in a handful of sentences at Gettysburg. He handed the word "dedicate" down through a few sentences, repeatedly re-contextualizing it, something like this: #
- Our forefathers dedicated this nation to a worthy concept. This war tests whether a nation dedicated to that concept can endure. #
- We're here to dedicate a memorial cemetery to the many soldiers who died defending that nation, that concept.#
- But honestly, we can't hallow this ground, we can't dedicate it, because the soldiers who died here hallowed it and dedicated it already.#
- But we can dedicate ourselves to that nation, that worthy concept, so that these soldiers will not have died in vain.#
- We can dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work of making that nation, protecting that concept.#
- And so government of the people, by the people, for the people will not perish from the earth.#
- Shortly after reading the Gettysburg Address, a citizen today might stop and reflect. Might think about the founders, the founding documents, the institutions that stand on their foundation, the citizens that animate them, the soldiers that have protected them, the concept that has a chance to unify them all, and the ideal of dedication, for a moment, for a reader, shimmers in all of these.#