After viewing the film Lincoln this weekend, I am reflecting on the study I'd made of Lincoln when I wrote 'The American Soul' several years ago. Here is an excerpt. (The full chapter on Lincoln can be read here.)
from CHAPTER 5.
Individuality: A Meditation on The Face of Lincoln
This face was placed before us when we were very young. We were told he was a great man. We were also told wonderful things about Washington and Jefferson and, in my household, Franklin D. Roosevelt. But only with Lincoln did we actually sense greatness. I was drawn again and again to his face.
We were told about his great deeds—freeing the slaves, holding the nation together. We were given the Gettysburg address to memorize and study. But it was not what he did or said that astonished me. It was what was in his face. ...
… I now have before me a book of Lincoln photographs. It is not easy to look at them freshly and honestly, so overcrowded with familiar associations is this face. What helps is that this particular collection also contains numerous photographs of Lincoln's family, friends and associates. I remind myself that I am looking for the root meaning of the ideal of individuality that lies at the heart of the American experiment. I know—I sense—that a key to this ideal is in the face of Lincoln. …
… I look now at one of the later photos of Lincoln taken probably around the same time as the photo of Grant. It is April, 1864. The war by now has gone far, far beyond what anyone expected. Far, far more death and horror and danger to the republic. Only Lincoln seems able to contain all the death and anguish of the war, all the demons that have been unleashed. His posture is contained, his body seems to contain all that passes in his inward-directed face and eyes. And I see that it is Lincoln's body that gives his face such force. The face alone, yes, it is strong, perhaps even spiritual; but with the body, the relaxed body (a grown-up's relaxation, not a child's, not an animal's), everything in the face is rendered more objective; the qualities one feels in the face are verified, rendered part of nature, organic.
Looking at Lincoln in this way, one begins to suspect that over the years the ideal of individuality which we lies at the root of the idea of America has become infantilized. The corruption of individualism we now so often see about us is a species of arrogance that confirms itself by excluding others and begets conflict with others, opposition, and fear. True individuality contains the whole of man—to be truly oneself, to be uniquely oneself is to be I. ...
… It is important to remember that photographic portraits in that era required that the subject tiresomely sit and wait without moving for long stretches of time. The camera, therefore, does not capture the impression of the moment as it can do today, the fleeting smile or flash in the eyes; the sudden look that sometimes appears for a moment between familiar postures. No, here the camera records what the man or woman has worn all their lives under every other smile or frown. It is said, for example, that Lincoln's good humor and playfulness never appears in his photographs.
These old photographs can therefore represent for us the individual stripped somewhat to some small degree, of his or her "individuality" in the contemporary sense of the term—the fleeting impulses, the "charm" that one sustains for short moments and in immediate reaction to some stimulus. Of course, a great photographer can see through all that and, in one instant, give us the essential person behind the passing facades. But in these old photographs, time is the photographer. Time always speaks the truth.
And yet, in these photographs, Lincoln appears intensely individual, intensely alive and singular. This face is a face within which we sense the possibility and the right of a man to say I. …
… The face of Lincoln draws us to ponder this meaning of spirituality as the main heritage of American individualism. If Luther's struggle turned into Lutheranism, very well, that is how religions form, and perhaps it is very good. If George Fox's raw experience of God's presence turns into Quakerism, also very good, and in the same sense. If the presence in the person of Socrates becomes Platonism; if the being of the remarkable manual laborer of late antiquity, Ammonius Saccas, becomes eventually the neo-Platonic religion systematized through the writings of his pupil Plotinus; if the Zen Master's pupils create Zen Buddhism; well, it is the way all religions, rituals and forms of human life appear for all the good and bad that these forms support. But at the heart, at the origin of all these religions or schools there is the experience of individual presence—the conscious presence that is as yet uncaptured by forms of thought, language or social organization. That there should exist at the center of the American culture the ideal of such a man, such a human being, is not unusual in the history of nations and cultures. That this man should have been the most politically powerful man in the nation—that is remarkable. The central icon of our culture is a man of individual presence who is also immensely effective and engaged in all the outer forces of life—war, power, money, action, calculation, love and hate, negotiation, compromise—the whole world of the senses and the ego. The most powerful man in the United States and therefore, by then, already one of the most powerful men in the world: that this should have been a man of individual presence—that is remarkable.
I do not know how to measure Lincoln against the figures and legends such as Luther, Socrates, Moses. We can only say, with some degree of certainty, that his face calls us to the whole question of individuality as a conscious presence that transcends the ordinary meanings of the word "individualism."
It has become fashionable to criticize American individualism as narcissistic in relation to the social demand to act for the common good. There is the materialistic narcissism of consumerism; there is the psychological narcissism of New Age self-development; there is the narcissism of political and social apathy. Against such "narcissism" is placed the duty to participate in the governance and needs of the community. The figure of Abraham Lincoln entirely eclipses this familiar dichotomy between individualism and social responsibility. It does so, in part, by making us question our individual consciousness in the very social actions we feel obliged to perform. Of what real value are actions undertaken blindly and imitatively? Or, worse, violently, self-righteously, perversely, hypocritically? Yet act we must, now and here in just this world and at just this time. The face of Lincoln is not the face of a solitary or a recluse. Or should we say that yes, it is the face of a solitary who in his time was, paradoxically, perhaps the world's greatest and chief agent of action. ...
© 2002 Jacob Needleman