Lincoln

Going down Lincoln’s family line a ways, Mr. Burlingame gives us this dramatic tale of Lincoln’s father and grandfather.

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Captain Abraham died a violent death on the “dark and bloody ground” of frontier Kentucky. As a boy, the future president often heard this harrowing tale, which he called “the legend more strongly than all others imprinted upon my mind and memory.” Working his farm one spring day in 1786, the 42-year-old Grandfather Abraham was ambushed by an Indian, who shot him dead before the terrified eyes of his young son, Thomas (father-to-be of the sixteenth president). As the Indian prepared to kidnap the lad, his older brother Mordecai dashed back to the family cabin, grabbed a rifle, aimed at the silver ornament dangling from the Indian’s neck, and squeezed the trigger. Luckily for Thomas, his brother’s aim was true, and the boy escaped unharmed, at least physically.

-- Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life”

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Monday Morning

Ash has taken over the bed in the big room this morning. I do not have the heart to push her off just because I want to hump my bedding a little. Maybe it is the cold, chilly morning, as she snuggles deep into the pillows and bedsheets.

Money

Pop is on the phone having a heated conversation about ... bills, money, something like that. He has had so many of these over the years that I have grown blasé about it, figuring he will somehow find his way and our life will go on as usual. No problem. I still do not know how he does it. My best guess is that he might be going through his life insurance, which conceivably could have afforded him ten, twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars to play with, but this is a wild guess. But you never know when the party is going to end.

As for the concern that this is money that I will need when he dies, I don't feel ripped off. I wouldn't even know how to get that money. Jack would probably figure out a way to take it all anyway. True, it would be nice if more of that money might be going to my use, rather that Kay's, Lorie's, and Jack's, but I am good with all the Internet, books, and air-conditioning that I can use.

Camus and Sartre

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Sartre called freedom under capitalism a “hoax” because workers possessed no real economic power. Their hunger, on the contrary, was a demand to be free from need, to become full human beings. In his response, Camus spoke of democracy as “an exercise in modesty.” He would not simplify human problems, as reactionaries and revolutionaries did, and embraced democracy as the “least evil” system of government. Like Sartre, he refused “to accept the condition of the proletariat,” but he equally refused “to aggravate that misery in the name of a theory or a blind messianism.”

-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”

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The Natural World

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