February 12, 1809

That Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin share the same birthdate at first seems a marvelous coincidence that must carry a deep meaning.  On the other hand, we’ve all been amazed by how often the birthday coincidence occurs, and I at least am still surprised that it only takes 23 people in the room to have 50-50 odds that two will have the same birthday (day, not year).  Nonetheless the Lincoln-Darwin alignment prompted Adam Gopnik to write a short book, Angels and Ages, about the two men, their lives, families, work, writing, and contributions.  There are uncanny parallels and of course real differences.  Gopnik also speculates on the role that each played in pushing Western society into a new political and scientific age.

The title comes from the historical controversy about exactly what Stanton said at Lincoln’s deathbed.  Did he say “He belongs to the ages now” or “He belongs to the angels now”?  Reports differ, and it’s interesting to think about the differing implications of each.  Ultimately Gopnik (like others) can’t really decide, but he does provide an interesting discussions and a conclusion of sorts.  Gopnik visited the death room as a tourist, and writes about the experience.  I can best do him justice by quoting him directly:

“The sentence forms in the mind, and with it the thought that there would be a good place to end: he belongs to both. But as the queue inches forward and I can see, at last, into the room that I have been reading about – I want to laugh.  This place isn’t small; it’s tiny. They brought him here, to this back room, I had learned, because all the other rooms in the house were to messy for a president to die in, and yet – four people would make it crowded; six would overwhelm it; the forty or so who passed in and out, and the ten or twenty who crowded inside at the end, would have turned it into the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

In the brief moment given to a visitor to look inside, I wished for a machine that would be able to re-create every breath of air, every vibration that ever took place in a room.  And then I knew that we probably would not have understood any better had we been standing there then than we do now.  Stanton was weeping, Lincoln had just died, the room was overwhelmed, whatever he said was broken by a sob – the sob, in a sense, is the story.  History is not an agreed-on fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn’t what’s heard, and what is heard isn’t what gets repeated.  Civilization is an agreement to keep people from Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, but the moments we call historic occur when there is a fire in a crowded theater, and then we all try to remember afterward when we heard it, and if we ever really smelled smoke, and who went first, and what was said. The indeterminancy is built into the emotion of the moment.  The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.  If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said.  All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.”

Of course the book’s title also refers to the tremendous religious and cultural controversy stirred by Darwin’s theory. Darwin was reluctant to publish.  His wife was very religious,  His family was dear to him.  He in no way welcomed the storms that would necessarily follow.  Yet he stayed firmly rooted in his scientific methods of observation, and his writing can indeed tire us with countless details before even hinting at the radical conclusions to come.  Nonetheless, when they come the arrive with the force of the inevitable denouement of a great novel.  In retrospect we see that it could be no other way.

And on the question of geological time (a concept very much at odds with theology and in some ways plain common sense) Gopnik writes about Darwin:

“For that, far more than God and man, is what Darwin is really always returning to: live and time, life and time, and their complements, death and sex, and how they make the history of life.  In Darwin’s work, from The Beagle to the earthworm, time moves at two speeds; there is the vast abyss of time in which generations change and animals mutate and evolve, and then there is the gnat’s-breath, hummingbird-heart time of creaturely existence, where our children are born and grow and, sometimes, die before us. The space between the tiny but heartfelt time of human life and the limitless time of Nature became Darwin’s implicit subject, running from The Beagle to The Origin. Religion had always reconciled quick time and deep time by pretending that the one was in some way a prelude to the other -- a prelude or a prologue or a trial or a treatment. Artists of the Romantic period, in an increasingly secularized age, thought that through some vague kind of transcendence they could bridge the gap. They couldn’t. Nothing could. The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much.  There isn’t a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.  The human challenge that Darwin felt, and that his work still presents, is to see both times truly – not to attempt to humanize deep time, or to dismiss quick time, but to make enough of both without overlooking either.”

Gopnik also writes extensively about the way Lincoln and Darwin used language, and how in each case that was integral to the personality, mission, and success of each.  Gopnik is a skilled writer.  I’ve read him for many years in The New Yorker. I’m glad to hear his thoughts on language and writing, and I’m glad to read something by him that is longer than (even a longish) New Yorker piece.  He is a very talented writer, a skilled journalist, and a thinker as well.  Good company for a reader.  Very good.