On a morning of pearl-gray mist, reminiscent of traditional Chinese painting, I wandered from my room on the campus of Tunghai University in Taichung City in Taiwan, Republic of China. The University was situated on a sloping hillside and a green valley below, all connected with tree-lined pathways. As the sun began to penetrate the misty morning, I discerned the figures of young women, each clutching ancient-looking Chinese brooms, vigorously sweeping the sidewalks. I later discovered that these young women were all university students, performing this humble task as a way of doing service for the community, honoring their fellow students and their professors. They were not required to rise early and sweep the walkways, and they were certainly not earning any college credit for their meticulous work. They swept because they were living the ancient Confucian ideals of humility and service to the country. There was not a scrap of crumpled paper or fallen leaves anywhere in sight. It was all like a painting. And when the sun broke through, flooding the scene with light, the sweeping angels disappeared like the mist itself.

It was Teacher’s Day on the official university calendar, and I wrongly assumed that the “teacher” being honored was each individual professor. I even thought that someone might tell me to “have a happy teacher’s day”—as we might offhandedly say “have a good day”—since I was on the campus to give lectures on Abraham Lincoln and the English language. My egocentricity was undeniably western and very revealing, since the teacher actually being honored was venerable old Confucius himself, and the fact that he had a holiday reserved to himself was one of many beautiful surprises I enjoyed during my memorable visit to the Orient. I had come to Taiwan to lecture and teach, but I found myself becoming a kind of student once again.

I cannot remember a single instance when I was jostled, yelled at, pushed, or handled in anything but a gentle and dignified manner. Even though my Mandarin was minimal at best, and my familiarity with the currency and coins was virtually non-existent, everyone was patient with me, including waiters and clerks, especially the young woman in my little hotel who sold me an excellent cup of coffee every morning, carefully removing the proper coins from my proffered hand. We came to know one another through this little ritual. People went out of their way to be nice. My maid slipped me extra packets of jasmine tea. The desk clerks would save all the English language newspapers for me. These gestures of respect and kindness went much deeper and were part of a code of conduct that stressed respect for nature and the social environment, too.

When I visited the national art museum with two students as my guides, I was astonished to see them return all the brochures and maps we had been given on entering the building. Each document had been neatly folded and returned to its proper place. Nothing was wasted. Again and again, the Taiwanese citizens reminded me of the smallness of their island, of the infinite value of space.

When we would brake at a stoplight, or even when walking along the verges of narrow streets lined with food vendors, we would constantly dodge and thread our way among throngs of motor scooters. With their brightly-colored helmets, loud buzzing motors, and sleek little vehicles, the drivers appeared almost other-worldly, as if they were piloting squadrons of menacing spaceships. Yet the scooters miraculously avoided bumping into one another, or denting the nearby cars, or nudging the meandering and dawdling pedestrians. I came to trust them because they mastered the precisely defined space in which they moved so artfully, so elegantly.

These drivers, like the citizenry as a whole, were engaging in a complex urban ballet in which every one had a rightful and dignified place. The Taiwanese scooter drivers were utterly different from their daredevil counterparts in Paris or Rome, whom I rightfully had learned to fear. After a while I paid them little mind, for every day I spent in the country of Taiwan was another

It is easy to trivialize a culture by reducing its nuances and subtleties to a single culinary item, as if Caribbean culture could be mastered by consuming a plate of black beans, rice, and mango salsa--or as if one might pretend to understand Cajun culture by tucking into a filet of blackened redfish, liberally slathered with sauce picante. Although I had not flown 3,000 miles to China in order to eat, I found myself doing it rather frequently since many of our planned activities began or ended with food. Besides, the Chinese enjoy eating since it is a basic social event, and the meals are never rushed. Each morning I visited the 7-11 convenience store attached to the lobby of my hotel, where I purchased a cup of coffee and a shrimp-and-boiled-egg sandwich with mayo and lettuce on white bread. My choices were largely a matter of necessity since I could not readily identify many of the bagged items for sale in the coolers, and I did not—at an early hour of the morning—feel attracted to the “thousand-year-old-eggs” (boiled eggs floating in a cauldron of soy sauce so dark that each egg turned black). I also became quite fond of jasmine tea and green tea, the latter drunk in chilled plastic bottles available everywhere. Coke and Pepsi were relatively rare sights on the culinary horizon.

Since I was on the grounds of the campus most of the day, visiting with faculty and students, it was convenient to eat at the restaurant on campus (known as the Red Roof) or to sample the chow at one of the dining halls attached to a dormitory. My first meal on campus consisted of seaweed soup (very popular), a pork cutlet, curried potatoes, steamed cabbage, and braised eggplant. Everything was fresh and succulent. The cost was about two American dollars; in fact, most of the meals averaged around two or three dollars, with some exceptions.

My first meal off-campus occurred in Tunghai Villa, which is a precinct adjoining the university, quite famous for its “night markets” and street vendors. The streets were serpentine entanglements of motor scooters, pedestrians, and food vendors offering shrimp, chicken, duck, pork, and various pastry items and beverages. I ate dinner in a small restaurant with no name, a kind of small warehouse with two tables and five stools. Of course, there was no menu, but my student companions ordered a series of dishes for me, including cabbage soup, a fried egg with soy sauce, braised eggplant, two kinds of tofu that were brown and relatively hard, chicken shredded over rice (the specialty of the house), pork shredded over rice, and a chilled bottle of green tea. We also shared a large bottle of Chinese beer—all this for 82 New Taiwanese Dollars or about $2.50 USD. For dessert, we purchased a waffle from a street vendor. This pastry was filled with whipped cream and a mildly sweet red bean paste. I had to work, however, to finish my waffle as I was approaching my gastrointestinal limit.

As we meandered through the “night markets,” the students took great delight in pointing out the more esoteric items, including barbecued duck heads and necks, chicken feet (actually the leg shank of the chicken), and, improbably, “chicken tails,” which were sold roasted on a skewer or frozen raw in little plastic boxes.

The very next night my university hosts treated me to one of the most memorable dinners of my entire life. We drove to the busy downtown of Taichung, a city of two million souls, and found ourselves at the glass-and-chrome doors of the Windsor Hotel, part of a swank Hong Kong chain. We dined in a lovely room with marble walls, subtle lighting, and world-class cuisine. There was a proffered menu, but of course it was printed in Mandarin. My recollection of the meal begins with one of four pots of jasmine tea which we quickly imbibed—the whole room, in fact, was suffused with the heavenly aroma of jasmine. It was easily the best tea I have ever drunk. To accompany that seemingly divine drink, we lingered over crab soup, rice soup (a kind of porridge), noodles and very spicy roast pork, fried pork dumplings, thin little pancakes, and, finally, dumplings covered in gold foil. That meal alone would have justified the trip.

The following afternoon I was escorted by three, senior, foreign-language students who were currently reading Frankenstein in their English literature class. They took me on a tour of the “art street” in Taichung, which contained a number of small, curious shops, some selling pottery or clothes, others selling tea. We began at a tea shop, buying tall cups of “pearl bubble tea,” a local delicacy, consisting of milky tea with globules of dark indigo gelatin floating like bubbles in the mixture. It was really quite good—and most refreshing on a hot, humid afternoon while traversing streets as hilly as those of San Francisco. We visited another teashop that specialized in local and rare teas. The owner insisted on preparing a pot of jasmine tea for me to sample, but in the end I decided on some “high mountain tea,” which won the immediate approval of my Chinese companions. We next visited a noodle shop, partly at my suggestion, because I had noticed how much the Chinese seem to love noodles, possibly even more than rice. I enjoyed a huge bowl of noodles with beef, garlic, and green onions. The only sour note was my inadvertent faux pas of leaving my chopsticks crossed over the top of the bowl, which is considered a sign of disrespect or disapproval.

I pause in this review of local cuisine to mention an American item that appeared on my final day of lecturing, when I visited a small group of about twenty faculty members to speak about the art of teaching. Afterward, we shared war stories, and I discovered that Chinese professors have some of the same problems—especially with the internal hierarchy—as do their American counterparts. This session was preceded by the magical appearance of Subway sandwiches—ham, cheese, pickle, and mayo, all neatly arranged on their sandwich buns and wrapped in white and green paper. I noticed that the Chinese seemed to have trouble eating theirs subs because there is simply no way to attack that kind of sandwich with a feeble pair of chopsticks. I felt vindicated for my clumsy articulation of chopsticks over the previous week, although my skill and dexterity were improving daily, about on a par with my ability to discern new Chinese words in that harmonious ocean of sound called the Mandarin language.

On that evening, my hosts took me to the food court of the Mitsukoshi Department Store, a Japanese landmark in downtown Taichung. The food court occupied an entire floor and offered virtually any kind of Asian food imaginable. My companions settled on a spicy noodle dish from the Thai section, and I decided to try a more traditional “country meal” of Hakka cuisine, easily the heaviest and most flavorful of the foods I encountered. Hakka dinners are served on a sizzling, square, cast-iron platter. My meal consisted of generous portions of stewed chicken and gravy (excellent in taste and texture), shredded pork with back pepper, bean sprouts (the only ones I saw on my trip), green peas, and, of course, rice. I washed this big meal down with a bottle of chilled green tea.

We paused the next day, while touring temples in the countryside, to have a tall, refreshing cup of iced coffee as we walked toward a restaurant famous for its oyster omelet, which, in fact, was one of the single best items on my entire Oriental menu. At my companions’ prodding, I also sampled some “monkey shrimp,” tiny shrimp fried crisp like potato chips and swallowed whole, shell and all. I was also treated to some “stinky tofu,” a garlic-rich product, as well as clam soup, fried oysters with sea salt, and a spinach-like vegetable dotted with chunks of garlic. It was an enjoyable but rather heavy meal to tackle on a hot and humid day. The “monkey shrimp” did battle with my colon for the rest of the afternoon.

On my final day in Taiwan, one of my hosts brought me a “vegetable yogurt” Popsicle for breakfast. And for our final lunch, we ate at a rather elegant downtown hotel called the Tango, which offered a superb beverage bar, including strong black coffee and passion-fruit juice. I enjoyed both drinks as we worked our way through a slightly more Western style of presentation with real forks instead of chopsticks. The Tango staff believed in big meals. We began with abalone, followed by Hakka-style shredded pork with barbecue sauce served over shredded cabbage. I was then treated to “drunken shrimp,” actually prawns simmered in a red wine sauce laced with traditional Chinese medicines. We then enjoyed Thai lemon chicken, then a stalk-like vegetable, which was very tender, kung shing tsai slivers of fried spicy catfish, steamed rice, slices of honeydew melon, star fruit, petits fours, and “black jelly,” chien tsao dung. Fortunately, we took our time to absorb all these gastronomical delights, and we had ample opportunity for friendly conversation. I reflected that the Chinese had been doing this kind of thing for about 3,000 years.

I had specifically asked my university hosts to help me visit any ancient temples during my “off days,” so one Saturday morning we boarded a university van with Amun, our faithful driver, at the helm, and headed south to the small city of Chunghua to visit the Lu-Kang museum and several temples known collectively as the temples of Lugan. The museum was actually a building that harkened back to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan (which lasted until 1945). The grounds were landscaped with gardens, trellises, gazebos, benches, little wooden bridges, and small pools of goldfish (koi).

The museum itself was packed, room after room, and even hallways, with telling Chinese artifacts, including shadow puppets, hand puppets, Chinese chess pieces, a “moon” guitar, a wooden fish once used by monks to keep time, paper doll figures, a small indoor shrine, bronze incense burners, a little “spirit room” provided as a convenient hiding place for ghosts, wooden pillow rests, tin wine pots, silk robes, an ear-scratching tool, bronze coins from the 1600’s, and “bowl” hats.

The most obscene and tragic exhibition concerned the despicable practice of foot-binding. On display were special foot-binding shoes, cloth wrappings to bind the feet, and even a chair to restrain the helpless victim. It was all a sad and poignant moment in the day, and the ladies with me were visibly moved.

We concluded the museum visit with exhibits of fine porcelain ware with floral patterns, “nesting cups” for a “drinking game,” wooden statuettes of Buddha, also images of Buddha standing on water lilies as well as many female Buddhas. This gender ambiguity was the beginning of a whole day in which my ideas about Oriental religions would be twisted and turned in all sorts of directions. Confucius could be seen as a great philosopher or a kind of indigenous saint. Some temples catered to both Confucian and Taoist deities, and all the temples enjoyed an open-air, nearly carefree atmosphere. The Chinese don’t seem to make the western distinction between a shrine and a temple. There was no need to make the sign of the cross, genuflect, shake hands with a preacher, or even identify yourself as Buddhist or Taoist. No one checked IDs, and doctrinal pettiness was banned from the scene.

Everyone was welcome, and the rule seemed to be that there were no rules. Children, old people, married couples, and solitary wanderers, crossed over the sill of the outer temple wall (a symbol of demarcation in Chinese culture) and entered the temple proper. Some stood silently, some talked, and many bought incense sticks with which to pray, holding the smoking bundles in both hands and bowing reverently over and over, as if in a hypnotic trance. The incense sticks were finally placed in a giant bronze cauldron. The whole temple was covered with a thin cloud of scented gray smoke, like a layer of prayer. It was all very moving, even for an old Christian like myself.

My evangelical friends will probably quake at the “pagan” quality of the next activity, in which most of the visitors participated. Many visitors picked up two wooden pieces, called giao, shaped like segments of an orange, or the two halves of the yin-yang symbol, and threw them in the air, waiting to see the position in which they landed. If the pieces faced inward, towards each other, that result was good; outer facing pieces were bad. If the pieces interlocked perfectly, the outcome was ideal. The whole process was akin to throwing dice, an attempt to divine the future or secure an answer from the gods. Nearly half the temple visitors seemed to throw the dice, as it were, and seek redress to some grievance or other. In anthropological terms, throwing the giao seemed like simple white magic, as old as humankind itself.

The streets of Chunghua exuded a kind of carnival air with pedestrians everywhere and even a parade in honor of the sea-goddess Mazu, whose likeness was everywhere. Her blazing portrait adorned the side of a multi-story building in the center of town. Mazu is a Taoist divinity (one of many), and she is associated with good luck and the sea, which is appropriate for Chunghua given its location near the water. She is honored at the Tian Ho Temple, the largest and most elaborate in the city, a kind of Mecca for all the visitors, Taoists and non-Taoist alike.

We also visited the Lungshan Temple, slightly smaller and less visited—a Buddhist temple. Even smaller was the Wen Kai Temple and School, dedicated to Confucius. There were no pictorial symbols or outward signs to distinguish these temples from one another. In fact, it seemed that for many Chinese a temple was a temple. Period. People shared their temples with their neighbors as sacred places that transcended denominational differences. These sacred sites were doorways to the other world, and no one should be shut out.

On the last day, we visited two temples in the heart of Taichung, small but intricately decorated structures. The Wan-Ho Temple and the Wen Chang Temple, like all ancient Chinese temples, are built with the gull-wing rooflines and with posts and brackets holding up the roof. Traditional Chinese architecture does not employ rafters or trusses, relying on dozens of columns on which the roof rests, like a bird on its nest. All of the temples had tables with food offerings for the gods, usually oranges and apples. Candles or small white LED bulbs burned in memory of the dead. And most of the temples used “temple money,” special currency used to “pay” the gods. These prayer notes are usually bright red, the color of good luck in Chinese thinking. At the rear of the Wan-Ho Temple, we inspected the so-called “Golden Burner,” a special fireplace where the used temple money is ritually burned. The prayers ascend to heaven in a column of smoke.

The Wen Chang Temple was also remarkable for its heterogeneity. This one site accommodated Buddhist and Confucian believers—and also local Taoist worshippers of General Kuan Kung, a man who became a saint and divinity for his heroic deeds. I could not think of any comparable arrangement anywhere in the West.

The English novelist E. M. Forster, who wrote brilliantly and incisively about Indian civilization, once remarked that a visitor who been to India for a few weeks would want to write a book about it, but a visitor who had stayed for a few months would not know where to begin. I would like to offer three examples of my Taiwanese experience that somehow add up to a portrait of an inscrutable and noble race.

The first incident occurred when I landed at the airport in Taipei. I was merrily rambling inside the huge terminal, seeking my checked baggage, when a uniformed lady with a beagle on a leash appeared before me, asking if I was carrying any fruit. No, I replied, none at all. Of course, I didn’t realize that my dear spouse, in an act of kindness, had slipped a Gala apple into the bottom of my carry-on bag. The beagle began squirming, wagging his tail furiously, and yipping loudly. Suddenly, another uniformed person, a man who could have been a guard in the National Football League, planted himself firmly in my path. The beagle now had his paws on my bag, and the man asked again if I had any fruit. Again, I denied it. Very politely, he asked if he could inspect my bag. I agreed, and in a few seconds he extracted the offending piece of fruit, held it aloft, and all the passengers who had quickly gathered around me sighed a collective Ah!

At this point, I expected to be questioned, fined, jailed, or otherwise encumbered. At the very least, I was prepared for a warning citation. Instead, the beagle commenced to licking my hand. He clearly wanted to be petted and complimented for his job well done. Good boy, I muttered, not believing I had actually uttered those words. Then the woman smiled, patted the dog on its head, and wished me a good day. It was all very civilized and humane. Taiwan, after all, is a small island nation and must protect its botanical environment, a fact I fully appreciated. The crowd dispersed, and we all went on our way as if nothing had happened.

The second incident involves a Taiwanese salesman named Hunt Ko whom I met on the China Air flight to Taipei. He was returning from Las Vegas and a bicycle convention, and he spoke very good English, even teaching me a few useful Mandarin phrases before we took our naps. We later exchanged e-mails and telephone numbers. I never expected to encounter him again, but I knew he lived near Chunghua (the site of our temple excursion). On a whim, I asked one of my hosts to call Mr. Ko and invite him to join us, which, in fact, he did, taking a seat opposite me at the seafood restaurant and sharing the oyster omelet and other good things on the table, relating very nicely to my hosts and Amun our driver. I felt absolutely secure, as if I had been with people I had known for my entire life. This friendliness and basic human decency is the most admirable trait in Taiwanese culture. I was the only one at the table who had previously encountered Hunt Ko, but that was good enough. And while we ate together, we were family, experiencing that domestic euphoria that the Germans call Gemutlichkeit. Hunt later proved to be a valuable source of information on the temples, and I was honored to be in the company of people who could so easily treat a stranger like a friend.

On my last afternoon in Taiwan, one of my hosts drove us to the town house of her parents. Her little nephew “Andy” (eight years old) and niece “Ann” (six) were cute and curious kids who probably didn’t have that many Caucasians visiting them and sharing a plate of sliced guava, sliced pear, and a tumbler of grape juice. They spoke only Mandarin, but they exuded friendliness. They later rode in the car with me until we reached the university, where I changed to the van that would take me to the airport. In a photograph taken at that very moment, just before I left the country, I considered them my Chinese family, living examples of the special bonding I had experienced during the whole trip.

“Andy” and “Ann” were not their real names, of course—these were their English names. Teachers in Taiwan give English names to their students to facilitate communication with foreigners. The young woman who took me to the noodle shop was not really called “Amy,” and my facilitators and hosts were not really “Claire” and “Christine.” So while we were eating our guava and pear slices, I proposed that my host and her family give me a Chinese name to balance matters. At first, they were amused and a little puzzled. Then they considered it and conferred for about half an hour, eventually dubbing me Chi Li Zen, which I think means something like “learned person” or professor. But for me, it is a way of naming all the things that weren’t written down in my little red journal, and a catalyst for all the memories that would have otherwise gone astray.

Here is the actual text of how I presented Lincoln to an elite group of students at what I considered my most successful lecture. Students stayed for over an hour after the talk to discuss their future careers and how Lincoln might have reacted to their plans. It was all very touching and sincere. Why was Lincoln so attractive to them? First of all, they saw Lincoln in the mold of Confucius, a man who taught that ethical and honest behavior were the cornerstone of society and government, a man who made government service honorable. Secondly, they saw Lincoln as a family man, who valued his family immensely. Family is probably the highest value for the Chinese. People stay together, and the family becomes a model for other social organizations, including unions, and trade associations. People band together, and no one, especially the elderly, is abandoned. Third, again like Confucius, Lincoln was a kind of saint, a man whose prophetic wisdom and prayerful oratory could heal and lead a nation during its most harrowing times. With that preamble, here is the text, as delivered on a very warm evening in October:

Let us begin by imagining the morning of February 11, 1861, in the city of Springfield, Illinois. A tall, lean man wearing a gray shawl and a funny black hat, kisses his wife goodbye, hugs his children, and begins to walk around the corner of his house to a little railroad station. It is a cold, damp, and gloomy morning. The sky is filled with mist, which turns into a light rain, almost becoming snow. A large crowd is gathered around the railway station. The tall man ascends the steps of the last train car. Standing on the platform, he removes his hat, and slowly surveys the crowd. There are tears in his eyes, and he seems to be shivering from the cold. Everyone is suddenly silent as the man pulls a sheet of paper from his pocket and puts on his spectacles.

The man, of course, is Abraham Lincoln, it is the morning before his 52nd birthday, and he is leaving on a special train for Washington, D.C., to assume his duties as sixteenth president of the United States. Lincoln takes a moment, stares solemnly at his audience, smiles once, and begins to read his famous “Farewell Address” to the citizens of Springfield. It is perhaps the most moving short speech ever written in the English language.

This short speech is compelling and absolutely believable, partly because Lincoln is speaking the language of the heart but also because he is relying on a long tradition of farewell speeches, a tradition that stretches from Jesus bidding farewell to the apostles to Polonius bidding farewell to his son Laertes in the pages of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Human life is all about comings and going, arrivals and departures. How we tell our friends goodbye is a foolproof measure of our humanity—it shows exquisitely how we have absorbed the lessons of the inner life.

Even in these brief ten lines, Lincoln addresses such cultural values as friendship and community. He gives this speech on a cold, drizzly morning, yet most of the people of Springfield come out to bid him farewell anyhow. Why? Because they care about him as a human being. They love him. He acknowledges their friendship and returns their kind gesture by offering his affection (or love) and by openly admitting his sadness at parting. Lincoln also demonstrates a profound sense of history, both public history and personal history. That is why he talks about living there a quarter of a century and losing one of his children, Eddie Baker Lincoln, who died in Springfield on February 1, 1850. That is why he mentions George Washington, the first president of the United States, who, in this context, acts as a kind of political saint and historical marker. What makes the “Farewell Address” positively brilliant is Lincoln’s ability to bring together in one single moment the past and the present, the public and the personal, the individual and the community.

Saying goodbye is a great ritual moment, on the level with a wedding, funeral, or a baptism—it is one of the moments where our humanity is put on full display. And Lincoln’s humanity is highly complex—he is filled with anxiety and deep dread as he prepares to lead the nation through a bloody civil war, and he seeks divine assistance (religion and prayers) to help him in this awesome task. The “Farewell Address” is not merely a great speech; it is a great moment in the history of humanity. Lincoln rises to the level of a priest, blessing the people at a moment of great need, taking them out of the shabby world of the present and into a glorious world of eternity. In many ways, this speech anticipates his “Gettysburg Address” where he will perform the same ritual for the whole nation, not merely the citizens of Springfield.

I then proceeded to discuss the great “Gettysburg Address” and to show its structural and functional similarity to the “Farewell Address.”

The “Gettysburg Address” marks the zenith or high point of Lincoln’s career as an orator and political speech-maker—it occurred during the last days of November 1863, at a time when he was asked to make a formal dedication for the huge national cemetery that was being built on the site of the Battle of Gettysburg in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, one of the worst battles in all of American military history—and probably the most famous. The battle was fought between General George Meade on the Union side and General Robert E. Lee on the Confederate side. The battled lasted for three very bloody days, from July 1, 1863 to July 3, 1863.

Temporary hospitals could not handle all the dead and wounded; the smell of rotting corpses was still in the air when Lincoln arrived on the evening of November 18,1863. He had taken a train from Washington, D.C. and ridden for about two hours. There is a legend that Lincoln wrote the famous “Gettysburg Address” on the back of an envelope as he was traveling to Gettysburg on the train. But this is not true. Lincoln had been working on the speech for several days before he boarded the train; he did bring a sheet of paper which contained the latest draft or version of the speech, and Lincoln did work on that sheet of paper while he was on the train and later that night in his bedroom in Gettysburg.

Considering the fact that the “Gettysburg Address” is probably the most famous speech in the English language—certainly the most famous short speech—it is a remarkably brief document. And it took Lincoln only two minutes to deliver it to a huge crowd on November 19, 1863 on the grounds of the cemetery. The cemetery was a physical example of the “cult of death” (a morbid preoccupation with death). In fact, this period was the time when most of the great cemeteries were built in the United States. They were designed to be giant gardens or parks where people could visit their lost loved ones and walk about pleasantly under the trees and along the garden pathways. The cemetery, thus, would become more than a mere “graveyard” but a place of meditation and spiritual communion with the dead—a holy place, a shrine. Lincoln certainly understood the new style of cemetery that was being built, and he planned his address to help set the tone and define the purpose of the national cemetery. His speech and the whole idea behind the cemetery were very “modern” ways of addressing a national need to mourn the soldiers who had died in the Battle of Gettysburg—and during the previous two years of bitter fighting.

Lincoln’s address, although it is usually printed as a piece of prose, should actually be read as a prayer or an elegy (a poem for the dead). In its short, powerfully rhythmical statements and phrasing, the “Gettysburg Address” is more akin to a poem than anything else. It could easily be re-formatted as a poem. The elegy, or funeral poem, was invented by the ancient Greeks as a way of honoring the dead and helping to relieve the burden of loss among the survivors. Christian culture added the notion of salvation to the end of the elegy, so that the poet could openly grieve over the death and then assuage (or relieve) the grief by promising that the departed soul had found sanctuary in heaven. The elegy, as it evolved, in western culture is a powerful tool, a way of coping with the overwhelming pain of death.

But the elegy is usually a private poem for one dead person. Lincoln’s genius was to turn this private literary form into a kind of public or national elegy, a kind of political prayer. There is nothing quite like the “Gettysburg Address.” It is unique and beautiful. And it only took two minutes for Lincoln to deliver it, so every word had to be placed precisely, and every rhythm and pause had to work to bring the message to its resounding conclusion. It was great oratory delivered at just the right moment in history when the country was suffering unendurable pain, and someone had to make sense of all the suffering and blood-letting. Lincoln rises to the task, comforting the nation, blessing them, and exhorting or encouraging them to build a new nation on the ashes of the war.

The “Gettysburg Address” begins, like all elegies, with an admission of grief and mourning—we cannot escape the fact that a great slaughter took place here and that many men on both sides suffered and died. Lincoln does not want to ignore that painful and bloody reality, but he wants to move quickly into the next phase of the elegy where the poet or speaker offers some comfort for the living: they can achieve some measure of inner peace and spiritual balance by dedicating the battlefield to the memory of the slain heroes. The battlefield will live forever in the nation’s memory, even if the individual bodies will die and decompose into dust.

In effect, Lincoln is proposing a kind of exchange, a special kind of quid pro quo: in exchange for the deaths we will dedicate the cemetery. Their duty was to die; our duty is to remember.

Then Lincoln does a truly remarkable and daring thing—he admits that we are really powerless to dedicate this sacred, blood-soaked ground, which is rather confusing and contradictory, as if he is destroying his own argument in the previous lines. Then, in a stroke of pure genius, Lincoln says that the cemetery should not be the ultimate object for our attention—we should dedicate ourselves to the unfinished tasks facing the nation, and the chief among those is the freedom of all human beings. In a single simple sentence, Lincoln is saying that we will honor the dead by continuing to live the life of citizens in a democracy. Thus, the dead are not really dead if we devote ourselves to making the nation a better place by building on their sacrifice and death. This argument is powerful, a masterpiece of political logic that rises to the level of political prayer. Lincoln is the great leader here, showing the nation how to find its way back home after the terrible labyrinth of war. The battlefield at Gettsyburg is not an end but a true beginning because it will lead the country to a “new birth of freedom”:

That emphasis on “the unfinished work” is critically important because it lifts the speech out of the two-minutes in which it was delivered on November 19, 1863, and projects the work of making the ground holy, consecrating the ground, into the future. The speech becomes part of a living process; and, thus, the dead are given immortality by the living. Then comes Lincoln’s great summation or conclusion: