Vessey’s Reviews > Lincoln in the Bardo > Status Update

When a child is lost there is no end to the self-torment a parent may inflict. When we love, and the object of our love is small, weak, and vulnerable, and has looked to us and us alone for protection; and when such protection, for whatever reason, has failed, what consolation (what justification, what defence) may there possibly be? None. Doubt will fester as long as we live. And when one occasion of doubt has been

Peace, sir, make peace: the cry of man since at least our Savior’s time. Why ignore it now? Blessed are the peacemakers, the Scriptures say, and we must assume the converse also to be true: Cursed are the war-mongers, however just they believe their cause.

All men labor under some impingements on their freedom; none is absolutely at liberty. I was living simply an exaggerated version of any man’s life. I endeavored to be a good and honorable servant, to people who were good and honourable themselves. Of course, there was always a moment when a small, resistant voice would make itself known in the back of my mind.

He never appeared ugly to me, for his face, beaming with boundless kindness and benevolence towards mankind, had the stamp of intellectual beauty.

I will have her. We will travel. In many new cities, I will see her in dresses of many colors. Which will drop to many floors.

I saw, as if for the first time, the great beauty of the things of this world: waterdrops in the woods around us plopped from leaf to ground; the stars were low, blue-white, tentative; the wind-scent bore traces of fire, dryweed, rivermuck; the tssking drybush rattles swelled with a peaking breeze, as some distant cross-creek sleigh-nag tossed its neckbells.

We found two little fellers holding hands couldn’t been more than fourteen fifteen apiece as if they had desided to pass through that dark portal together.

The dead lay as they had fallen, in every conceivable shape, some grasping their guns as though they were in the act of firing, while others, with a cartridge in their icy grasp, were in the act of loading. Some of the countenances wore a peaceful, glad smile, while on others rested a fiendish look of hate. It looked as though each countenance was the exact counterpart of the thoughts that were passing through the

More than a thousand troops on both sides were killed and three times that number wounded. It was “a most bloody fight,” a young Union soldier told his father, so devastating to his company that despite the victory, he remained “sad, lonely and down-hearted.” Only seven of the eighty-five men in his unit survived.

There was a touch of prairie about the fellow. Like stepping into a summer barn late at night. Or a musty plains office, where some bright candle still burns. Vast, windswept, new, sad.