Meet Mr. Lincoln

[L Verge]

Hopefully, the reader will have been introduced to this via a posting I just made on the Books section. I am quoting from the Foreword to a book entitled Meet Mr. Lincoln. The book is a spin-off from an NBC production of the same name honoring the 150th anniversary of Mr. Lincoln's birth.

"Meet Mr. Lincoln was conceived as a dramatic essay about a man whose simplicity of being was the spirit of his greatness. In our time, it is a greatness that travels the world, a spirit that lives in distant places. Yet, in America, something has happened to the Lincoln legend, something has passed away. A kind of pleasant myth has sapped the strength of an exciting reality. Perhaps it is because we in America, in childlike innocence, have too eagerly accepted Lincoln in godlike terms, or perhaps it is because, in adult pride, we have ignored the person in order to create a proud image on a towering pedestal, obscured in wispy clouds of blind allegiance. Whatever -- the beauty of Lincoln has too often been colored by the cloak of complexity.

"To be sure, Lincoln as a man of wondrous depth, of warm love and craggy manner, of slow, brilliant reasoning and quick, hand-hewn philosophy, of softness and hardiness, and in appearance a paradox, a beautiful ugliness that was poetry in expression.

"He was a man loved and hated for the same thing at the same time. He was all the things that men are, and if there is any mystery about the man Lincoln, it is because he was infinitely human. That was his greatness and his genius, created from a thousand complexities, but molded into a oneness of purpose."

[LincolnMan]

The description sounds very Carl Sandburg-like. Nice.