Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [69]
At times Lincoln’s melancholy signaled a withdrawal to the solitude of thought. As a child, he would retreat from others to read. In later life, he would work a problem through in private—whether a proof of Euclidean geometry or the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Only when he had resolved the problems and issues in his own mind did he display the results of his private meditations. It is little wonder that others saw these withdrawals as evidence of melancholy. Furthermore, the very contours of Lincoln’s face in repose lent him a sorrowful aspect. One observer remarked that “his face was about the saddest I ever looked upon.” Another contemporary described his face as “slightly wrinkled about the brows, but not from trouble. It was intense, constant thought that planted the wrinkles there.”
Unlike depression, melancholy does not have a specific cause. It is an aspect of temperament, perhaps genetically based. One may emerge from the hypo, as Lincoln did, but melancholy is an indelible part of one’s nature. Lincoln understood this: “a tendency to melancholly,” he told Joshua’s sister, Mary, “is a misfortune not a fault.”
“Melancholy,” writes the modern novelist Thomas Pynchon, “is a far richer and more complex ailment than simple depression. There is a generous amplitude of possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a sense of humor.” And, as everyone connected with Lincoln testified, he was an extraordinarily funny man. “When he first came among us,” wrote a Springfield friend, “his wit & humor boiled over.” When he told his humorous stories, Henry Whitney marveled, “he emerged from his cave of gloom and came back, like one awakened from sleep, to the world in which he lived, again.” His storytelling, Speed believed, was “necessary to his very existence—Most men who have been great students such as he was in their hours of idleness have taken to the bottle, to cards or dice—He had no fondness for any of these—Hence he sought relaxation in anecdotes.” Lincoln himself recognized that humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep. He saw laughter as the “joyous, universal evergreen of life.” His stories were intended “to whistle off sadness.”
Modern psychiatry regards humor as probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting to melancholy. “Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne,” writes George Valliant. “Humor can be marvelously therapeutic,” adds another observer. “It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.”
The melancholy stamped on Lincoln’s nature derived in large part from an acute sensitivity to the pains and injustices he perceived in the world. He was uncommonly tenderhearted. He once stopped and tracked back half a mile to rescue a pig caught in a mire—not because he loved the pig, recollected a friend, “just to take a pain out of his own mind.” When his schoolmates tortured turtles by placing hot coals on their backs to see them wriggle, he told them “it was wrong.” He refused to hunt animals, which ran counter to frontier mores. After he had broken with Mary, he wrote that the only thing that kept him from happiness was “the never-absent idea” that he had caused Mary