MY INTEREST IN ABRAHAM LINCOLN • I think it was in 2005 that a friend and I attended a lecture on Abraham Lincoln from historian and author Ronald C. White, Jr. at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. He had just finished a book about Lincoln called The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words. Mr. White later wrote another book, this time a full biography of Lincoln simply called A. Lincoln: A Biography, which was the way Lincoln usually signed his name. I read that book in 2014, and it quickly became my third favorite book of all time. Mr. White is a fabulous, insightful, and lucid author who provides a deeply moving biography of our greatest president. I realized that Abraham Lincoln was a thinking and logical man, full of humor, wit, and respect for other human beings. I liked the fact that Lincoln was a man of reason and a true genius with words, both in his profound speeches and in his eloquent writings. In fact, it was Lincoln’s reasoning abilities that gave me the idea for the name, Common Reason. 

There were two other experiences which rooted my feelings of friendship with Mr. Lincoln. First, I listened to a few audio books of Lincoln’s writings, both his personal letters and public speeches; the narrators expressed Lincoln’s words with such eloquence and meaning. I felt like I was hearing Lincoln’s voice, and getting a glimpse into the man, his mind, and his times. Second, I watched the actor Daniel Day-Lewis give a masterful performance in the movie Lincoln (2012). I later appreciated what he said in an interview about becoming Lincoln and what comes next: “a total investment of that period of our lives in the process of telling that particular story, so it’s very hard to conceive of any other life after it … but in this particular case, I felt two things, at one and the same time. One was a sense of immeasurable privilege of having been enabled to explore that man’s life. And the other, directly as a result of that, was a sense of great sadness and loss that that time allowed me was now over, because he did become for me — there’s never been a human being that I never met that I loved as much as him, ever. I doubt there ever will be.”

I now consider Abraham Lincoln as my friend. My favorite coffee mug has an image of the Abraham Lincoln statue from the Lincoln Memorial, with the words to his Gettysburg Address. Because I love coffee, I get to look at Abraham Lincoln every day of my life, and I even take him with me whenever and wherever I travel.