October 10 , 2005

Dear Colleague,

If you want to be remembered by posterity, be an orator. By remembered, I mean the readiness with which we associate certain words with an individual person. An example would be, "To be or not to be..." When we hear or say these words, we think Shakespeare. Shakespeare is immortal because our common speech is laced with Shakespearean inventions. No other writer in the English language matches him in that regard. Poets of slightly less stature can also be immortal this way: for instance, Keats, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty," and Walt Whitman, "Do I contradict myself? /  Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)." But, you will say, even these words do not have wide currency in American society. And this is where I return to my first sentence, which I repeat: if you want to be remembered by posterity, be an orator. An orator, not a poet, an essayist, or novelist. One doesn't have to be a UW graduate to be familiar with the following, all of which are extracted from orations:

"...give me liberty or give me death" (Patrick Henry, 1775).

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God give us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in..." (Abraham Lincoln, 1865).

"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat" (Winston Churchill, 1940).

"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country" (John F. Kennedy, 1961).

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" (Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963).

Why are they so memorable? Surely not because they are of outstanding eloquence. Many poets can do as well, if not better. Is it because they are embedded in political utterances? Do we pay special attention because they are delivered by powerful personages? Why are so many of them American rather than, say, British when Britain has produced more than her share of eloquent and powerful statesmen? Women are almost wholly absent, the most obvious reason being that they have only recently been allowed a political platform. But that cannot be all. Women's speeches are not sufficiently bombastic. And we the people--we jerks--are easily impressed by bombast--by "sounding brass," as St. Paul put it. "Give me liberty or give me death." Give me a break!

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu