Gettysburg Mourning

Cora Diamond uses the phrase "the difficulty of reality" to mark "experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome or astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty of being hard or impossible or agonizing to get one's mind around." Clearly, these are not difficulties in the ordinary sense of the term, meaning problems to be solved or resolved. Rather, they are challenges to the mind's ability to encompass the reality it seeks to comprehend. In this essay the author would like to discuss difficulties he has been having with Gettysburg: difficulties in comprehending what happened there in the days and weeks after the famous Civil War battle; difficulties in comprehending Abraham Lincoln's response, the Gettysburg Address. The author has no difficulty with the thought that the historical facts make historical sense. Rather, I am troubled by a sense that something primordial went wrong, and we as a country remain haunted by it.