World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual. — Gore Vidal

...American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.

Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.