They say life, at least this one, passes by in the blink of an eye–a hyperbolic, unfactual axiom coined, perhaps, by anxious people who may or not have been looking back at their own lives wasted, in regret. 113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡEHie70uL8Z
Even “Honest Abe” bought into this time-warped fallacy, often reciting one of his favorite poems, a morose little ditty entitled, Oh, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal be Proud? Its opening stanza includes the lines: “A flash of the lightning/a break of the wave/He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.” 113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSju8wo6vwi
This is a poetic lie–life is much, much longer than the figurative flash of lightning, the breaking wave, or the blink of an eye, especially if you consider a person flutters his eyelids 14,400 – 19,200 times a day, 100,800 – 134,400 times a week, between 5.2 and 7.1 million times a year. Averaging out these numbers to 16,800 blinks a day, 117,600 a week, 6.2 million times a year, I will prove Lincoln’s poem wrong, using his own life as proof.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ8qGVGOA3Vy
Blink 1 and done: If life literally passes by in the blink of an eye, Abe’s, in utero, would have ended around the beginning of the third trimester, meaning his mother, Nancy Hanks, would have miscarried on, or near December 4th, 1808, in that log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. There would have been no great statesman, no “Great Emancipator,” born at all. Case closed.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBzKg8pMqeL
Blink 2 to Blink 182 (in rhythm) : When Lincoln’s fetus was first jarred awake by dad Tom’s reverberant banjo-playing at around week 28, his eyelids opened and closed in time with “Skip to the Lou,” so right there, he was already 181 blinks past his life’s limit.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgpbLD3nsFj
Blinks 55,846,214, 55,846,215 (and the 2,335 subsequent blinks after that) tallied up quickly as 9-year old Abe fought back tears at his mother’s grave after she died from tremetol vomiting, a kind of poisoning characterized by trembling, vomitting, and severe intestinal pain. The “milk sick” affects individuals who ate or drank dairy products or meat from a cow that has fed on white snakeroot plant, which contains the poison tremetol.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkuE0VproQH
Blinks 130,234,453 and 130,234,454: Abe was tall, strong, and athletic, and became county wrestling champion at the age of 21. He gained a reputation for strength and audacity after winning a wrestling match with the renowned leader of ruffians known as "the Clary's Grove Boys,” according to historian David Herbert Donald’s biography, written in 1995. (I will give “Hulk” Lincoln only two blinks here as the two combatants probably stared each other down during weigh-in.)113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVXOhgqQlUa
Blinks 204,672,885 through 204,672,927 tallied up slowly: on November 4, 1842, Abe married Mary Todd in her sister’s home in Springfield, Illinois. While anxiously preparing for the nuptials, he was asked where he was going and replied, "To hell, I suppose." Those forty-two slow, disappointed blinks came later that evening in the Lincoln bedroom with stunned surprise–when his bride disrobed, he was shocked to discover that the hoop skirts Mary always wore were actually form-fitting ensembles.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIsoBlicjvZ
Blink 285,200,721½ was a wink: Lincoln, a former member of the Whig party that was irreparably split and, subsequently dissolved by the Kansas–Nebraska Act and other efforts to compromise on the slavery issue, wrote in 1855, "I think I am a Whig, but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an abolitionist....I do no more than oppose the extension of slavery." In his dressing room before attending the Bloomington Convention to establish an anti-slavery platform for the new Republican party that he had helped form, he primped and primed and gave himself a proud “one-eye” and two yuge thumbs-up in front of the mirror after donning his red “Make America Abe Again” stovepipe hat.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGO9VWN0F4x
Blinks 302,200,721, 302,200,722, 302,200,723, 302,200,724, 302,200,725, 302,200,726, and 302,200,727: Trying his hand at stand-up, he was left blinking vacantly at the limelights in silence after he bombed with the interracial joke, “If a white man wants to marry a Negro woman, let him do it–if the Negro woman can stand it.” 113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡttl7VAD77s
His audience of dense-as-sod prairie-billies, imbibed with the promise of Manifest Destiny, booed him off the stage after his honest, cutting observation, joking: “Young America is a great friend of humanity; his desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom.” And then the brazen punch-line that snuffed out his career in comedy: “Young America is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land. As to those who have no land, and would be glad of help, he considers they can wait a few hundred years longer.” 113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjI0Z09wwFS
“The Hilarious A-B-Doodle-Dandy,” his stage name, may have washed out on the late 1850s Dinkytown, Illinois comedy circuit, but his radical take on things would have gone over great on the Ed Sullivan Show a century later.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡoaZbIGqjIi
The ‘non-blink” right after blink 322,421,777: On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th president; on February 11, 1861, he gave a particularly emotional farewell address upon leaving Springfield, a town he would never return to, alive. Due to secessionist plots, a then-unprecedented attention to security was given to him and his train as it traveled east (en route to his inauguration, the president-elect evaded suspected assassins in Baltimore). On February 23, he arrived in disguise in Washington, D.C., which was placed under substantial military guard. Lincoln directed his inaugural address to the South, proclaiming once again that he had no inclination to abolish slavery in the Southern states as he stared down the seceding states (to no avail).113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡn0hKvsx1FE
Blinks 322,553,201 through 322,553,722: Fluttering his eyelids to keep the blowing dirt out of his gray-pupiled-peepers, Abe, wearing a “GO NORTH!” t-shirt and a giant, “We’re #1” foam finger, roots for the home team in the Battle of Bull Run, the first dust-up of the Civil War.
Blinks 323,562,994 through 384,362,994: 24,800,000 blinks of grief, holding back 24,800,000 salty tears—the Civil War resulted in at least 1,030,000 casualties (3% of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease—and 50,000 civilians. In addition, he took away black folks’ trade schoolin’.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjIhWBAK1za
Blink 347,200,009: Lincoln’s last. Knowing that the president was attending the British comedy Our American Cousin, on the evening of April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theater, John Wilkes Booth, an actor who knew the play well, timed his shot to be drowned out by the funniest line in the play, delivered halfway through Act III, Scene 2. 113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVd2w1jY0R3
The soon-to-be-martyr (and former comic) guffawed and blinked back tears of laughter–for a split second or two–after the character of Asa Trenchard, played that night by Harry Hawk, utters this line, considered one of the play's funniest, to Mrs. Mountchessington: “Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal – you sockdologizing old man-trap!113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡa3ShH6Ald1
Lincoln never opened his eyes again, and at 7:22 the next morning, he died. 113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡu8vVF72lv4
So . . . Abraham Lincoln passeth-ed from life to his rest in the grave, not in the blink of an eye, but in the blinketh of over a third of a billion times in his 56 years–a far cry from the length of a lightning strike or any breaking wave. I’m usually not one to criticize Republican politicians, but I'm calling bullshit, A-B-Doodle Dandy!
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