Words and transformation

On a cool misty long-ago night I went for a late run through the streets of my neighborhood. I had given up on a writing assignment that was due the next morning for a communication course I was taking. But in rhythm with my feet splashing on the pavement, my mind did consider what might be worth writing about. And I thought, if I were to write anything, I would want it to be about the Mississippi in flood. Beyond that, I had nothing...

Back at home, I decided to at least sit down at the computer and see if anything might happen. I slid my fingers onto the keys and wrote:

Dear Children,

Someday I must take you to see the Mississippi in flood...

And something did happen. I had a finished piece in about 45 minutes. I volunteered to read it to the class the next morning. Afterward, the instructor asked if he might have a copy to put in his lecture file.

I saw him again about six months later and he said, "You were great last week." "I was great?" "Yes, at the Air Force Academy." He taught that you are what you say, so if he has your words with him, he talks as if you, yourself, were with him. He went on: "I was teaching a course at the Air Force Academy. I had Lincoln with me. I had Jefferson with me. But because of where the conversation was going, I thought the cadets needed to hear from you. I read them your piece, and you were great. You transformed the conversation." 

This memory came back to me at lunch today as I read in the second chapter of Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer, where Fred Kaplan describes the young Lincoln's reading of two anthologies that became his "formative books." He says:

It seems almost certain that Lincoln repeatedly read both volumes from cover to cover. He had few other books to choose from, and those did not have similar range and quality. These anthologies, created in the spirit of Anglican tolerance and respect for literary history, transformed him.

It's the word "transformed" that stopped me. That word is a little overused in corporate settings, but I still put a lot of stock in it. To think that Lincoln was transformed by what he read -- and because he was transformed, his bicentennial birthday was all over the news yesterday. 

But where do the transforming words come from? In my middling experience, when the transformational teacher trotted out my words at the Air Force Academy, they existed only because of... 

an assignment...

a deadline...

a run in the dark and the mist...

a mental image of something worth writing about...

and a choice that was made between going to bed and laying fingers on a keyboard to see what might happen. 

Probably not all that different from the words that transformed Abraham Lincoln.