The Rail Splitter by Noah Brooks

Weltering Storm by Mark Twain

A Common Purpose by Edith T. Hegan

Say That We Saw Spain Die by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Strange, Bitter Shadow by James Baldwin

Homecoming by Edward W. Said

After September by Don DeLillo

The Rail-Splitter
By Noah Brooks

From “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” which appeared in the July 1865 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

The simple habits of Mr. Lincoln were so well known that it is a subject for surprise that watchful and malignant treason did not sooner take that precious life which he seemed to hold so lightly. He had an almost morbid dislike for an escort, or guard, and daily exposed himself to the deadly aim of an assassin. A cavalry guard was once placed at the gates of the White House for a while, and he said, privately, that he “worried until he got rid of it.” On more than one occasion the writer has gone through the streets of Washington at a late hour of the night with the president, without escort, or even the company of a servant, walking all the way, going and returning.

Considering the many open and secret threats to take his life, it is not surprising that Mr. Lincoln had many thoughts about his coming to a sudden and violent end. He once said that he felt the force of the expression “to take one’s life in his hand,” but that he would not like to face death suddenly. He said that he thought himself a great coward physically, and was sure that he should make a poor soldier, for, unless there was something in the excitement of a battle, he was sure that he would drop his gun and run at the first symptom of danger. That was said sportively, and he added, “Moral cowardice is something which I think I never had.” Shortly after the presidential election in 1864, he related an incident which I will try to put upon paper here, as nearly as possible in his own words:

“It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there had been a great ‘Hurrah, boys!’ so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau, with a swinging-glass upon it”—and here he got up and placed furniture to illustrate the position—“and, looking in that glass, I saw myself reflected, nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again I saw it a second time—plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler, say five shades, than the other. I got up and the thing melted away, and I went off and, in the excitement of the hour, forgot all about it—nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home I told my wife about it, and a few days after I tried the experiment again, when [with a laugh], sure enough, the thing came again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was worried about it somewhat. She thought it was ‘a sign’ that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term.”

The president, with his usual good sense, saw nothing in all this but an optical illusion; though the flavor of superstition which hangs about every man’s composition made him wish that he had never seen it. But there are people who will now believe that this odd coincidence was “a warning.”

Weltering Storm
By Mark Twain

From “Stirring Times in Austria,” which appeared in the March 1898 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

The Ausgleich is an Adjustment, Arrangement, Settlement, which holds Austria and Hungary together. It dates from 1867, and has to be renewed every ten years. It establishes the share which Hungary must pay toward the expenses of the imperial government.

The ten-year rearrangement was due a year ago, but failed to connect. At least completely. A year’s compromise was arranged. A new arrangement must be effected. Otherwise the two countries become separate entities.

The galleries are crowded this particular evening, for word has gone about that the Ausgleich is before the House; that its president, David Ritter von Abrahamowicz, has been throttling the rules; that the Opposition are in an inflammable state in consequence; and that the night session is likely to be of an exciting sort.

In his high place sits the president. He is sunk back in the depths of his armchair, and has his chin down. He brings the ends of his spread fingers together in front of his breast and reflectively taps them together. He looks tired, and maybe a trifle harassed. He is a gray-haired, long, slender man, with a colorless, long face, which, in repose, suggests a death mask, but when not in repose is tossed and rippled by a turbulent smile which washes this way and that, and is not easy to keep up with—a pious smile, a holy smile, a saintly smile, a deprecating smile, a beseeching and supplicating smile; and when it is at work the large mouth opens and the flexible lips crumple, and unfold, and crumple again, and move around in a genial and persuasive and angelic way, and expose large glimpses of the teeth; and that interrupts the sacredness of the smile and gives it momentarily a mixed worldly and political and satanic cast.

One half of the great fan of desks was in effect empty, vacant; in the other half several hundred members were bunched and jammed together as solidly as the bristles in a brush; and they also were waiting and expecting. Presently the chair delivered this utterance: “Dr. Lecher has the floor.”

Yells from the Left, counter-yells from the Right, explosions of yells from all sides at once, and all the air sawed and pawed and clawed and cloven by a writhing confusion of gesturing arms and hands. Out of the midst of this thunder and turmoil and tempest rose Dr. Otto Lecher, serene and collected. He began his twelve-hour speech. At any rate, his lips could be seen to move, and that was evidence. On high sat the president imploring order, with his long hands put together as in prayer, and his lips visibly but not hearably speaking. At intervals he grasped his bell and swung it up and down with vigor, adding its keen clamor to the storm weltering there below.

Dr. Lecher went on with his pantomime speech, contented, untroubled. At one point a new and most effective noisemaker was pressed into service. Each desk has an extension, consisting of a removable board eighteen inches long, six wide, and a half inch thick. A member pulled one of these out and began to belabor the top of his desk with it. Instantly other members followed suit, and perhaps you can imagine the result. Of all conceivable rackets it is the most earsplitting, intolerable, and altogether fiendish.

The persecuted president leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, clasped his hands in his lap, and a look of pathetic resignation crept over his long face. It is the way a country schoolmaster used to look in days long past when he had refused his school a holiday and it had risen against him in ill-mannered riot and violence and insurrection. Twice a motion to adjourn had been offered—a motion always in order in other Houses, and doubtless so in this one also. The president refused to put these motions. By consequence, he was not in a pleasant place now, and was having a right hard time. Votes upon motions, whether carried or defeated, could make endless delay, and postpone the Ausgleich to next century.

A Common Purpose
By Edith T. Hegan

From “The Russian Revolution from a Hospital Window,” which appeared in the September 1917 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Monday, February 27 (O.S.)— The appearance of the crowd changes daily. Sometimes there are many women and sometimes nearly all the women are of the student class, clad in blouses and heavy skirts. The advice of the women students seems to be heard with as much respect as that of the men. There seems to be a wonderful camaraderie between them. There are constantly increasing numbers of peasants. The red flag of the Revolution is everywhere.

The Russians usually gather in one of the three big squares in Petrograd; but today they have streamed restlessly up and down the Nevsky Prospekt. We hear that the tsar has been taken prisoner. They used to speak reverently of him as “Little Father,” but now they speak his name with a sort of amused indulgence.

While we were taking tea in the club there was a whirlwind of renewed shooting. S— and I went to the hospital for duty. We were not allowed to go out again but told to sleep there. Stray bullets enter the hospital now and then, but the patients take the matter calmly and philosophically. They still entreat us to avoid the windows. But it is such a wonderful picture unfolding itself before us constantly that we cannot leave it. We often see officers who do not wear the bit of red, or who are suspected of having German tendencies, surrounded by people who tear away their arms. I saw one fierce officer, covered with decorations and looking very much annoyed, pursued by a crowd. His sword fell to a gray-haired woman who shrieked apparently uncomplimentary Russian epithets at him as she contemptuously bent the sword over her knee, broke it in two, and lightly tossed it into the canal.

The Court of Justice was burned today and all prisoners were released from the fortress. The situation seems to be getting beyond control. Soldiers are deserting continually to the cause of the people. We are ordered by the Embassy to put out as many Red Cross flags as possible, and we all turned to and made more today.

Tuesday, February 28—The crowd looks very excited today. S— and I were permitted to return to the club. After taking a bath and lying down, we had orders to return to the hospital at once. There was considerable excitement while we hastily gathered up our valuables.

We heard the tramping of hooves, the roar of the lorries, and the subdued muttering of the crowd outside. While we were waiting for the others to come down, bullets flew through the house. One hummed through the window directly between our heads. We walked quickly to the hospital. There seemed to have been a subtle change in the demeanor of the crowd. Where they had been merely restless and wandering for days, they seemed bent on a common purpose now.

Several times we had to stop while on the way, the firing was so heavy. We were anxious to get back and worried lest the shots might strike some of our already badly injured patients. And we were interested enough to wish to get back to our windows, for it is not often that one can watch the death of a monarchy and the birth of a new republic. The thing that no one believed could ever happen has happened. If the rumors we hear are true, the tsar of all the Russias has been dethroned as easily as a recalcitrant schoolboy is made to stay in after school.

Say That We Saw Spain Die
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

This poem appeared in the October 1938 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Say that we saw Spain die. O splendid bull, how well you fought!
Lost from the first.
. . . the tossed, the replaced, the watchful torero with gesture elegant and spry,
Before the dark, the tiring but the unglazed eye deploying the bright cape,
Which hid for once not air, but the enemy indeed, the authentic shape,
A thousand of him, interminably into the ring released . . . the turning beast at length between converging colors caught.

Save for the weapons of its skull, a bull
Unarmed, considering, weighing, charging
Almost a world, itself without ally.

Say that we saw the shoulders more than the mind confused, so profusely
Bleeding from so many more than the accustomed barbs, the game gone vulgar, the rules abused.

Say that we saw Spain die from loss of blood, a rustic reason, in a reinforced
And proud punctilious land, no espada—
A hundred men unhorsed,
A hundred horses gored, and the afternoon aging, and the crowd growing restless (all, all so much later than planned),
And the big head heavy, sliding forward in the sand, and the tongue dry with sand—no espada
Toward that hot neck, for the delicate and final thrust, having dared trust forth his hand.

Strange, Bitter Shadow
By James Baldwin

From “Me and My House…,” which appeared in the November 1955 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

I don’t believe that a single one of us arrived in the world, or has since arrived anywhere else, on time. But none of us dawdled so intolerably about the business of being born as did my baby sister. We sometimes amused ourselves, during those endless stifling weeks, by picturing the baby sitting in the safe, warm dark, bitterly regretting the necessity of becoming a part of our chaos and stubbornly putting it off as long as possible.

Death, however, sat as purposefully at my father’s bedside as life stirred within my mother’s womb, and it was harder to understand why he so lingered in that long shadow. It seemed that he had bent, and for a long time, too, all of his energies toward dying. Now death was ready for him, but my father held back.

All of Harlem, indeed, seemed to be infected by waiting. I had never before known it to be so violently still. Racial tensions throughout this country were exacerbated during the early years of the war, partly because the labor market brought together hundreds of thousands of ill-prepared people and partly because Negro soldiers, regardless of where they were born, received their military training in the South. What happened in defense plants and Army camps had repercussions, naturally, in every Negro ghetto. The Harlem police force had been augmented in March, and the unrest grew. Perhaps the most revealing news item, out of the steady parade of reports of muggings, stabbings, shootings, assaults, gang wars, and accusations of police brutality, was the item about six Negro girls who set upon a white girl in the subway because, as they all too accurately put it, she was stepping on their toes. Indeed she was, all over the nation.

I had never before been so aware of policemen, on foot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two. Nor had I ever been so aware of small knots of people. Never, when I passed these groups, did the usual sound of a curse or a laugh ring out. Neither did there seem to be any hum of gossip. There was certainly, on the other hand, occurring between them communication extraordinarily intense.

Another thing that was striking was the unexpected diversity of the people who made up these groups. Usually one would see a group of sharpies standing on the street corner, or a group of older men, usually, for some reason, in the vicinity of a barbershop, discussing baseball scores, or the numbers, or the women they had known. Women, in a general way, tended to be seen less often together—unless they were church women, or very young girls, or prostitutes. But that summer I saw the strangest combinations: large, respectable, churchly matrons standing on the stoops or the corners with their hair tied up, together with a girl in sleazy satin whose face bore the marks of gin and the razor, or heavyset, abrupt, no-nonsense older men in company with the most disreputable and fanatical “race” men, or these same “race” men with the sharpies, or these sharpies with the churchly women. And on each face there seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow.

The churchly women and the matter-of-fact no-nonsense men had children in the Army. The sleazy girls they talked to had lovers there; the sharpies and the “race” men had friends and brothers there. It would have demanded an unquestioning patriotism, happily as uncommon in this country as it is undesirable, for these people not to have been disturbed by the letters they received, by the newspaper stories they read. It was only the “race” men, to be sure, who spoke ceaselessly of being revenged—how this vengeance was to be exacted was not clear—for the indignities and dangers suffered by Negro boys in uniform; but everybody felt a directionless, hopeless bitterness, as well as that panic which can scarcely be suppressed when one knows that a human being one loves is beyond one’s reach, and in danger. Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the South, to do battle overseas. Now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen. Such a death would be, in short, a fact with which one could hope to live.

Homecoming
By Edward W. Said

From “Palestine, Then and Now,” which appeared in the December 1992 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

There were four thriving Arab quarters in the West Jerusalem of my childhood: Upper and Lower Baqa’a, Qatamon, and Talbiya. I recalled that during my last weeks in Palestine, in the fall of 1947, I had to traverse three of the security zones instituted by the British to get to St. George’s School in East Jerusalem from my home in Talbiya. And by February 1948 Talbiya was in the hands of the Haganah, the Jewish underground. Now, as we drove around looking for my family’s house, I saw no Arabs, although the handsome old stone houses still bear their Arab identity.

I remembered the house itself quite clearly: two stories, a terraced entrance, a balcony at the front, a palm tree and a large conifer as you climbed toward the front door, a spacious and (at the time) empty square, designated to be a park, that lay before the room in which I was born, which faced the King David Hotel. I could not recall street names from that time (there was no name to our street when I lived there, it turns out), but my cousin Yousef, now in Canada, had drawn me a map from memory that he sent along with a copy of the title deed. Years before, I had heard that Martin Buber lived in the house for a time after 1948 but had died elsewhere. No one seemed to know what became of the house after the middle Sixties.

Our guide this day was George Khodr, who had been a friend of my father’s and an accountant for the family business, the Palestine Educational Company. I could vividly recall the company’s main premises, with its wonderful bookshop at which Abba Eban had been a regular customer, built against the stretch of city wall running between the Jaffa and New Gates. All gone now, I saw, as we drove past the wall and up Mamilla Road. What in my childhood had been a bustling Arab commercial block was, last summer, a construction site.

Khodr’s family had also lived in Talbiya, in a house he took us to so as to orient himself. Save for the Mediterranean flora, one might have been in an elegant Zurich suburb, so strongly did Talbiya bespeak its new European personality. As we walked around, Khodr called off the names of the villas and their original Palestinian owners—Kitaneh, Sununu, Tannous, Haramy, Salameh—a sad roll call of the vanished past, for my wife, Mariam, a reminder of the Palestinian refugees with the very same names who fetched up in Beirut during the Fifties and Sixties.

It took almost two hours to find the old family house, and it is a tribute to my cousin’s memory that only by sticking very carefully to his map did we finally locate it. Today the street is called Nahum Sokolow; the sandy little square now an elegant, even manicured, park. My daughter later told me that, using her camera with manic excitement, I reeled off twenty-six photos of the house.

It bore the nameplate international christian embassy at the gate. To have found my family’s house now occupied not by an Israeli Jewish family but by a right-wing fundamentalist Christian and militantly pro-Zionist group, run by a South African Boer, no less! Anger and melancholy overtook me, so that when an American woman came out of the house holding an armful of laundry and asked if she could help, I could not bring myself to ask to go inside.

More than anything else, perhaps, it was the house I did not, could not, enter that symbolized the eerie finality of a history. It seemed to stare down at me from behind its shaded windows. Palestine as I had known it was over, and I found myself thinking of my last view of my father a few days before he died in Beirut.

After September
By Don DeLillo

From “In the Ruins of the Future,” which appeared in the December 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Many things are over. The narrative ends in the rubble, and it is left to us to create the counternarrative.

There are a hundred thousand stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the world. Where we were, whom we know, what we’ve seen or heard. There are the doctors’ appointments that saved lives, the cell phones that were used to report the hijackings. Stories generating others and people running north out of the rumbling smoke and ash. Men running in suits and ties, women who’d lost their shoes, cops running from the skydive of all that towering steel.

People running for their lives are part of the story that is left to us.

There are stories of heroism and encounters with dread. There are stories that carry around their edges the luminous ring of coincidence, fate, or premonition. They take us beyond the hard numbers of dead and missing and give us a glimpse of elevated being. For a hundred who are arbitrarily dead, we need to find one person saved by a flash of forewarning. There are configurations that chill and awe us both. Two women on two planes, best of friends, who die together and apart, Tower 1 and Tower 2. What desolate epic tragedy might bear the weight of such juxtaposition? But we can also ask what symmetry, bleak and touching both, takes one friend, spares the other’s grief?

The brother of one of the women worked in one of the towers. He managed to escape.

In Union Square Park, about two miles north of the attack site, the improvised memorials are another part of our response. The flags, flower beds, and votive candles, the lamppost hung with paper airplanes, the passages from the Qur’an and the Bible, the letters and poems, the cardboard John Wayne, the children’s drawings of the Twin Towers, the hand-painted signs for free hugs, free back rubs, the graffiti of love and peace on the tall equestrian statue.

There are many photographs of missing persons, some accompanied by hopeful lists of identifying features. (Man with panther tattoo, upper right arm.) There is the saxophonist, playing softly. There is the sculptured flag of rippling copper and aluminum, six feet long, with two young people still attending to the finer details of the piece.

Then there are the visitors to the park. The artifacts on display represent the confluence of a number of cultural tides, patriotic and multidevotional and retro hippie. The visitors move quietly in the floating aromas of candle wax, roses, and bus fumes. There are many people this mild evening, and in their voices, manner, clothing, and in the color of their skin they recapitulate the mix we see in the photocopied faces of the lost.

For the next fifty years, people who were not in the area when the attacks occurred will claim to have been there. In time, some of them will believe it. Others will claim to have lost friends or relatives, although they did not.

This is also the counternarrative, a shadow history of false memories and imagined loss.

The internet is a counternarrative, shaped in part by rumor, fantasy, and mystical reverberation.

The cell phones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashed in the faces of running men and women. The box cutters and credit cards. The paper that came streaming out of the towers and drifted across the river to Brooklyn backyards: status reports, résumés, insurance forms. Sheets of paper driven into concrete, according to witnesses. Paper slicing into truck tires, fixed there.

The magazine’s entire 175-year archive—including the complete texts from which these readings are drawn—is available online at harpers.org/archive.