Seven score and nine years ago, a great man gave a great and simple speech, striking the fractured soul of the nation divided. I have been asked to imitate this oration, a simple yet scintillating gem of rhetoric and wisdom. The task is daunting, but not so much as the skeleton which has been foisted upon me, a silhouette of the masterpiece in which I am trapped.
Beneath its shadow, its brilliance is inappreciable, its walls advance upon me, suffocating me underneath its stifling grandeur. I am not this honored speaker; how can I be expected to mimic his achievements? As a man of the pen, not the hour, it is an egregious sin to ask me to respect not the creation of a man, but the husk left behind and gutted of meaning.
Divide not the body lest it be another corpse upon the battlefield it commemorates; apportion no sections to be examined by cold instruments in the name of education through imitation. The speech’s power resides but little in its individual format; its true strength lies in the spirit of the moment, the wisdom of the speaker, and the meaning of the words themselves. A writer learns his craft through imitation, but truly creates only of his own accord, reason, and in his own manner; great works are born not of a Frankensteinian borrowing of parts, but of the creative genius of original design.
