We are what we read more than we know

From The Jefferson Lecture by David McCullough, delivered in 2003. On the cumulative nature of cultural development.

We are what we read more than we know. And it was true no less in that distant founding time. Working on the life of John Adams, I tried to read not only what he and others of his day wrote, but what they read. And to take up and read again works of literature of the kind we all remember from high school or college English classes was not only a different kind of research, but pure delight.

I read Swift, Pope, Defoe, Sterne, Fielding, and Samuel Johnson again after forty years, and Tobias Smollett and Don Quixote for the first time.

I then began to find lines from these writers turning up in the letters of my American subjects, turning up without attribution, because the lines were part them, part of who they were and how they thought and expressed themselves.

But we do the same, more often than we realize. Every time we "refuse to budge an inch," or speak of "green-eyed jealousy," or claim to be "tongue-tied," we're quoting Shakespeare? When we say "a little learning is a dangerous thing," or "to err is human," or observe sagely that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread," we're borrowing from Alexander Pope, just as when you "slept not a wink," or "smell a rat," or "turn over a new leaf," or declare "mum's the word," you're quoting Cervantes?

When young Nathan Hale was hanged by the British as a spy in New York in 1776, he famously said as his last words, "My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country." That's a line from the popular play of the eighteenth century, Cato by Joseph Addison, a play they all knew. Washington, who loved the theater, is believed to have seen it half a dozen times.

Imagine how it must have been for Nathan Hale, about to be hanged. Who, in such a moment, could possibly think of something eloquent to say. I think he was throwing that line right back at those British officers. After all, Cato was their play.

I imagine him delivering the line, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

One needs to read the great political philosophers -- Hume, Locke, Ferguson, Montesquieu -- whose writings had such profound influence on the founders. Yet there is hardly a more appealing description of the Enlightenment outlook on life and learning than a single sentence in a popular novel of the day, A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne.

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.