Overwhelmed

Finished reading Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom in the very handsome Library of America edition, which concludes with transcripts of a number of the speeches he delivered in the years after achieving his hard-won freedom. I'm considering whether to move on immediately to his third and final autobiography, Life and Times, which occupies more than half the edition. If I do so I'm likely to skip the early slavery chapters which, at first glance, appear to be transcriptions of the material in the second autobiography. But I'm more likely to steer away from Douglass for a week or two.

He's a very fine writer, often astonishingly powerful, but the sheer vigour of his work can be overwhelming. It's difficult to imagine anyone hearing those speeches not being utterly entranced and driven to support the speaker in his great cause. But I can imagine living to regret the infusion of moral fervour after a time and wanting to come down from the moral heights once in a while. Yet it's obvious that such was the force of Douglass's personality that this was never an issue for him.

Having said that, I'm fascinated to read about the rough and tumble of his political involvements after emancipation. And I've got a suspicion I'll end up admiring the older man even more than I do the young Douglass.

(Oh, and trivial as it sounds, I love his use of the semi-colon. I've got a feeling it corresponds to the half-pauses he would have employed in his speaking style; a way of dragging his listeners along with him as his brilliant rhetoric shook them to pieces.)