I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger...

One humid day in August of 1993, I sat in a D.C. metro train, reading a book as we sped on down the line, trying to keep my mind off of the heat and humidity that would practically suffocate me the moment I stepped back outside.

The book I was reading was Mr. Lincoln's Army, the first of historian Bruce Catton's magisterial trilogy on the Army of the Potomac. I'd been a Civil War nut since my childhood, ever since the first time my grandfather Havelock Hunter showed me a Civil War photograph of his grandfather, my great-great grandfather, Lieutenant James Hunter of the 170th New York Volunteers, posed with his company somewhere near the Bull Run battlefield. My granddad had died the previous spring, and now that I was here on my first visit to Washington D.C., about thirty miles from the site of the photo, it seemed fitting and proper to catch up on some Civil War reading.

It was on that train ride where I first encountered the following passage, a description of the army on the night before the Battle of Antietam, a paragraph so powerful and exquisitely written that I nudged my long-suffering wife in the seat next to me and read it aloud:

How far they had marched, those soldiers--down the lanes and cross-lots over the cornfields to get into position, and from the distant corners of the country before that; they were marching, really, out of one era and into another, leaving much behind them, going ahead to much that they did not know about. For some of them there were just a few steps left: from the rumpled grass of a bed in a pasture down to a fence or a thicket where there would be an appointment with a flying bullet or shell fragment, the miraculous and infinitely complicated trajectory of the man meeting the flat, whining trajectory of the bullet without fail. And while they slept the lazy, rainy breeze drifted through the East Wood and the West Wood and the cornfield, and riffled over the copings of the stone bridge to the south, touching them for the last time before dead men made them famous. The flags were all furled and the bugles stilled, and the army was asleep--tenting tonight on the old camp ground, with never a song to cheer because the voices that might sing it were all stilled on the most crowded and most lonely of fields. And whatever it may be that nerves men to die for a flag or a phrase or a man or an inexpressible dream was drowsing with them, ready to wake with the dawn. (Catton, 261)

I hope, dear reader, that even if this passage doesn't move you the way it did me, you can acknowledge the beautiful phrasing of it. In my book Between the Commas, I wrote of another passage I would encounter some years later, this one by the mountaineer and writer Jon Krakauer, a passage which tantalized me, as both a teacher and a writer, with its lean and elastic qualities. This was the case with Catton's prose, too. That day on the DC Metro, I was just a few weeks away from starting my second full year in the classroom, and I could hardly wait to share this passage with my students and tell them, "Write like this!" Then I would watch with delight as my students, impressed with my evident passion, would begin to submit their brilliant offerings, which I would read with delight over the course of many happy nights and weekends.

Of course, it didn't work out that way. Looking back, I now see that I was navigating through that early phase of my career when I still thought that simply showing some great writing to my students would constitute teaching them--a mistaken assumption that I would soon regret. 

Now, after twenty-nine-and-a-half years in the classroom, I look at Catton's paragraph and think about how I would teach it today--the problems to anticipate, the steps to take, the expectations I could fairly hold my students to. I'd like to take a few days, in serialized form, to explore these issues, so that readers of my book who have further questions might be able to bolster their understanding of the sentence. Hope to see you back here soon!