Resonance

 

1. The quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating.
1.1 The ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions.

Memorial Day is a day to remember. A day of honor. A day of sacrifice.

Maybe you will be seeing videos, reading books, attending concerts. But whatever you are doing you will be in the presence of echoes — sounds that call forth memories.

At some point, possibly many points, you will be awash with emotion as you achieve resonance — an involuntary connection with thought and sound. Is it the sound of Taps? Is it a particular chord in a patriotic song? Is it a grainy image of too-young men pushing forward in combat? Is it the row of markers that dot a verdant hill?

This morning one of my neighbors posted a link to a speech by Ronald Reagan — Freedom Isn’t Free. We miss that voice dearly. He was able to simply state what was important. To explain the need for sacrifice, the purpose of sacrifice, the nobility of sacrifice. And the debt we all owe to sacrifice.

But he was not the first:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

— Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address

As we read these words and listen to memorials and music we achieve resonance with the spirit of Memorial Day.

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