MICHIKO KAKUTANI ESSAY

WASHINGTON - In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written,“that people had begun to listen to my opinions.”Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power“to transform”:“with the right words everything could change - South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”


Much has been made of Mr.Obama’s eloquence - his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.


Mr. Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father,”(which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others - as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual- intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.


More recently, books have supplied Mr.Obama with some concrete ideas about governance. It’s been widely reported that Team of Rivals,”Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. Books about Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s“Ghost Wars,”about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.


Mr. Obama tends to take a selective approach to reading - ruminating upon writers’ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.


President Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books - Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,”which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,”which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.


What’s more, Mr. Obamas love of fiction and poetry - Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”and Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead”are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s“Self Reliance”- has imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.


Like “Dreams From My Father,”many of the novels Mr. Obama reportedly admires deal with the question of identity: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon”concerns a mans efforts to discover his origins and come to terms with his roots; Doris Lessing’s “Golden Notebook” recounts a womans struggles to articulate her own sense of self; and Ellisons Invisible Man”grapples with the difficulty of self-definition in a race-conscious America and the possibility of transcendence.


The notion of self-creation is a deeply American one - a founding principle of the country, and a theme addressed by such classic works as “The Great Gatsby” - and it seems to exert a strong hold on Mr. Obama’s imagination.


In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, he wrote of the humble beginnings that he and Lincoln shared, adding that the 16th president reminded him of “a larger, fundamental element of American life - the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

The incandescent power of Lincoln’s language, its resonance and rhythmic cadences, as well as his ability to shift gears between the magisterial and the pragmatic, has been a model for Mr.
Obama.
He has said he frequently rereads Lincoln for inspiration.
And he has also studied the uses to which Lincoln put his superior language skills: to goad Americans to complete the unfinished work of the founders, and to galvanize a nation reeling from hard times with a new vision of reconciliation and hope.