My Tribute to Harper Lee

I have three favorite books.  (See note at the end of the post, though).  East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, and To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. Today, Harper Lee passed away at the age of 89.  I wasn't alive to make a tribute to Steinbeck or Dickens.  So I suppose my tribute to Lee will have to account for that.  

Every once in awhile, someone will be born to this Earth who changes it completely.  And some of them change them in obvious ways: Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, Hitler, Martin Luther King, Lenin, Genghis Khan. Whether they change for good or bad, they changed it completely.  And they changed it by changing the setting or the plot.  Others change the world so subtly that we don't even feel it.   They change it, not by changing the setting or the plot, but by changing the characters. I think Harper Lee is one of those people.  The effects that she, and her legacy, will have upon us will keep going.  And I think that most of us can't even feel how she did it.  

When I was thirteen (I think), I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time.  I don't even remember which of her themes hit me that time. Was it the race issues? Was it the innocence of children?  Was it the understand of humans?  The optimism for the future (through children)?  Was it the experience of learning that there is evil in the world? I don't remember. But it spoke to me. 

Since then, I have re-read the book a few times, and I have seen the movie more than a few times, and I even saw a play.  I also read Go Set a Watchman, but we're not going to talk about her family's exploitation.  

What we are going to talk about is that Harper Lee, by writing a story, something that so many people have done, made the world a much better place. I give to you today my 13 favorite quotes from To Kill a Mockingbird (one for each year of my age when I first read it).  It's a little frightening how quickly I came up with these thirteen...and I could have kept going.

1. “People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
2. “The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
3. “I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
4. “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

5. “Atticus, he was real nice."
"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
6. “As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash”
7. “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”
8. “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”
9. “They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.” 

10. “There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible.”

11. “We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe- some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others- some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of men. But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.”

12. “He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
13. “There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them.”

And as a bonus, because I think this is the legacy that Harper Lee will leave for a long time as every generation of children becomes just a little bit better than the one before it:

“Things are never as bad as they seem.”

 --To Kill a Mockingbird, by Nelle Harper Lee (1926-2016)

 

NOTE: I don't call the scriptures my favorite books for two reasons:  People who say that the Book of Mormon is their favorite book are basically attempting to make everyone believe that they are more spiritual than the rest of us, and when someone asks your favorite book, they're talking about literature.  Not the sacred word of God.  And I think it's kind of denigrating to the scriptures to put them in the same box as Shakespeare, Austen and Tolstoy (no matter how gorgeous that box be).