@lizkat:
No, the old - and quite wonderful - line - "do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself...I am large, I contain multitudes..." line (which I love, and to which a male friend - a mentor in the study of history, and a very good friend, he was in his early twenties at the time, I was in my mid teens - one with whom I am still in touch, we spoke for an hour less than a week ago, from where he (now) lives in Spain, introduced me...oh, quite a few years/decades ago)...
He ran a history club/society for (well, yes, "bright" kids) and my name had been given to him by my school; in a stuffy, suffocating, society (and limited, - in terms of class, gender, race - the way the world is limited if you are a bright - especially a bright female - teenager, the way that nerds, though that term was then unknown, might experience the world in your mid teens) this was a revelation - you could be unashamedly intellectual and revel in it.
Anyway, one of the subjects that this society addressed in my time there was a production - a public production (to packed houses) performance is too strong a word, though the production did have elements of a performance in it - on Russian (Soviet) leaders from Kerensky to Brezhnev (another was the First World War - I did Lloyd George, which meant that even at 15-16, I had an unusually detailed knowledge of this subject matter), where each of us took one leader, and gave a talk on/from this person's perspective, and subsequently took (entirely unscripted) questions from a panel of specialist historians (often from the local university's history department), and then, also took questions from the invited audience (which also included proud parents).
In any case, on our Russian production, I was Lenin (and yes, my knowledge of Russian history - I had devoured biographies of the man, his world and that era to try to work out what made them tick - was unusually extensive from the age of 15), and I thank that society for giving rise to - encouraging, promoting - an interest in the history of that part of the world which stood me in good stead at university, and later, primed me to be aware of - to identify, to recognise - to be interested in - when changes began to take place in the USSR, and which meant that I had the knowledge, the interest (and the grades) to be in a position where I could offer to teach a course on all this stuff, which, in turn, allowed me to become recognised as a bit of an academic expert on this stuff, which also helped when I was subsequently recruited for my election monitoring work ......strange how things start, or, are triggered...
As Lenin, I worried (as you do when you are an idealistic teenager, but also a good school's debater, which I was) about Lenin's twists and turns, and compromises.
"I mean," I asked my mentor, "if asked", (yes, I wondered and worried about the questions that would - inevitably - come my way from the professional historians at the production), "how do I explain away Lenin's conversion to the NEP when he had been an avowed Marxist until then?" (there are those idiots - usually male, - who cannot conceive that women had any serious conversations of this sort, or, indeed, anything other than conversations of this sort of stuff as a teenager).
My mentor, bless him, advised, firmly, kindly, - but, quite calmly - this is how you deal with that question, and he quoted Walt Whitman, and carefully wrote out the quote by hand for me.
And that was my introduction to the work of Walt Whitman.
