on reputation and character
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-eight years and a million words
Toronto, 2016.09.23
It's almost comically unfashionable to talk about things like character and reputation in today's society, but it wasn't always so. Abraham Lincoln apparently once said, "Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." What tree do we have, today, when character comes second to status and "reputation" fluctuates with thumbs up on Internet posts.