To This Great Stage of Fools: Born March 6th

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poet, b. 1806.

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
I love her for her smile–her look–her way
Of speaking gently,–for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of ease on such a day–
For these things in themselves, BelovÃ¨d, may
Be changed, or change for thee,–and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheek dry,–
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winning Colombian novelist, author of Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), b. 1928. I read this book in college in Spanish. I’ve never read it in English. My Spanish was pretty good back then for a non-native speaker, but this novel really threw me. I was “plunged, soul-forward, headlong” when it started raining flowers. I kept looking up words in my Spanish/English dictionary to see if I had missed something, read something wrong, but no, it was really raining flowers. Nobody warned me about “magical realism.”

Thatcher Hurd, author and illustrator of Cranberry Thanksgiving and other Cranberry books, b. 1949. Thatcher Hurd’s father was Clement Hurd, illustator of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, and his mother was children’s book author Edith Thatcher Hurd. He says he “wanted to be a baseball player, then a rock ‘n’ roll star.”

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born March 3rd

Mar3

William Godwin, founder of philosophical anarchism, b. 1756. Godwin was greatly influenced by Thomas Paine; however, William Godwin believed and wrote that government was a corrupting force and that it would become increasingly unnecessary and powerless because of the spread of knowledge. He believed also that one should always act for the common good no matter what the personal cost or feelings. His demonstrated this belief in a story that came to be called “the Famous Fire Case.”

. . . we are asked to consider whom I should save from a burning room if I can only save one person and if the choice is between Archbishop Fenelon and a common chambermaid. Fenelon is about to compose his immortal Telemaque and the chambermaid turns out to be my mother. Godwin’s conclusion that we must save the former relies on consequentialist grounds.”

(I’d save my mom and let Archbishop Fenelon go to be with the Lord.)
In a triumph of feeling over perfect rationality, he married Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women. She died soon after the birth of her daughter, also named Mary. Godwin was a friend and mentor to Byron and to Shelley, but his friendship with Shelley was strained when Shelley eloped with Godwin’s then sixteen (or seventeen) year old daughter (the same Mary). Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley later wrote Frankenstein.

John Austin, philosopher of law and jurisprudence, b. 1790.

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor, b. 1847. On March 10, 1876, Bell spoke to his asistant in the next room, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” And the rest, as they say, is history, including the fact that I am using an electronically transmitted signal to communicate with you over the internet. A miracle, isn’t it?

Patricia Maclachlan, author of Sarah, Plain and Tall and other books for children and young adults, b. 1938. If you’ve never seen the movies with Glenn Close nor read the book, I strongly recommend either or both.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 26th

Feb26

Victor Hugo, b.1802. One of my Top Ten Favorite Authors of All Time. Les Miserables may be the best novel I’ve ever read. I certainly can’t think of a better one right now. I started re-reading it in december, got bogged down, need to get back to it. Right now books that require any great measure of concentration are beyond my abilities, what with everything else going on in my life. Oh, well, to everything there is a season.

Previous posts on Victor Hugo:
Christmas, 1823
February 26, 2005
February 29, 2004: Belated Birthday Wishes
Barbara Curtis (Mommy Life) on Les Miserables: Legalism and Grace

Poetry and Fine Art Friday: George Washington

Feb22

Today is George’s REAL birthday as opposed to that amalgamation of a President’s Day that we celebrated a week or two ago. So I thought you might enjoy a couple of selections of Washingtonian poetry:

From James Russell Lowell:

“Dumb for himself, unless it were to God,
But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent,
Tramping the snow to coral where they trod,
Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content;
Modest, yet firm as Nature’s self; unblamed
Save by the men his nobler shamed;
Not honored then or now because he wooed
The popular voice, but that he still withstood;
Broad-minded, higher-souled; there is but one
Who was all this, and ours, and all men’s,
Washington.”

By John Greenleaf Whittier:

“Thank God! the people’s choice was just,
The one man equal to his trust,
Wise beyond lore, and without weakness, good,
Calm in the strength of fearless rectitude.
His rule of justice, order, peace,
Made possible the world’s release;
Taught prince and serf that power is but a trust,
And rule, alone, that serves the ruled, is just,
That Freedom generous is, but strong
In hate of fraud and selfish wrong.

To accompany the famous picture of Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emmanuel Gottleib Leutze, here’s a set of words to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”, author anonymous, found in my book, The Year’s Entertainments, compiled and selected by Inez McAfee:

Washington’s Christmas Party

Come, all who love a merry tale
With joke both true and hearty,
We’ll tell you how George Washington
Once made a Christmas party.
Across the Delaware quite plain
The British flag was vaunted,
His troops ill-clad, the weather bad
And yet he was undaunted.

“Come boys,” he said, “we’ll go tonight
Across the raging river;
The troops will be at Christmas sports
And will suspect it never,
The Hessians all will keep this night
With games and feasting hearty;
We’ll spoil their fun with sword and gun,
And take their Christmas party.”

And so they row across the stream,
Though storms and foe pursue them,
The fishermen from Marblehead
Knew just how to go through them.
Upon the farther shore they form
And then surround the city,
The Hessians all after their ball
Were sleeping, what a pity.

And when at last at call, to arms!
They tried to make a stand, sir,
They soon took fright and grounded arms
To Washington’s small band, sir.
Across the stream they took that day,
One thousand Hessians hearty,
Their fun was spoiled, their tempers roiled,
By this famous Christmas party.

Finally, here’s a link to my favorite Washington poem, a poem I posted a few years ago, Leetla Giorgio Washeenton by Thomas Daly.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 17th

Feb17

Thomas Robert Malthus, b. 1766. “Population increases in a geometric ratio, while the means of subsistence increases in an arithmetic ratio.” What Malthus didn’t consider.

Ann Manning, b. 1807.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, b. 1879. Author of Understood Betsy.

Bess Streeter Aldrich, b. 1881. Nebraska author of A Lantern in her Handand many other books and short stories. I read a description of her writing as “cheerful realism.”

Robert Newton Peck, b. 1928. Author of the “Soup” books.

Chaim Potok, b. 1929. Rabbi and author of The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev. “I would prefer to say that the universe is meaningful, with pockets of apparent meaninglessness, than to say it is meaningless with pockets of apparent meaningfulness. In other words I have questions either way.” (Potok in Christianity Today, September 8, 1978)

Ruth Rendell, b. 1930. Author of detective fiction and also other non-detective fiction using the pseudonym, Barbara Vine. “I think that most writers have these two opposing feelings co-exist. One, this is the most wonderful work of art since War and Peace, and also this is the most awful trash, and why did I ever write it?”

I feel that way about almost everything I write–especially the latter feeling. Does that mean I’m a real writer?

Cathy at Poohsticks on Ruth Rendell.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 8th

Feb8

John Ruskin, b. 1819. Known as a literary and art critic, Ruskin lived a rather tragic life. He was a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Morris, Meredith, and Swinburne, and his wife left him and married the painter Millais. He fell in love with a young Irish girl, but she would not marry him and she later died. He lost his faith in Christianity, suffered from mental illness, and finally re-embraced the Christian faith of his youth, although he refused to believe in hell. Maybe this rejection had something to do with the fact that during episodes of mental illness he had horrendous visions of himself battling with Satan.

Henry Walter Bates, b. 1825. Naturalist, entomologist, and evolutionist. He wrote The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863. Has anybody out there read it?
If you’d like to know more about this pioneer in entomology, here’s a good article from The New Yorker, August 22, 1988, about Bates’s life and travels along the Amazon.

Jules Verne, b. 1828. In a letter: “I must be slightly off my head. I get caught up in all the extraordinary adventures of my heroes.”

Digby Mackworth Dolben, b. 1848. English poet, he was rather a character. He wrote love poetry to another (male) student at Eton and then considered conversion to Roman Catholicism and went around wearing a Benedictine monk’s habit. He drowned in a rather mysterious accident at the age of nineteen before he could go up to Oxford.

Kate Chopin, b. 1851. American author of The Awakening.

Martin Buber, b. 1878. Jewish philosopher and teacher. In 1938 he left Germany and went to live in Jerusalem. He wrote the book, I and Thou about the relationships of people to people and persons to God. “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.”

John Grisham, b. 1955. OK, I’m not really terribly intellectual at all. Of all the authors who have birthdays today, the only two I’ve read are Jules Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days and John Grisham. Which Grisham novel do you like best? Do you agree with me that his novels have not gotten better but rather the opposite? I did enjoy The Firm and The Client and, my favorite, The Rainmaker. I haven’t read his latest yet, but I’ve seen it in all the stores.

Edited slightly and reposted from February 8, 2006.

Poetry Friday: Abraham Lincoln

Feb8

Tuesday is Lincoln’s Birthday. So I’m leaving you with a couple of Lincoln elegies.

O Captain, My Captain by Walt Whitman

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weatherâ€™d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise upâ€”for you the flag is flungâ€”for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbonâ€™d wreathsâ€”for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
Youâ€™ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchorâ€™d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Lincoln by John Gould Fletcher
(an excerpt, go here for the entire poem.)

There was a darkness in this man; an immense and hollow darkness,
Of which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor enter;
A darkness through which strong roots stretched downwards into the earth 15
Towards old things;
Towards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and spoke with God,
Towards the wanderers who sought for they knew not what, and found their goal at last;
Towards the men who waited, only waited patiently when all seemed lost,
Many bitter winters of defeat; 20
Down to the granite of patience
These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, seeking,
And drew from the living rock and the living waters about it
The red sap to carry upwards to the sun.

Not proud, but humble,
Only to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through service;
For the ax is laid at the root of the trees, and all that bring not forth good fruit
Shall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the fire.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 7th

Feb7

A great day for another LOST episode:

Sir Thomas More, b. 1478 More’s Utopia is a novel which “describes the political arrangements of the imaginary island nation of Utopia (a play on the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place”, and eu-topos, meaning “good place”). Wow, if that’s not related to LOST island, the noplace/good place . . .

Samuel Butler, b. 1612. Butler was a nineteenth century author whose masterpiece was a novel called Erewhon (“nowhere” backwards). Erewhon was an imaginary country, neither utopia nor dystopia, but rather ambiguously satirical of the British Empire at the time. Is LOST a utopia or a dystopia, and can we tell the difference?

Charles Dickens, b. 1812. Of course, Dickens is Desmond’s favorite novelist, and he’s read all of DIckens’ novels except for the one he’s saving to read just before he dies, Our Mutual Friend. Here’s my post on LOST and Our Mutual Friend.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, b. 1867. Sawyer says he watched Little House on the Prairie when he was a kid. Can’t you just picture little James watching Laura and Mary on Little House?

Sinclair Lewis, b. 1885. Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith is about a brilliant but self-involved doctor named Martin Arrowsmith who moves from swmall town practice to large hospitals to research and eventually works to contain an outbreak of the bubonic plague that kills his beloved wife. After the loss of his wife, Dr. Arrowsmith becomes lost to himself and his principles and deserts his second wife. I’m not sure exactly how this plot relates to Jack Shepard, dedicated doctor who becomes an alcoholic and a druggie, but surely there’s a parallel there.

Everything relates in some way to LOST, right?

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 4th

Feb4

George Lillo, b. 1693, British playwright. He wrote what he called “domestic tragedies” about common people instead of heroes and kings.

Josiah Quincy, b. 1772, Congressman, judge of the Massachusetts municipal court, state representative, mayor of Boston and president of Harvard College.

Mark Hopkins, b. 1802, American educator and Christian apologist. He wrote a very popular nineteenth century text on apologetics called Evidences of Christianity.

William Harrison Ainsworth, b. 1805, English historical novelist. Several of his novels are available at Project Gutenberg.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, b. 1887. English novelist. She wrote many novels, mostly set in the English countryside of Sussex. Her novel, Joanna Godden, is available from Virago Press.

MacKinlay Kantor, b. 1904, American novelist and screenwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his novel Andersonville. It was a “grimly realistic” novel about the Confederate prisoner of war camp, Andersonville. Has anyone read it?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, b. 1906, German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and member of the resistance movement against Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. Here’s a very interesting poem by W.H. Auden, dedicated to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, entitled Friday’s Child. I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s worth reading anyway.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 3rd

Feb3

Horace Greeley, b. 1811, American journalist. “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.”

Walter Bagehot, b. 1826, British essayist and journalist. “The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.”

Sidney Lanier, b. 1842, American poet. “Music is Love in search of a word.”

Gertrude Stein, b. 1874, writer and patron of artists and writers. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation… You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.” Quoted by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.

James Michener, b. 1907, American novelist, author of Hawaii. “The really great writers are people like Emily BrontÃ« who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.”

Joan Lowery Nixon, b. 1927, Houston author of YA and children’s fiction. “My husband and I have four children, and when they were young I had only one day a week in which someone could watch the preschoolers and I could write. I discovered that you never find time to write. You make time.”

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

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