Barter
Sarah Teasdale

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.


Sara Teasdale, “Barter” in the Public Domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of writer Joy Williams (books by this author), born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts (1944). Williams went to college and grad school in the Midwest, but she decided she needed to live someplace more mysterious and exotic, so she moved to a trailer park in northern Florida surrounded by swamps and alligators and snakes. She said, "I was miserable, of course. But it was all very good for my writing. It's good to be miserable and a little off-balance." The result was her first novel, State of Grace (1973), which got great reviews. Her fourth novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Williams latest work is a novel Harrow (2021).

Screenwriter Philip Dunne (1908) (books by this author) was born in New York City on this day in 1908. Politically active, he helped organize the Writers Guild of America and fought against entertainment industry blacklists of writers suspected of leftist leanings in the 1940s and 1950s. Among Dunne's many screenwriting credits are How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Robe (1953).

It's the birthday of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909), film director, producer, and screenwriter, who was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1909. He won many awards, including double Oscars as Best Director and Best Screenplay for All About Eve (1950) in which he gave Bette Davis the line, "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

It's the birthday of the man who gave us the phonograph, the light bulb, and the movie camera, among 1,097 patents: Thomas Alva Edison, born in Milan, Ohio (1847).

It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer (books by this author), born to Indian parents in Oxford, England (1957). After college he spent a year working in a Mexican restaurant in the U.S., disguising himself as a Mexican. Then he and a friend went on a trip from California through Central America to Bolivia. He later said, "It's a great thing to take a journey like that when you're seventeen or eighteen because you're relatively reckless and you don't really know what the dangers are. And then once you've done it, anything seems possible."

He went to graduate school at Harvard and during the summers he got a job writing for a budget travel guidebook. He traveled around England, France, Italy and Greece, living on almost no money and sleeping in the gutters and under bridges. He covered a different town each day, walking its streets and taking notes in the morning and afternoon and writing it up in the evening.

After graduating he got a job working for Time magazine. He sat in a cubicle all day and wrote articles about places like the Philippine jungles and the Andes Mountains from reports he got from other writers. He finally got fed up with office work and took a vacation to Southeast Asia. He fell in love with the place and decided to take a six-month leave of absence. He spent the first three months traveling through 10 Southeast Asian countries and the next three months writing the draft of his first book, Video Nights in Katmandu (1988). He's since published several more books, including the novel Abandon: A Romance (2003) and A beginner’s guide to Japan: observations and provocations (2020).

Pico Iyer said:

"The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger," and "Home is whatever you can rebel against."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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