Thoughts in a Garden by Andrew Marvell What wondrous life is this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that Ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. "Thoughts in a Garden" by Andrew Marvel. Public domain. (buy now) It’s the birthday of poet Maya Angelou (books by this author), born in St. Louis, Missouri (1928). When she was three years old her parents’ marriage ended and her father put Angelou and her brother on a train and sent them to a tiny town in Arkansas to live with their grandparents. She wrote, “Stamps, Arkansas, with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.” Occasionally she went back to live with her mother, and during one of these periods her mother’s boyfriend raped seven-year-old Angelou. She told her family and the man was murdered, possibly by her uncles. Angelou felt responsible and she stopped speaking for five years. She said, “I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone.” Angelou and her brother went back to live with their grandmother in Stamps. One day she met Bertha Flowers, a stylish, educated black woman who wore voile dresses and flowered hats and had a library of great books. Flowers took the girl under her wing; she had a beautiful voice, and she read aloud from her favorite novels and poems — from Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe, and many more. She was insistent that language was the most important thing that separated people from all other species, and not just written words, but also spoken word. When Angelou was 12 Flowers took her to the library and suggested that she read everything, beginning with books whose titles began with the letter “A”; Angelou eventually read every book in the library. Flowers encouraged Angelou to memorize and recite literature, especially poems, and slowly, by reciting other peoples’ words, the girl began to speak again. When Angelou was 14 she moved to Oakland to live with her mother and soon dropped out of school to become the first black streetcar driver in the city of San Francisco. She gave birth to a son at age 17. She found steady work as a calypso dancer and singer and toured Europe as a dancer with a production of Porgy and Bess. She moved to New York City, then lived for a while in Egypt and Ghana, working as a journalist. She met with Malcolm X in Ghana and decided to return to America to help establish his Organization of African-American Unity but he was killed days after she returned. A few years later she had just agreed to help Martin Luther King Jr. when he, too, was killed — on her 40th birthday. She sunk into depression, but she received lots of support from her friend James Baldwin, a novelist. One night he took her to dinner with some friends, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife, Judy. All three were magnificent storytellers and Angelou had to fight to get a word in edgewise, but she said a few things. Apparently they were impressed because Judy Feiffer called up Bob Loomis, an editor at Random House, and told him that he should convince the dancer Maya Angelou to write an autobiography. Loomis called her up, but she refused. He called several more times and she continued to turn him down. Finally Loomis asked Baldwin for help and Baldwin suggested a strategy. So Loomis called Angelou one more time and said he would stop bothering her and that it was probably a good thing she wasn’t attempting it because it was very difficult to write an autobiography that was also good literature. Immediately Angelou agreed to give it a try. She said, “Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass — the slave narrative — speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning we.” She went to work, and her first autobiography became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). She went on to write many more books of poetry and autobiography, including Gather Together in My Name (1974), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), And Still I Rise (1978), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013). On this day in 1832, Charles Darwin (books by this author), traveling aboard the HMS Beagle, landed on the shores of Rio de Janeiro as part of a five-year trip. His Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, which emerged as a result of his journey on the Beagle, remains one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 19th century. Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. He attended Edinburgh University as a young man to become a doctor, but discovered quickly that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood or suffering. He decided to become a clergyman in the countryside instead so that he could more fully pursue his interest in natural history. Before he could complete his religious studies he was approached by the Captain of the HMS Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, who sought an unpaid companion for the trip. Darwin agreed, seeing opportunity to catalog animals and plants on the journey. Later Darwin discovered that he almost missed his chance in the history books, detailing the ordeal in one of his letters: “Afterwards, on becoming very intimate with Fitz-Roy, I heard that I had run a very narrow risk of being rejected, on account of the shape of my nose! He was an ardent disciple of Lavater, and was convinced that he could judge a man’s character by the outline of his features; and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage. But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.” Darwin and Fitzroy landed at port in Rio in April of 1832 and stayed until June. At the start of the trip on land Darwin recorded the midday temperature in the shade as a sweltering 104 degrees Fahrenheit. He took ill at one point but was cured overnight by “cinnamon and port wine.” In one day he collected 68 different species of beetles. One of the most memorable moments of the stop came when he came across a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a live caterpillar to be eaten alive by the grubs after hatching. This event single-handedly challenged Darwin’s belief in God; he wrote to fellow naturalist Asa Gray, “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” Darwin himself sampled many of the animals he encountered on the islands that he visited. He ate armadillos, iguanas, giant tortoises, agouti rodents (“the best meat I ever tasted”), a puma with “veal-like” meat, and a large bird called a rhea which Darwin had been looking for desperately before realizing that he had been dining on it. Darwin finally reached the famous Galapagos Islands three years later, in 1835. Then, in 1859, he published his seminal book On the Origin of Species. Those looking through the prolific library of Darwin at the time of the theory’s development will encounter endless marginalia detailing his thought process. On the final page of his copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which argued for an archaic view of evolution, Darwin scribbled a single line: “If this were true, adios theory.” It’s the birthday of Robert E. Sherwood (books by this author), born in New Rochelle, New York (1896). As a boy he loved the circus and when he was seven he was so moved by a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that he had to be carried out of the theater — he was sobbing. He was gassed in the First World War and the tension between maintaining peace and defending justice became his life’s work — that and show business. By age 26 he was the leading film critic in the U.S. and one of the wits sitting next to Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Round Table. He earned three Pulitzers in five years for his plays about the moral implications of war — Idiot’s Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939), and There Shall Be No Night (1941). It's the birthday of novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter Marguerite Duras (books by this author), born near a small village in French Indochina near what is now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (1914). Her parents had left France to teach in the colonial South Pacific island but her dad became ill there and died and Duras had an impoverished miserable childhood in which she was abused by her mother and brother. When she was a teenager she became lovers with a wealthy, older Chinese man whom she met on a ferry between Sa Dec and Saigon. She would write about him for the rest of her life in autographical works like The Sea Wall (1953), North China Lover (1991), and The Lover (1984) which was an international best-seller and won France's most prestigious literary prize. The Lover begins: “One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, ‘I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you that I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.’” Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® |