Good-Night
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be good night.

How can I call the lone night good,
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood—
Then it will be—good night.

To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,
They never say good-night.

"Good-Night" by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Public domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of the novelist who coined the term "Generation X": Douglas Coupland, (books by this author) born on a NATO base in Baden-Söllingen, West Germany (1961).

His first novel was Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991).

Coupland said, "TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public."

It's the birthday of Rudyard Kipling, (books by this author) born in Bombay, India (1865). As a boy, he was cared for by an ayah, a governess, and other Indian servants, and he learned to speak Hindi better than English and liked to listen to the servants tell stories, which his parents couldn't understand. He wrote: "In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she [his ayah] or Meeta would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution 'Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.' So we spoke 'English,' haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in."

But his days in India ended when he was six years old and sent back to England. He went to school there, but he didn't have enough money to go to Oxford and he didn't do well enough in school to get in on a scholarship. So in 1882, when he was 16 years old, he went back to India to work for a newspaper, The Civil and Military Gazette. He went on to write extremely popular stories about British people in India, including Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1888).

Kipling married an American woman, Carrie Balestier, in 1891, and the couple moved to Vermont. And it was there that he wrote his most famous novels, The Jungle Book (1894) and its sequel, The Second Jungle Book (1895).

He also published several poetry collections, including The Seven Seas (1896) and Barrack Room Ballads (1892), and he is best known for the poems "Gunga Din," "The White Man's Burden," and "If."

It's the birthday of Swedish novelist Sara Lidman, (books by this author) born in the village of Missenträsk, Sweden, near the Artic Circle, in 1923.

She published her first novel, Tjärdalen (1953), translated as The Tar Pit. Written in dialect, it's the story of a small, poor village in northern Sweden in the 1930s.

 The Tar Pit made Sara Lidman famous as soon as it was published. She went on to write many more novels, many of them set in rural Northern Sweden, including Cloudberry Land, (Hjortronlandet, 1955), Rain Bird (Regnspiran, 1958), and Life's Root (Lifsens rot, 1996).

Sara Lidman died at age 80 in 2004.

It was on this day in 1816 that Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were married. They traveled through Europe, then returned to England, by which time Mary was pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter, who was born prematurely and died after two weeks. A year later, in January of 1816, they had a healthy child named William. That summer, they accepted the invitation of Mary's stepsister, Claire, to join her and Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. It was during that stay in Switzerland that Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, soon to be Mary Shelley, (books by this author) began her most famous novel, Frankenstein (1818).

It's the birthday of artist, poet, and punk rocker Patti Smith (books by this author). She was born in Chicago during the Great Blizzard of 1946. She wrote about her bohemian years in New York City in the '60s with her then-lover Robert Mapplethorpe in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids.

She made the foray into rock and roll not long after she began giving poetry readings around New York City. One night, a friend with an electric guitar accompanied her, and she began trying to merge poetry with rock and roll, much as earlier poets had done with jazz. She released her first of 12 albums, Horses, in 1975; it's considered a punk rock classic.

She said, "In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth."

Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies on this date in 1924. At the time it was thought that our Milky Way galaxy represented the entirety of the universe. Hubble was studying the Andromeda Nebula using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson observatory in California. With a weaker telescope, nebulae just looked like clouds of glowing gas, but with the Hooker telescope — the most powerful telescope in the world at that time — Hubble was able to distinguish individual stars within the nebula. One of the stars in the Andromeda Nebula turned out to be a Cepheid variable: a particular type of star that pulsates and is very bright. Astronomers had figured out a decade earlier that, by observing a Cepheid variable and measuring its brightness and the length of time it takes to go from bright to dim and back again, they could calculate the star's distance from the Earth. Hubble crunched the numbers and realized that the star he was observing was 800 thousand light years away, more than eight times the distance of the farthest star in the Milky Way. It was then that he realized that the "cloud of gas" he'd been observing was really another vast galaxy that was very far away. He renamed the Andromeda Nebula the "Andromeda Galaxy," and went on to discover 23 more separate galaxies. His findings proved that, unimaginably vast though it seemed to us, our Milky Way was just one of many little islands of stars.

It's the birthday of novelist, composer, and poet Paul Bowles (books by this author), born in New York City, New York (1910). His first and most famous novel was The Sheltering Sky (1949), and it was set in Morocco. It helped cause a U.S. literary migration to Tangier, and he became a resident there in 1952.

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

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