THE COLD
by Wendell Berry

How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,
my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go
separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you
perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping
—to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.
And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.


Wendell Berry, “The Cold” from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 1968 by Wendell Berry. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Counterpoint Press, counterpointpress.com., LLC (buy now)

Today is the birthday of Sebastian Junger (books by this author), born in Belmont, Massachusetts (1962).

He wanted to be a journalist, but in 1991 he was working as a tree trimmer to make a living. He cut his leg badly with a chainsaw and was recovering when he got the idea to write about people who do dangerous things for a living. It was about this time that he heard media reports of a commercial swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, the Andrea Gail, which had gone missing in the North Atlantic. The boat and her crew were casualties of the “Halloween Nor’easter,” an especially violent storm that collided and combined with Hurricane Grace which had moved up from the southwest. Junger started researching the story of Captain Billy Tyne and his crew, and it became his first book, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (1997). He made a name for himself with that book and was able to pursue his journalism career after all. He also formed the Perfect Storm Foundation to provide grants to kids whose parents work in the commercial fishing industry.

Captain James Cook and his crew on HMS Resolution were the first Europeans to sail below the Antarctic Circle on this date in 1773. Cook made three exploratory voyages to uncharted areas of the Pacific, making maps as he went. In 1772 he was commissioned by the Royal Society to go in search of the rumored Terra Australis, a hypothetical continent that was first suggested by Aristotle. Cook had already circumnavigated New Zealand and charted the eastern coast of Australia, but the Royal Society believed that Terra Australis lay farther south. Cook left Plymouth in July 1772 to sail around the bottom of the world. They had some trouble with pack ice, but once the weather warmed up in the southern hemisphere's midsummer, they were able to cross below the Antarctic Circle. They crossed it two more times on this voyage, and on the third crossing, Cook very nearly discovered Antarctica. They sailed within about 150 miles of the continent, and had hoped to go further, but couldn't make their way through the pack ice so they turned back.

Today is the birthday of Benjamin Franklin (books by this author), born in Boston, Massachusetts (1706). He was a printer, a scientist, an inventor, a writer, the founder of America's first lending library, and one of the Founding Fathers of America itself. He recalled in his Autobiography (1794) that writing well became "of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement."

It's the birthday of the youngest of the Brontë sisters: Anne Brontë (books by this author) was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in 1820. We don't know as much about her as we do about her sisters, Charlotte and Emily. She was sensitive, passionate, and spiritual, but also a bit meek and timid. She was especially close to Emily and they would make up fanciful stories about an imaginary country called "Gondal." When she was 19 she took a position as a governess because she wanted to contribute to the support of the household. Six years later she returned home and began writing. The three sisters hatched a plan to publish a book of poetry under three male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The book got a couple of good reviews and sold all of two copies. But Anne continued to write and she sold a couple of poems to regional periodicals. She also wrote two novels: the first, Agnes Grey (1847) sold pretty well, and her second, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), was a smash hit. It sold out the first printing in six weeks.

It was also in 1848 that Charlotte and Anne went to London to reveal the fact that the Bell brothers were really the Brontë sisters. Anne in particular had gotten frustrated over the speculation about the sex of the authors and whether it was appropriate for women to write novels. She wrote:

"I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man."

Within the next year three of the four Brontë siblings — Emily, Anne, and their brother Branwell — died of tuberculosis. Anne was the last to die, and before she died, leaving Charlotte alone, Anne whispered, "Take courage."

Today is the birthday of poet William Edgar Stafford (books by this author), born in Hutchinson, Kansas (1914). Among his best-known books are The Rescued Year (1966), Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems (1977), Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation (1978), and An Oregon Message (1987).

During the Second World War, he was a conscientious objector. He refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army. From 1940 to 1944 he was interned as a pacifist in civilian public service camps in Arkansas and California where he fought fires and built roads. He wrote about the experience in the 94-page prose memoir Down In My Heart (1947) which opens with the question, "When are men dangerous?"

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

^