IF
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
 
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
 
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
 
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son


“If” by Rudyard Kipling. Public Domain. (buy now)

It’s the third Monday in January, so today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In 1983, after years of petitions, conferences, and advocacy on behalf of the holiday, Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law that made Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday.

 It’s the birthday of Alan Alexander Milne — better known as A.A. Milne (books by this author) — born in London (1882). The young H.G. Wells was one of his schoolteachers and served as a kind of mentor to the boy. Milne attended Trinity College at Cambridge on a mathematics scholarship, but when he wasn’t occupied with his studies, he gained a foothold in the literary world. He worked as a writer and editor for Granta, Cambridge’s literary magazine, and when he had earned his degree in mathematics, he moved to London to work as a freelance writer. He took a job with Punch in 1906, writing essays and light verse for the satirical magazine until 1914.

Milne served in both World Wars. He enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment to fight in World War I, and later served as a signaling officer. He was stationed in France but was sent home after he was injured in the Battle of the Somme. After he recovered, he wrote propaganda articles for British Intelligence. Support for the war was dropping, and Milne -a lifelong pacifist -  was ordered to write about British heroism and German treachery to rally the home front. He followed orders, but when the war ended, he contributed to a pamphlet called The Green Book; in it he made his true feelings known through verses. During World War II, he served as captain of the Home Guard.

Milne was discharged in 1919 and moved back to London, where his son Christopher Robin was born the following year. Punch didn’t hire him back, so he worked for some years as a successful playwright; his plays include Mr. Pim Passes By (1921) and Toad of Toad Hall (1930), an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s book The Wind in the Willows. He also published a mystery novel, The Red House Mystery (1922), and worked as a screenwriter on several British films.

Milne wrote poems for his son, which resulted in a couple of volumes of light verse for children: When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927). Though he was successful as a writer of plays, essays, and verse for adults, most people think of him as a children’s author, due to these verse collections and especially for his most enduring works: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Christopher Robin’s beloved stuffed animals inspired the tales. In addition to his famous bear, Milne’s son also had a piglet, a tiger, two kangaroos, and a donkey. All of them found their way into the stories, along with a rabbit and an owl that Milne made up just for the books. Pooh Bear made his debut on Christmas Day, 1925, in a story read over the BBC. By the time the first Winnie-the-Pooh collection hit the bookstores, Milne had already found himself typecast as a children’s author — a reputation he rather resented for the rest of his life. His son, Christopher Robin, felt resentment too--toward his father. He wrote in his autobiography that Milne “had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.”

It’s the birthday of Peter Mark Roget (books by this author), born in London in 1779. He had a long and distinguished career as a doctor, he lectured, he invented a slide rule that did complex mathematics, he studied optics and made an important breakthrough about how the retina perceives images. But when he retired, he came back to a pet project, a compilation of 15,000 words arranged in categories. And Roget’s Thesaurus has never been out of print and now contains more than a quarter of a million words.

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

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