Musée Des Beaux Arts
By W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or
just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the
torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything
turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
 

"Musée des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden, from Collected Poems. © The Modern Library — Random House, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It's the birthday of writer Jorge Luis Borges (books by this author), born in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1899). In 1955, at about the same time he lost his sight, Borges was appointed director of Argentina's National Public Library. He said: "Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a palace. There I was, the center, in a way, of 900,000 books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines. I wrote the 'Poem of the Gifts,' which begins: 'No one should read self-pity or reproach / into this statement of the majesty / of God, who with such splendid irony / granted me books and blindness at one touch.'"

After he went blind, Borges turned from writing prose fiction to formal poetry. He dictated his writing to his mother, Leonor Acevedo, who worked as his personal secretary and lived to be 99 years old.

His books include Fictions (Ficciones, 1944), The Aleph (El Aleph, 1949), Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957), and Dreamtigers (El Hacedor, 1960).

He said: "A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry."

Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying the Roman city of Pompeii, on this date in the year 79. Pompeii was about five miles away from the mountain, and it was a resort town for Rome’s elite. It’s estimated that about 20,000 people lived in and around Pompeii at that time, and most of them were able to escape relatively unscathed.

Just after noon, a plume of ash, pumice rock, and debris shot up into the air and began falling on the surrounding area. Before long, the ash in the streets of Pompeii lay nine feet deep. Pliny the Younger witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius from across the Bay of Naples, and noted that the billowing soot, rocks, and gas looked like an enormous pine tree. It eclipsed the sun. “Darkness fell,” Pliny wrote, “not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a dark room.” Even from his safe distance, he observed, “I believed I was perishing with the world, and the world with me.” About five thousand people died — most likely from a blast of blistering hot, poisonous gas, not debris or lava — and the whole city was buried under millions of tons of ash and debris.

Pompeii and the nearby city of Herculaneum were rediscovered in the 18^th century. They were almost completely intact, buried under about 23 feet of volcanic debris.

It’s the baptismal day of poet Robert Herrick (books by this author), born in London (1591). He’s the author of the lines, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying, / And this same flower that smiles to-day / To-morrow will be dying.” They appear in his poem “To the Virgins, to make much of Time.” He worked as a goldsmith, went to college, and left London for the English countryside, where he stayed for many years and wrote most of his poetry. He wrote short lyric poems and songs. He wrote about seducing women and taking advantage of your youth, but he never married and most of the women in his poems were probably imaginary. He also wrote religious poems. His poetry was distributed among friends and eventually reached people in higher places, making Herrick known throughout England. In 1648, he published Hesperides, which contained more than 1,000 poems.

It was on this day in 1456 that the first edition of the Gutenberg Bible was bound and completed in Mainz, Germany. The Gutenberg Bible was the first complete book printed with movable type. The press produced 180 copies of the Bible. Books had been printed on presses before, in China and Korea, with wood and bronze type; but Gutenberg used metal type, and made a press that could print many versions of the same text quickly. His contributions to printing were huge: he created an oil-based printing ink, he figured out how to cast individual pieces of type in metal so that they could be reused, and he designed a functioning printing press. But others before him had come up with similar ideas. Probably the most important thing that Gutenberg did was to develop the entire process of printing — he streamlined a system for assembling the type into a full book and then folding the pages into folios, which were then bound into an entire volume — and to do it all quickly. The techniques that Gutenberg refined were used for hundreds of years, and the publication of the Gutenberg Bible marked a turning point in the availability of knowledge to regular people.

It’s the birthday of American novelist John Green (books by this author), born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1977). He is best known for his blockbuster young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars (2012), about two adolescents with cancer who fall in love.

About writing for teenagers, Green says, “I love the intensity teenagers bring not just to first love, but also to the first time you’re grappling with grief, at least as a sovereign being — the first time you’re taking in why people suffer and whether there’s meaning in life.”