Gratitude List
by Laura Foley

Praise be this morning, for sleeping late,
the sandy sheets, the ocean air,
the midnight storm that blew its waters in.
Praise be the morning swim, mid-tide,
the clear sands underneath our feet,
the dogs who leap into the waves,
their fur, sticky with salt,
the ball we throw again and again.
Praise be the green tea with honey,
the bread we dip in finest olive oil,
the eggs we fry. Praise be the reeds,
gold and pink in the summer light,
the sand between our toes,
our swimsuits, flapping in the breeze.
 

“Gratitude List” by Laura Foley from Why I Never Finished My Dissertation. Headmistress Press © 2019. Reprinted with permission (buy now)

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night in the Northern Hemisphere.

Poets over the ages have proffered plenty of advice for the coming months. Poet Pietro Aretino, born in the 15th century, said, "Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius." William Blake wrote, "In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy." There's a Japanese proverb that says, "One kind word can warm three winter months."

Emily Dickinson wrote, "There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons — That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes."

It was on this day in 1940 that F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author) died of a heart attack in Hollywood at the age 44.

The last decade had been difficult. In 1930, his wife, Zelda, suffered her first breakdown and hospitalization. She would spend the next several years in and out of psychiatric clinics before being hospitalized for the rest of his ­— and her — life. After huge critical and commercial success in his 20s, Fitzgerald found himself in his mid-30s deep in debt and feeling depleted.

He wrote about it in The Crack-Up essays, published in Esquire magazine in early 1936. He wrote: "I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt." He'd "cracked like an old plate."

He was deep in debt, and so he went to Hollywood to work on movie scripts. It paid really well: In 1937, during the Great Depression, MGM paid him $1,000 per week. His daughter, Scottie, entered college at Vassar, and the next year MGM declined to renew his contract. He drank a lot. He also began work on what would be his final novel, The Last Tycoon.

Throughout 1940, he wrote letters from Hollywood to his daughter across the country. They were letters filled with thoughts on reading and writing. Shortly before his death on this day in 1940, he wrote to Scottie about what he called "the wise and tragic sense of life," which he described as "the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle."

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."

 Today in 1879, the world premiere of Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House took place at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark (books by this author). When the play opened, the cast had only rehearsed together 11 times, including the dress rehearsal. There was a director, but he didn't give much guidance to the actors about how they should approach their characters. The stage set from Ibsen's play The Pillars of Society (1877) was still hanging around the theater, so the production used the same set for A Doll's House.

The print version of A Doll's House was published a couple of weeks before the stage premiere, so most of the critics had already read it. The play was hugely controversial because of its ending: the main character, Nora, walks out on her family, leaving behind her husband and three young children.

When A Doll's House was first produced in Germany a year later, the lead actress, Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, refused to act the final scene, claiming that she would never leave her own children. She insisted on a new ending. There were no sufficient copyright laws to protect A Doll's House from being rewritten by someone else, so Ibsen finally agreed to write a new ending, rather than have someone else butcher it. In the new version, Nora is overcome with emotion when her husband shows her the door to the nursery, and she sinks down on her knees and doesn't leave. Ibsen hated the alternative ending, calling it "a barbaric outrage."

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

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