Snow Fall
by May Sarton

With no wind blowing
It sifts gently down,
Enclosing my world in
A cool white down,
A tenderness of snowing.

It falls and falls like sleep
Till wakeful eyes can close
On all the waste and loss
As peace comes in and flows,
Snow-dreaming what I keep.

Silence assumes the air
And the five senses all
Are wafted on the fall
To somewhere magical
Beyond hope and despair.

There is nothing to do
But drift now, more or less
On some great lovingness,
On something that does bless,
The silent, tender snow.


"Snow Fall" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems: 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. Used by permission of Russell and Volkening through Massie and McQuilkin. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of the playwright sometimes described as “the Irish Chekhov.” That’s Brian Friel (books by this author), born near Omagh in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland (1929). He’s the author of the Tony Award-winning Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), as well as numerous other plays, including The Freedom of the City (1973), Faith Healer (1980), and Wonderful Tennessee (1993).

He published his first short story, “The Child,” in 1952. He was working as a mathematics teacher when he first began writing radio plays for the BBC. He also wrote some short stories that were published in The New Yorker; the magazine paid so well that he found he could live pretty well by selling only three stories a year. He also wrote a few plays that were staged in Dublin. He decided to pursue a theatrical career after he spent six months observing rehearsals at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater in 1963; he said the experience gave him “courage and daring to attempt things.” A year later, his play Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) opened to great reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Friel said of directors, “I want a director to call rehearsals, to make sure the actors are there on time, and to get them to speak their lines clearly and distinctly,” he said. “I’ve no interest whatever in his concept or interpretation.”

Friel died at his home in County Donegal. He was 86.

It’s the birthday of the novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (books by this author), born in Paris, France (1908). She entered the Sorbonne, and it was there that she met another philosophy student, Jean-Paul Sartre. He was five feet tall, had lost his sight in one eye, wore baggy clothes, and seemed to have no interest in hygiene. But he loved to talk, and he was both funny and brilliant. Beauvoir later said, “It was the first time in my life that I felt intellectually inferior to anyone else.”

Sartre was equally impressed by Beauvoir’s intellect, especially when she finished her philosophy degree in one year, after it had taken Sartre three years to finish his own. She was the youngest person to receive the degree in French history. They fell in love, but instead of getting married, they decided to form a pact. They would both have affairs with other people, but they would tell each other everything. That basic arrangement of their relationship would last for the rest of their lives.

They didn’t even live together, but every evening they would meet in a café and show each other what they were working on. They each edited the other’s work, and they gave each other ideas, and together they helped formulate the school of philosophy known as existentialism, which was the idea that human beings should consider themselves completely free to define their own existence, without regard to religion, culture, or society.

Sartre wrote his book Being and Nothingness (1943) about the new philosophy, and Beauvoir followed with a book of ethics based on the same ideas, called The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). But one of her most famous books was inspired by an offhand comment Sartre made one day. They were talking about the differences in the ways men and women were treated, and Beauvoir claimed that she’d never been adversely affected by this treatment. Sartre said, “All the same, you weren’t brought up the same way a boy would have been; you should look into it further.”

So Beauvoir did look into it. She spent weeks at the National Library in Paris researching the way women had been treated throughout history. The result was her book The Second Sex (1949), in which she wrote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” It was one of the first comprehensive arguments that the difference between the sexes was the result of culture, not nature, and it helped found the modern feminist movement.

Beauvoir went on to write many more books, including several volumes of autobiography, such as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), about her childhood, and The Prime of Life (1960), which tells the story of her relationship with Sartre and the years they spent together during World War II.

It’s the birthday of adventurer and author Richard Halliburton (books by this author), born in Brownsville, Tennessee (1900), the son of a civil engineer. He went to a prestigious New Jersey prep school, edited the student newspaper at Princeton, and then set off on the dizzying array of adventures around the world that would make him famous. To raise funds for these adventures, he wrote books about them. Many of his books became best-sellers.

On one of his first major trips, he traveled down the Nile River, headed over to India and Thailand, and climbed Mount Fiji; he wrote about these escapades in The Royal Road to Romance (1925). Other books also were travelogues of his adventures: The Glorious Adventure (1927); New Worlds to Conquer (1929); and The Flying Carpet (1932), which was also the name of the biplane he took around the world.

In 1939, he attempted to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco. It was 75 feet long, had a dragon painted on it, and was run by a diesel engine. The idea was to land at Treasure Island, in the Bay between San Francisco and Oakland. It was bad from the beginning. He was caught in a typhoon near Midway Island a few weeks after setting out. He sent out a couple messages: “Wish you were here instead of me” and “Southerly gale. Heavy Rain Squalls. High sea [...] lee rail under water.” He was never heard from again and was presumed dead shortly thereafter, age 39.

While he was gallivanting about, he wrote a lot of letters home to his parents. Afterward, his dad collected and published them as Richard Halliburton: His Story of His Life’s Adventure, as Told in Letters to His Mother and Father (1940). His travel writings are also collected in Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels (1941).

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

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