A Sighting
by Connie Wanek

The gray owl had seen us and had fled
but not far. We followed noiselessly,
driving him from pine to pine:
I will not let thee go except thou bless me.

He flew as though it gave him no pleasure,
forcing himself from the bough,
falling until his wings caught him:
they had to stroke hard, like heavy oars.

He must have just eaten
something that had, itself, just eaten.
Finally he crossed the swamp and vanished
as into a new day, hours before us,

and we stood near the chest-high reeds,
our feet sinking, and felt
we'd been dropped suddenly from midair
back into our lives.

"A Sighting" by Connie Wanek, from On Speaking Terms. Copyright © 2010 by Connie Wanek. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press. (buy now)

The first edition of the Guinness Book of World Records was published on this date in 1955. The idea for the book had come four years earlier, when Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery, was hunting birds in Ireland. He missed a shot at a golden plover, which led to an argument among his friends over which was faster, the golden plover or the red grouse. Beaver considered creating a book that could be consulted during similar debates that often cropped up over a round of drinks. He figured that Guinness could stamp it with their name and distribute it to pubs for advertising purposes.

Beaver mentioned the idea at work, and one of his employees recommended twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter, who ran a fact-finding agency in London. The McWhirters had photographic memories and knew an amazing number of unusual facts. The brothers set to work finding the tallest, oldest, heaviest, fastest — the superlatives in a number of categories; their strategy was to give each record their best guess and then send it out to experts for their input. As one twin said: “We found that people who have a total resistance to giving information often have an irresistible desire to correct other people’s impressions.” The McWhirters worked 90 hours a week for nearly 14 weeks on the project.

Beaver intended the book solely as a marketing gimmick; he didn’t expect to make any money on it. The first edition cost just five shillings, and they printed 50,000 copies. They sold 10,000 copies in the first week alone, and went through three more editions over the next 12 months. It has remained an enormous best-seller, with more than 130 million copies sold, and people go to great lengths to be included for things like hula hooping, egg tossing, and kiwi peeling. The McWhirters stayed on for many years as the book’s editors and fact checkers. Ross McWhirter was assassinated by the IRA in 1975, and Norris retired in the mid-1980s.

It’s the birthday of philosopher Georg Hegel (books by this author), born in Stuttgart (1770). He started out as a theologian, particularly interested in how Christianity is a religion based on opposites: sin and salvation, earth and heaven, finite and infinite. He believed that Jesus had emphasized love as the chief virtue because love can bring about the marriage of opposites. Hegel eventually went beyond theology and began to argue that the subject of philosophy is reality, and he hoped to describe how and why human beings create communities and governments, make war, destroy each other’s societies, and then build themselves up to do it all over again.

He came up with the concept of dialectic, the idea that all human progress is driven by the conflict between opposites, that each political movement is imperfect and so gives rise to a counter movement that takes control — and that is also imperfect — and gives rise to yet another counter movement, and so on to infinity. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx argued that the most important dialectic of history was between worker and master, rich and poor, and their ideas led to the birth of communism.

On this date in 1859, petroleum was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania. It's been called "the most important oil well ever drilled" because it marked the beginning of the modern petroleum age. Petroleum had been discovered elsewhere, of course, but this was the first well successfully drilled in search of the stuff. Locals had noticed oil seeping from the ground for years; evidence even suggests that Native Americans harvested the oil for medicinal purposes as early as 1410, and European settlers had long used it to fuel their lamps and lubricate their farm machinery. A New York lawyer, George Bissell, had the idea to somehow collect the oil, refine it, and sell it commercially, and he co-founded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company to that end.

The Drake Well was named for railroad conductor Edwin Drake, who figured out a drilling system to access and collect the oil. Within a day of striking oil, other people were copying Drake's drilling system. The Drake Well only produced about 20 barrels a day, but it transformed the quiet farming community almost overnight, attracting would-be oil company executives and coopers to make the hundreds of barrels needed to collect the crude. Until the Texas oil boom of 1901, Pennsylvania was responsible for half of the world's production of oil, and it spawned the motor oil brands Pennzoil and Quaker State. Edwin Drake never patented his drilling process, and died in poverty in 1880.

Today is the birthday of novelist Theodore Dreiser (books by this author), born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. He was one of the early proponents of naturalism in fiction, a literary movement away from the moralizing and delicate sensibilities of the Victorian era. He’s the author of several novels, most notably Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

He grew up in poverty, the ninth of 10 surviving children. His father was a German immigrant, piously and rigidly Catholic. The senior Dreiser worked as a millworker, but was often unemployed, and he moved his family around a lot in search of higher wages or a lower cost of living. Dreiser’s numerous brothers and sisters always seemed to be in trouble: adultery, unwanted pregnancies, jail, alcoholism. He was quiet and studious, though, and in high school, he had a teacher named Mildred Fielding. She had also grown up poor in a dysfunctional family, and she sympathized with Dreiser at the same time that she recognized his potential. She encouraged his studies and told him to ignore the gossip of his schoolmates.

Dreiser eventually got fed up with his family’s poverty and scandals; he dropped out of school when he was 16 and left for Chicago with little more than a change of underwear and a few dollars in his pocket. He ran into his old teacher, Mildred Fielding, a couple of years later, and she offered to pay his college tuition for him. He took her up on it, but only stayed in school for a year. He eventually found work as a reporter, and turned his hand to fiction for the first time in 1899, at the urging of a colleague. He often used his family as a source of inspiration for characters or stories.

Sister Carrie (1900) was based in part on a scandal involving his sister Emma, who once ran away with a man who had broken into his employer’s safe and robbed it. Dreiser’s novel is about an 18-year-old country girl from Wisconsin who moves to Chicago to live out her version of the American Dream. She uses her youth and beauty to become the mistress of wealthy men, which enables her to go from poverty to material comfort and a sophisticated lifestyle almost overnight. Because Dreiser didn’t condemn or judge his characters, and let Carrie’s moral failings go unpunished, his publisher had some misgivings about the story. They tried to back out of the contract. Dreiser held them to it, but they didn’t really publicize the book very much, and it sold fewer than 500 copies at the time. Dreiser took the novel’s apparent failure badly, and he spiraled down into a deep depression. He didn’t write another novel for almost 10 years. Sister Carrie is now considered an American classic.

So too is An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s first book to sell well. It was published in 1925, the same year as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Dreiser got the idea for An American Tragedy when he read a newspaper article about a man who had murdered his pregnant girlfriend to keep their relationship a secret. He followed the story of the trial and clipped articles from the paper when they were published. It was critical of the American legal system, and many social reformers praised it highly for that reason. The book became a best-seller, and was included on a Time magazine list of 100 best English-language novels. It was also the last novel Dreiser published in his lifetime. He became too busy with a variety of social causes throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and focused his writing on critiques of communism and capitalism. He also published a memoir of his childhood and teenage years, titled Dawn (1931).

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