He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats. Public Domain.  (buy now)

It was on this day in 1789 that the United States held its first presidential election. The turnout was very small. Only white men with property could vote, and of the 3 million people in America, 600,000 were slaves, and many more were women or men who did not own property; in the end, fewer than 39,000 people voted, or 1.3 percent of the population. They elected George Washington unanimously, and he was inaugurated at the end of April.

On this date in 1610, Galileo wrote a letter describing his discovery of three of Jupiter’s moons. He discovered them in December, after improving his telescope design. He wasn’t sure at first they were moons; he thought they were fixed stars. He soon realized that they were actually orbiting the giant planet. Since most people at that time still believed in the Ptolemaic theory that the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around us, it was an important discovery. It went a long way toward confirming Copernicus’s controversial theory that the Earth went around the sun and not the other way around, something that Galileo believed as well.

A rival astronomer, Simon Marius, discovered the moons at about the same time, and he named them after four of Zeus’s mythological lovers. Marius’s names stuck, and today we know the moons as Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

It’s possible that neither Galileo nor Marius was the first astronomer to discover that Jupiter had moons. In 362 B.C.E., a Chinese astronomer named Gan De observed a small, reddish “star” near Jupiter, and that may have been Ganymede.

It’s the birthday of the man most responsible for reviving Hebrew as a spoken language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda born in Luzhki, part of the Russian Empire (1858). He wanted to make sure that Jewish people from around the world could communicate with each other. Though children from Jewish families often learned some Hebrew at Hebrew school, at the time no one on earth spoke modern Hebrew at home as a first language. Many European Jews spoke Russian or Yiddish, a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet.

Ben-Yehuda felt that reviving the Hebrew language was firmly intertwined with the creation of a Jewish homeland, which did not yet exist. He raised his child to be the first native speaker of modern Hebrew, and he’s the author of the first modern Hebrew dictionary. Today, modern Hebrew is spoken by more than 9 million people in Israel and elsewhere. It’s one of Israel’s two official languages. The other is Arabic.

It’s the birthday of American writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891) (books by this author), best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which is a staple of high school and college curriculums.

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and raised in Eatonville, Florida. Eatonville was established in 1887 and was the nation’s first incorporated African-American township. Hurston loved Eatonville, calling it, “A city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty of guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.” Many of Hurston’s stories and novels take place in Eatonville.

She got a scholarship to Barnard College, where she was the sole black student. She wrote a lot of stories, and graduated with a degree in anthropology, and when she finally landed in Harlem with $1.50 in her pocket and no job, she found herself smack in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, and made friends with writers like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

Hurston wrote her best-known work Their Eyes Were Watching God in three weeks while on a fellowship in Haiti. She wrote an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), but she never made much money; the largest royalty Hurston ever received was $943.75. Her books include Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti (1938), and Moses: Man of the Mountain (1939).

In 2018 Barracoon:The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was widely released to national acclaim. Based on her 1927 and 1931 interviews with 86 year old Cudjo Lewis, the last known living slave taken from Africa.

Zora Neale Hurston died in Florida in 1960, penniless. Her neighbors had to take up a collection for her funeral, but they didn’t have enough money for a headstone. Her papers were ordered to be burned, but a friend saved them and gave them to the University of Florida.

Zora Neale Hurston said, “I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”

It’s the birthday of novelist and nonfiction author Nicholson Baker (1957) (books by this author), born in New York City.

Baker is the author of many novels Vox (1992), The Fermata (1994), and House of Holes (2011), a memoir about his admiration for John Updike, U and I (1991), and Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids (2016), is a daily account of modern life in American public schools.

Nicholson Bakers said: “Most writers are secretly worried that they’re not really writers. That it’s all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won’t coalesce ever again.”

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

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