One Blessing had I than the rest (756)
by Emily Dickinson

One Blessing had I than the rest
So larger to my Eyes
That I stopped gauging — satisfied —
For this enchanted size —

It was the limit of my Dream —
The focus of my Prayer —
A perfect — paralyzing Bliss —
Contented as Despair —

I knew no more of Want — or Cold —
Phantasms both become
For this new Value in the Soul —
Supremest Earthly Sum —

The Heaven below the Heaven above —
Obscured with ruddier Blue —
Life's Latitudes leant over — full —
The Judgment perished — too —

Why Bliss so scantily disburse —
Why Paradise defer —
Why Floods be served to Us — in Bowls —
I speculate no more —
 

One Blessing had I than the rest (756) by Emily Dickinson. Public domain.

Today is the birthday of Rolihlahla "Nelson" Mandela (books by this author), born in Mvezo, South Africa (1918). He was the first member of his family to attend school, and that's where his British teachers gave him a new name: Nelson. Since childhood, Mandela had heard stories of his ancestors' courage. When he was 16 and participating in a ritual circumcision ceremony, the speaker lamented the life of oppression Mandela and the other boys would face under the rule of white South Africans. Mandela didn't understand everything that was said, but he later said that the experience formed his resolve to work for an end to apartheid.

He spent 27 years in prison, but refused to carry a grudge against his captors. He later said of his release from prison, "As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison."

He also said: "A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special."

It's the birthday of Jessamyn West (books by this author), born in Jennings County, Indiana (1902). Her parents moved to Orange County, California, when she was young, and there she grew up on her father's lemon grove in Yorba Linda.

Her first book was a collection of short stories, The Friendly Persuasion (1945), published when she was 43 years old. The tales centered on the lives of rural Quakers Jess and Elia Birdwell, and the collection received high and wide praise.

She was a cousin of future president Richard Nixon and babysat him while he was growing up.

Her other works include the novels The Witch Diggers (1951), South of the Angels (1960), The Massacre at Fall Creek (1975), The Life I Really Loved (1979), and The State of Stony Lonesome (1984).

The Great Fire of Rome began in the late evening hours on this date 1,950 years ago (64 A.D.). The fire raged for six days, during which time Emperor Nero either acted heroically to contain the fire and provide for his people, or played his lyre and watched the city burn — depending on whose version you believe. There are no surviving primary accounts of the fire, so we have to base everything we know on hearsay.

Most modern scholars tend to believe the account of Tacitus, a historian writing in the year 116. In Tacitus' version, the fire began in a dry goods store near the Circus Maximus. Since it was very windy and dry that night, the fire spread quickly through the closely built wooden apartment buildings. Tacitus also reported that looters encouraged the fire, but whether they were acting under orders from Nero or just taking advantage of the situation, he couldn't say with certainty. Far from setting the fire, Nero rushed back to Rome from his palace in Antium to rescue treasures from his mansion in the city. He opened his private gardens so evacuees would have a place to escape the flames, ordered the construction of temporary shelters, and brought in food from neighboring regions.

But people still wanted someone to blame, and Nero was, at the end of the day, still a politician. He pointed the finger at a relatively obscure but troublesome religious sect known as Christians and publicly tortured them to death in Rome's only surviving amphitheater.

Today is the birthday of Hunter S. Thompson (books by this author), born in Louisville, Kentucky (1937). When he was in high school, his father died of myasthenia gravis, leaving the family impoverished. Thompson’s mother had to take a job as a librarian to support the family, and she turned to the bottle to cope with the loss of her husband. Thompson rebelled and embarked on a brief criminal career during his senior year. He spent a month in jail as accessory to a robbery. As soon as he was released, he got into trouble again. This time, the judge gave him a choice between prison and the military, so he joined the Air Force. He began writing articles for the base’s newspaper, and when he was discharged, he took any newspaper jobs he could get.

His break came in 1964, when The Nation hired him to write about a dangerous new motorcycle gang known as the Hell’s Angels. The short investigative piece he wrote turned into a book deal, and he used his advance to buy a motorcycle. He rode around the country, and wrote about the bikers he met and the adventures he had. Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs was the end result; it was published in 1967, and it became a best-seller.

Thompson was a pioneer of a journalistic style that came to be known as “gonzo journalism.” The journalist becomes part of the story he’s researching, and the story is told through his eyes. There’s usually profanity, sarcasm, and exaggeration so that the line between journalism and fiction becomes blurred — mostly for the protection of the journalist and his subjects. As Thompson told Rolling Stone, “Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” The style was born, Thompson said, when he was up against a deadline for a piece about the Kentucky Derby. He ended up writing a rambling account of watching the race. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” appeared in Scanlan’s Monthly in June 1970. People loved it, and Thompson started getting bags of fan mail.

His most famous book started as an assignment for Sports Illustrated. That book is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream(1971). “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” the book begins. He published Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973), a collection of his Rolling Stone articles about the 1972 presidential election. He considered Richard Nixon his nemesis, and after Nixon’s death, he wrote an obituary of sorts, titled “He Was a Crook,” for Rolling Stone.

Thompson eventually ended up in Aspen, Colorado, where he took great delight in playing pranks on his neighbors. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2005, after a period of illness. Per his request, his ashes were shot from a cannon while Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” played.

It’s the birthday of author Elizabeth Gilbert (books by this author) (1969), whose memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006), a combination of travelogue, mysticism, self-help, and self-improvement, has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.

Her latest novel, City of Girls, came out just this past June.

Intel was founded on this date in 1968, chiefly by Gordon E. Moore and Robert Noyce. The company was originally going to be named Moore Noyce, but since that sounded too much like “more noise” — something that electronics manufacturers try to avoid — they called themselves NM Electronics, and then settled on Integrated Electronics, or Intel.