Some Woman to Some Man
by Edith Wharton
 

We might have loved each other after all,
Have lived and learned together! Yet I doubt it;
You asked, I think, too great a sacrifice,
Or else, perhaps, I rate myself too dear.
Whichever way the difference lies between us,
Would common cares have helped to lessen it,
A common interest, and a common lot?
Who knows indeed? We choose our path, and then
Stand looking back and sighing at our choice,
And say: “Perhaps the other road had led
To fruitful valleys dozing in the sun.”
Perhaps—perhaps—but all things are perhaps,
And either way there lies a doubt, you know.
We've but one life to live, and fifty ways
To live it in, and little time to choose
The one in fifty that will suit us best,
And so the end is, that we part, and say:
“We might have loved each other after all!”

“Some Woman to Some Man” by Edith Wharton. Public domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of American short-story author Grace Paley (books by this author), born in New York City (1922). She grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx, where she was surrounded by a wide variety of languages. Her own parents spoke Yiddish and Russian at home, and English in public. She loved to hear the different tongues, and especially loved listening to all the gossip, but when she first started writing poetry, she wrote in a formal, stilted British style because she thought that's what poems were supposed to sound like. Then, in college, she met W.H. Auden and he agreed to read her work. She later recalled: "We went through a few poems, and he kept asking me, 'Do you really talk like that?' And I kept saying, 'Oh yeah, well, sometimes.' That was the great thing I learned from Auden: that you'd better talk your own language."

It's the birthday of poet Naguib Mahfouz (books by this author), born in Cairo in 1911. He started writing when he was 17 and wrote more than 50 novels, even though he had to work as a civil servant to support himself until his retirement in 1972. He is most famous for his Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957)and Sugar Street (1957). He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. He said, "If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last."

It's the birthday of novelist Thomas McGuane (books by this author), born in Wyandotte, Michigan (1939). He came from a family of Irish Catholics. He said: "My parents moved to the Midwest, and I can assure you that, whatever we thought we were, we did not consider ourselves to be Midwesterners. [...] When I moved to Montana in my twenties, I felt myself to be an outsider in still another world. The only thing that seems reassuring is that most Montanans feel the same way..."

He went to college at the University of Michigan, where one of his classmates was another aspiring writer named Jim Harrison — the two became lifelong friends and ended up both living in Montana. McGuane spent the summer of 1968 in Livingston, Montana, and he loved it so much that he moved there a year later. His first novel, The Sporting Club, was published in 1969, and when he sold the film rights a year later, he went ahead and bought a ranch with the profits. But it took him awhile to settle down in Montana. He spent most of the '70s in Hollywood — writing screenplays, dating actresses, drinking too much, and doing too many drugs. His screenplays included Rancho Deluxe (1973) and The Missouri Breaks (1976), but he never wanted to be a screenwriter — he said, "Aspiring to be a screenwriter is like aspiring to be a co-pilot."

McGuane spends his days writing, fly fishing, and riding horses. He is a member of the Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame — he was Montana's cutting horse champion for three years in a row.

His latest book is Cloudbursts (2018), a short story collection.

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Jim Harrison (books by this author), born in Grayling, Michigan (1937). When he was 25 years old, he tried to decide whether he should go on a hunting trip with his father and sister, but in the end, he decided not to. They were both killed a few hours later when they were hit by a drunk driver. Harrison said their dying "cut the last cord that was holding me down." He published his first volume of poems, Plain Song (1965), and he thought he wanted to be a poet. He wrote two more books of poems, and then he was out hunting birds with his dog and he fell off a cliff and hurt his back and had to stay in bed for months. His friend Thomas McGuane convinced him to try writing a novel as a way to pass the time. Harrison wrote Wolf: A False Memoir (1971). A few years later he published the novella Legends of the Fall (1979).

Jim Harrison said: "Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know."

Jim Harrison died of a heart attack in 2016.

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

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