As I Walked Out One Evening
by W.H. Auden
 

As I walked out one evening,
  Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
  Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
  I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
  'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
  For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
  And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
  Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
  You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
  Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
  And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
  To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
  Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
  And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
  Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
  And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
  The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
  A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
  And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
  And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
  O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
  Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
  As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
  With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
  The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
  And the deep river ran on.

"As I Walked Out One Evening" by W.H. Auden, from Collected Poems. © The Modern Library — Random House, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It's the birthday of Carson McCullers (books by this author), born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia (1917). At the age of 17, she moved to New York City. She was an accomplished classical pianist, and she planned to study at Juilliard, but she somehow lost her tuition money — she told contradictory stories, sometimes that she forgot it on the subway, other times that an acquaintance had taken it. In any case, her dreams of a career in music never materialized. She started writing and publishing short stories. She got married, moved to North Carolina, and worked on a novel, which was published when she was just 23 years old: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). It was a best-seller and she became a literary celebrity.

But her health and marriage were deteriorating. She had had various health problems since she was a child, and she and her husband drank constantly and fought often. Beginning when she was 24, she had a series of strokes — the first one left her partially paralyzed — and over the years she had serious bouts of strep throat and the flu, lung problems, a nervous breakdown, and breast cancer. She and her husband got divorced, then remarried; but in 1953, her husband asked her to take part in a double suicide with him, and she refused but he killed himself anyway.

Through it all, she kept writing short stories, plays, and novels. Her books include Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).

It's the birthday of Amy Tan (books by this author), born to Chinese immigrant parents in Oakland, California (1952). Her mother hoped she would become a concert pianist or a doctor, but instead she became a writer. She began her career by writing business manuals and speeches for executives, and she felt pressured to write under an American-sounding pseudonym, so she chose May Brown — she rearranged Amy to get May, and Brown is a synonym of Tan.

But she had turned into a workaholic, and she realized that she needed a creative balance in her life, so she started jazz piano and also writing fiction. Quickly she got an advance to pen a book of short stories, which Tan wrote in about four months. Those stories worked together like a novel, and the book was published as The Joy Luck Club (1989). She's gone on to write more best-sellers such as The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001) and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005).

On this day in 1963, journalist Betty Friedan (books by this author) published her first book, The Feminine Mystique, which begins: "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'" That question would end up sparking a second wave of feminism in the United States, would permanently transform the American social fabric, and the book would come to be seen as a pioneering moment in American history and one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.

It's the birthday of novelist Jonathan Lethem (books by this author), born in New York City (1964). His novel The Fortress of Solitude begins: "Like a match struck in a darkened room: Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July."

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

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