Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Public Domain. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of the city of Dublin, founded in 988. The area had been occupied, more or less, since before the Roman invasion of Britain, and it appeared in Ptolemy's Guide to Geography in the year 140, but the first verifiable settlement came with the Vikings in about 831. They called it "Dyflin," which came in turn from the Irish Dubh Linn, which means "black pool." The reason it's considered to be founded in 988 rather than 831 is because that's the year the Irish king Máel Sechnaill reclaimed the city for Ireland. It's also the year he first forced people to pay him taxes, so Dublin has belonged to the Irish ever since, bought and paid for.

Dublin's contribution to literature alone has been remarkable. Ireland was one of the first countries to produce writing in the vernacular, and it's long had a tradition as a nation of scholars. A partial list of writers who are from Dublin, or who adopted it as their home, includes Jonathan Swift, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, Patrick Kavanagh, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, John Millington Synge, and Seamus Heaney.

"When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence." — Brendan Behan

"When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin." — J.P. Donleavy

Today is the birthday of short-story writer Alice Munro (books by this author), born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She’s the author of many collections of short stories, including Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Moons of Jupiter(1982), and Open Secrets (1994). She studied journalism on scholarship at the University of Western Ontario and then struggled to support herself as a writer, but she finally gave up and became a housewife in the 1950s. She had four children, and stayed home to take care of them, but while they were napping, she began to read widely — many of the most important books of the 20th century. And she began to write, though she found it very difficult. She said: “I went through about a year ... when I couldn’t finish a sentence. It was a time of terrible depression, about what I could do measured against what I wanted to do.” Then, in 1959, her mother died, and Munro suddenly found that she was able to explore her personal life in her fiction in ways she’d never been able to do before. Nine years later she published her first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968).

Munro often writes about ordinary people in small-town Ontario, where she grew up. She said, “People’s lives, in [my home town] as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable — deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for her work as “master of the contemporary short story” and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize recognizing her lifetime body of work.

It’s the birthday of French novelist Marcel Proust (books by this author), born in Auteuil (1871). He published a collection of short stories called Pleasures and Days in 1896, and then worked for four years on an autobiographical novel that he never published. When his parents both died within a few years of each other, Proust inherited enough money to live securely while he began the work for which he is remembered: his seven-volume work, Remembrance of Things Past, whose title is also sometimes translated as In Search of Lost Time (1913–27).

The most famous scene in the book occurs early on, when the narrator dips a bit of a madeleine in some tea and experiences a profound sense-memory of his childhood. That really happened to Proust, although in his case it was a humble rusk — a dry biscuit — that triggered a childhood memory.

It’s the birthday of British writer Edmund Clerihew Bentley (books by this author), born in London, England (1875). He first achieved fame for his 1913 mystery novel, Trent’s Last Case, which he wrote as a reaction against the prevailing conventions of detective fiction. Unlike the infallible Sherlock Holmes, Bentley’s detective, Philip Trent, bungles his cases and comes up with ingenious solutions that turn out to be completely wrong. Bentley also became known as the inventor of a new form of verse, the “clerihew,” which he introduced in his 1905 book, Biography for Beginners. A clerihew is made up of two rhyming couplets, the first rhyme provided by the name of a famous person. For example:

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

And it’s the birthday of John Calvin (books by this author), born in Noyon, Picardy, France (1509). He experienced a religious epiphany sometime between 1528 and 1533, in his early 20s, when, he said, “God subdued my soul to docility by a sudden conversion.” Calvin embraced Protestantism at a time when that was a dangerous thing to do; in 1534, two dozen Protestants were burned at as heretics in France. He took up a nomadic lifestyle for the next several years, traveling throughout France, Italy, and Switzerland, finally settling in Geneva.

In 1536, Calvin published Institutes of the Christian Religion; it was intended for a general readership and laid out the foundations which came to be known as Calvinism, or five principles that spell out the word TULIP:

Total depravity: all people are born sinful.
Unconditional election: God has already chosen those people who will be saved.
Limited atonement: Jesus died to atone for the sins of the elect only.
Irresistible grace: If you are among the elect, you will inevitably repent and become Christian.
Perseverance of the saints: You can never lose your salvation.

Word got around, and he made a name for himself among religious reformers; when he passed through Geneva, the pastor of the city prevailed on him to stay around awhile and help with the new church. William Farel, the pastor, wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, and even swore a curse on Calvin if he refused. Calvin stayed for a year and a half, and although Geneva was ripe for religious reform, there was still conflict between Calvin, who wanted to install a theocracy, and those who wanted less drastic reform. Calvin was driven out of the city and went to Strasbourg. He returned three years later, and he spent the rest of his life in Geneva. He wasn’t popular with everyone — some people set their dogs on him, or sent him death threats, or disrupted his sermons — but he persisted in spite of failing health, saying, “What! Would you have the Lord find me idle when He comes?”