Starry Starry Night
by Louis Jenkins

A bazillion stars overhead, and I look up as amazed and
baffled as the first hominid who gazed upward must have
been, stars passing overhead like a very slow-moving flock
of birds, going somewhere, disappearing into the wee
hours of the morning. I used to be able to recognize some
of the constellations: the Pleiades, the Big Dipper…but
I have forgotten most. Still, mankind has learned a lot
about the cosmos since Galileo's time. A friend of mine
said, "My wife bought me a telescope for my birthday, a
nice one, very powerful, I've got it set up on the deck.
You know, when you look at a star with your naked eye
all you see is a little white dot, but when you look at it
through a telescope you see a bigger white dot."

“Starry Starry Night” by Louis Jenkins, from Where Your House Is Now: New and Selected Poems. Nodin Press © 2019. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

On this day in 1862, Henry David Thoreau (books by this author) died of tuberculosis. He was 44. Before he died, his aunt asked him if he was at peace with God, and Thoreau replied, "I was not aware that we had quarreled."

It's the birthday of poet and critic Randall Jarrell (books by this author), born in Nashville, Tennessee (1914). In his critical essays, collected and published as Poetry and the Age (1953), he revitalized the reputations of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. He's also responsible for bringing attention to the poetry of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

During World War II, he worked as a control tower operator, and he wrote about war in his books of poetry, collections Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948). In Losses, he wrote:

6"We read our mail and counted up our missions —
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school —
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, 'Our casualties were low.'"

It was on this day in 1994 that the Channel Tunnel ("Chunnel") opened, connecting Britain and France via an underground tunnel beneath the English Channel. It was the first time Britain had been connected to the European mainland since the last Ice Age, more than 8,000 years ago.

Almost 200 years before the opening of the Chunnel, during a period of peace between France and England, a French mining engineer proposed the idea for a tunnel beneath the English Channel. In 1881 the two nations began digging with rudimentary boring machines. But the British military intervened, concerned that the tunnel would compromise national security if they ever went to war with France. Several solutions were proposed — a valve to quickly flood the tunnel, or a fortress on the British side that could close the tunnel with explosives — but the British military would not budge. The project was once again abandoned, as it was again in 1907, 1924, and 1930 — each time the French were supportive, but it was vetoed by the British. One Cabinet decision ended with these words: "So long as the ocean remains our friend, do not let us deliberately destroy its power to help us." The plan was renewed in the 1960s and seemed almost sure to happen this time, but the British government backed out in 1975, even though all the surveys had been completed and the British even had their tunnel-boring machine ready to go.

Finally, in 1984, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced that she had no interest in the government paying for such a project, but no objection to it if it were privately funded. Finally, the project was on its way, with a contest for the tunnel's design. The winning design consisted of two parallel railway tunnels, with a third smaller tunnel in between to be used for maintenance and as an emergency escape route. There were several places where railroad cars could cross from one tunnel to the other if necessary.

On this day in 1994, it was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth and President François Mitterrand. The 31-mile tunnel cost more than $15 billion to build. It is now possible to journey from London to Paris in less time than three hours.

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

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