Directions
by Connie Wanek

First you'll come to the end of the freeway.
Then it's not so much north on Woodland Avenue
as it is a feeling that the pines are taller and weigh more,
and the road, you'll notice,
is older with faded lines and unmown shoulders.
You'll see a cemetery on your right
and another later on your left.
Sobered, drive on.
                             Drive on for miles
if the fields are full of hawkweed and daisies.
Sometimes a spotted horse
will gallop along the fence. Sometimes you'll see
a hawk circling, sometimes a vulture.
You'll cross the river many times
over smaller and smaller bridges.
You'll know when you're close;
people always say they have a sudden sensation
that the horizon, which was always far ahead,
is now directly behind them.
At this point you may want to park
and proceed on foot, or even
on your knees.

Connie Wanek, “Directions” from On Speaking Terms. Copyright © 2010 by Connie Wanek. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of American poet, essayist, and translator W.S. Merwin (books by this author) (1927), best known for his spare poems about nature and the meaning of life. He once said, “I think a poem begins out of what you don’t know, and you begin not by having a good idea but by hearing something in the language.”

When he was a junior at Princeton University, he decided he would be nothing but a poet for the rest of his life, and would never get a job that didn’t have something to do with poetry. So when he graduated, he went to Europe, where he worked as a babysitter for writer Robert Graves in Majorca and wrote poems feverishly in his spare time. He said, “I wanted to be in the world, to meet people and go places and try to write, and learn from languages.” When he was 24, his first book, A Mask for Janus (1952), won the Yale Younger Poets Award, a major prize that launched his career.

During the 1960s, he was an ardent anti-war activist, and when he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders (1970), he refused the award, lambasting the Vietnam War in an open letter to the New York Review of Books. He wrote that he felt “too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace. Or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.” He asked that that the money go instead to a painter who was blinded by police in California while watching a protest.

W.S. Merwin’s books include The Lice (1967), Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973), The Compass Flower (1977), Finding the Islands (1982), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988).

In 1976, he moved to Hawaii and bought 20 acres of land by a dormant volcano. The land had previously been an ill-run pineapple plantation and Merwin and his wife set about turning it into a palm forest, hacking down dead growth with machetes and planting palms one by one. There are now more than 700 species of trees and plants, along with geckos and mynah birds.

When asked how he knows a poem is done, he answered, “When a poem is really finished, you can’t change anything. You can’t move words around. You can’t say, ‘In other words, you mean.’ No, that’s not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.”

Merwin died in 2019.

On this day in 1452, the first section of the Gutenberg Bible was finished in Mainz, Germany, by the printer Johannes Gutenberg.

It is unclear when Gutenberg conceived of his Bible project, though he was clearly in production by 1452. He probably produced about 180 copies — 145 that were printed on handmade paper imported from Italy and the remainder on more luxurious and expensive vellum.

Only four dozen Gutenberg Bibles remain, and of these only 21 are complete, but what Gutenberg created went far beyond the reach of those volumes. By beginning the European printing revolution, he forever changed how knowledge was spread, democratized learning, and allowed for thoughts and ideas to be widely disseminated throughout the known world. In his time, Gutenberg’s contemporaries called this “the art of multiplying books” and it was a major catalyst for the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and even the Protestant Reformation in the Western world. In 1997, Time Magazine named Johannes Gutenberg “Man of the Millennium” and dubbed his movable type as the most important invention of a thousand years (notwithstanding China's much earlier version of the same invention in the 11th century).

As Mark Twain wrote in 1900, in a congratulatory letter to mark the opening of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, “What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg."

It’s the birthday of American writer Truman Capote (books by this author), born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans, Louisiana (1924). Capote is best known for his tart novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and the nonfiction book In Cold Blood (1966), which is largely responsible for inventing the genre of true crime writing.

It’s the birthday of writer and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel (books by this author), born in a small village in Transylvania (1928). He grew up in a Hasidic community and learned to love reading by studying the Pentateuch and other sacred texts. When he was 15, he and his family were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother, sister, and father were all killed before World War II was over.

Wiesel survived the camp, but he couldn’t write about his experiences for 10 years. Finally, a mentor, François Mauriac, persuaded Wiesel to write about the war. He wrote a 900-page memoir, which he condensed into the 127-page book called Night (1955). Night has become one of the most widely read books about the Holocaust. In 1986, Wiesel received the Nobel Prize in literature for his writing and teaching.

A passage from Night: “Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing. And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

"For God's sake, where is God?"

And from within me, I heard a voice answer:

"Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows..."

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

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