MONDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER, 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Broken Fishing Lines," by Robert Bly, used with permission of the poet.

Broken Fishing Lines

Sometimes I slip away on an October day,
Get in my car, and all that I haven't done—
Letters, poems, praises—fall away and I
Drive north, passing abandoned cabins,
And admiring the shadows thrown by bare trees
In small towns where cold waves lap the sand.

The renegade minister—the one they all gossip
About—would see those waves too, after throwing
His Sunday hat out the window. He'll be
All right. Death hugs the underside of oak leaves.
In each cove you pass you will see
What you had to say no to once.

Go ahead, pull off at some empty resort;
Walk among abandoned cabins on the shore.
You'll see the little holes that raindrops leave in fine sand,
And those old fishing lines driven up on the rocks.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of the Spanish author of Don Quixote (1605), Miguel Cervantes, born near Madrid (1547). He grew up in one of Spain's oldest families, and one of its poorest. When he was 24, he joined the Spanish Armada and fought at the Battle of Lepanto. He wounded his left hand in the battle, and he never regained its full use again. On the way back from the battle, he was captured and enslaved by pirates. Eventually he returned home, only to be put into jail there for fraud. While he was in prison he began his most famous work, Don Quixote. It's a story about a man who reads too many books about chivalry, goes mad, and tries to restore old-fashioned heroism to the world. In one episode, he mistakes a group of windmills for monsters and attacks them. Don Quixote is considered to be the first modern novel. It was written as a satire of the popular literature of its time. Don Quixote's foolishness mocks the chivalric romances that celebrated the values of the medieval world. Cervantes was successful in degrading this genre: very few medieval romances were ever published after Don Quixote.

It's the birthday of Gene Autry, one of the greatest country-western singers, born in Tioga, Texas (1907). He worked as a telegraph operator and played his guitar when the lines weren't busy. One day, a caller overheard him and said that he thought Autry could be a professional. The caller was Will Rogers, the famous "cowboy philosopher." Autry recorded 635 songs and acted in nearly 95 movies. He was the first person to sell out Madison Square Garden. In 1941, the town of Berwyn, Oklahoma, where Autry had a ranch, officially changed its name to "Gene Autry." When Autry retired, he was still very famous and very wealthy, and he purchased the California Angels baseball team.

It's the birthday of the author of the Inspector Morse mysteries, Colin Dexter, born in Lincolnshire, England (1930). He attended Cambridge University, where he earned his Master's Degree in Classical Studies. On a rainy vacation in 1972, Dexter read two mystery novels. He decided he could do better, and three years later he published Last Bus to Woodstock (1975), his first Inspector Morse novel. Inspector Morse is educated and charming, but he's often morose, and he has a weakness for beer and women. Morse is the main character in each of Dexter's fifteen novels, as well as his popular television series. Colin Dexter said, "Well I think that you've got to be prepared to write a load of nonsense to start with and then you can tart it up. The business of getting going, getting started, is enormously important, and this can be physical. Solvitur Ambulando as the Romans used to say, which means 'the solution comes through walking.'"

It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer William Beckford, born near Bath, England (1760). He's best known as the author of the story The History of the Caliph Vathek His father was the Lord Mayor of London and the descendant of royalty. William was orphaned at the age of eleven, but he was left an allowance of nearly 160,000 pounds a year. He became one of the wealthiest people in all England. After he had finished his education, Beckford traveled across Europe. When he returned, he decided to renovate the family mansion at Fonthill. But he wasn't happy with the work and ordered that the house be completely rebuilt, this time into a huge abbey. The project cost 273,000 pounds. Beckford built a tower 280 feet tall on the house. It collapsed and was rebuilt at least two times. William Hazlitt called Fonthill Abbey "a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness." When Beckford was 21 he wrote the story known as Vathek. He wrote it in French, and claimed to have finished it in three nights and two days. It's a tale about a young ruler corrupted by power and wealth who falls under the control of Elbis, the devil. Beckford eventually sold his Abbey for 330,000 pounds, having squandered most of his father's fortune. He retired into obscurity and died in 1844. He was buried, at his request, under the shadow of his great tower, next to his favorite dog.

---

TUESDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER, 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Berryman," by W.S. Merwin, from Flower & Hand (Copper Canyon Press).

Berryman

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of poet W.S. Merwin, born in New York City (1927). His father was a Presbyterian minister, and Merwin made up hymns before he could even write. Merwin is a pacifist, environmentalist, and Buddhist. When he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of the Ladder in 1971, he gave his $1,000 award to an anti-war demonstration. He currently lives in Hawaii, in a house built on an old pineapple farm where he preserves many native plants. Merwin's recent poetry reflects his passion for conservation, especially in the books The Vixen (1996), The River Sound (1999), and The Pupil (2001). W.S. Merwin said, "The world is still here, and there are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don't pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness."

It's the anniversary of the first edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women in 1868. The success of the book made Alcott famous as a children's author. But her real passion was for dark and sensational stories with brilliant, diabolical woman protagonists. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a famous educator and friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He pressured his daughter to write a children's book. She responded by saying, "[I] never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it." Little Women was so popular that she wrote two sequels, Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

It's the birthday of mystery writer Michael Innes, born John Innes Mackintosh Stewart near Edinburgh (1906). He went to school at Oxford University, where he became close friends with the writers Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. In 1936 he sailed to Australia to start his first teaching job at Adelaide University. On the boat to Australia he began writing a mystery to pass the time. He published the book, Death at the President's Lodge (1936), later that year. Innes's mysteries are known for their complex plots and scholarly allusions, and for his entire life, he was able to excel both as a scholar and a mystery writer.

It's the birthday of American writer Truman Capote, born in New Orleans (1924). Even as a child, Capote wanted to become famous. He moved with his mother to New York City and applied to the prestigious Trinity School. He was given an IQ test as an entrance exam, and he scored 215, the highest in the school's history. Capote said, "I was having 50 perceptions a minute to everyone else's five. I always felt nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing." One day he read a news release about the murder of a family in western Kansas, and he decided to write about it. He moved to Holcomb, Kansas with his friend Harper Lee, and became attached to the community as it recovered from the crime. Capote compiled over 6,000 pages of notes on the crime, 80% of which he threw away. Eventually, he wrote his most famous work, In Cold Blood (1966), about the murders. He got to know the two murderers well and worked for many years to have their death sentences reduced. When the two men were hanged, Capote became physically ill. In Cold Blood introduced a new genre, the "non-fiction novel." Capote received nearly two million dollars for text and movie rights.

Capote craved fame and spent much of his life socializing. He was an unassuming figure—small and with a high lisping voice. But he was a lively storyteller, and an expert charmer. George Plimpton said, "He knew he had to sing for his supper but, my God, what a song it was!"

---

WEDNESDAY, 1 OCTOBER, 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Eating Together," by Li-Young Lee, from Rose (BOA Editions).

Eating Together

In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of aviation pioneer William E. Boeing, born in Detroit, Michigan (1881). He went to Harvard, but left early to go into the timber industry. He became interested in flying, took lessons, and bought a small plane. On his first solo flight from Los Angeles to Seattle, he misjudged his landing and damaged his plane. When he learned that replacement parts would take weeks to ship, he decided to make his own, and that was the start of the company that became Boeing Aviation.

It's the birthday of historian and author Daniel J. Boorstin, born in Atlanta, Georgia (1914). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for Empire of Czar. His other books include The Discoverers (1983), a study of great explorers in history, and The Creators (1992), which chronicles the achievements of great artists.

It's the birthday of classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz, born in Ukraine (1904). When he was eight years old, he began studying music at the Kiev Conservatory. He got his big break in 1926 when he played Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with only a half-hour's notice. He got a standing ovation and became an overnight success. When he had already established a secure reputation, the only major composer who had not opened up to him was Arturo Toscanini. After they met, Horowitz eventually won over Toscanini with his charm, and later married Toscanini's daughter. In 1986, he returned to his native Russia to give a series of concerts. It was his first return visit in sixty years.

It's the birthday of actor Walter Matthau, born in New York City (1920). He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Fortune Cookie (1966), and this was also the movie in which he starred with Jack Lemmon for the first time. When Matthau died three years ago, many newspapers reported in his obituary that his real surname was Matuschanskayasky. But this was just a false name that Matthau made up during an interview.

It's the birthday of the actress who played Maria in The Sound of Music (1965), Julie Andrews, born Julie Elizabeth Wells in Surrey, England (1935). She showed much talent even at a young age, and her father encouraged her. He taught her to read and write when she was three years old. When she was eight she began acting in theaters, and when she was thirteen she sang for the queen. Later, she became the youngest professional actress to play the lead role in My Fair Lady.

It's the birthday of author Tim O'Brien, born in Worthington, Minnesota. He graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, and went to Harvard for graduate school. He was drafted to go to the Vietnam War, and he went, even though he was opposed to it. Before he went off to Vietnam, he was spending the day in northern Minnesota and had the chance to cross the border into Canada, but he decided not to. He said later, "I did not want people to think badly of me. My conscience told me to run, but I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing." When he returned from Vietnam, he worked as an intern at The Washington Post. He left journalism after the publication of his book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). Almost all of his books deal with the Vietnam War. In the Lake of the Woods (1994), tells the story of John Wade, a would-be senator who suffers a defeat in the primary because it's revealed that he covered up his involvement in the My Lai massacre. After his defeat, his wife disappears, and Wade begins to think that he might have killed her and just not remembered. O'Brien also wrote The Things They Carried (1990), Going After Cacciato (1978), and July, July (2002). Tim O'Brien said, "Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember but the story."

---

THURSDAY, 2 OCTOBER, 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children," by John Updike, from Americana and Other Poems (Knopf).

Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children

They will not be the same next time. The sayings
so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.
Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in
the more securely to the worldly buzz
of television, alphabet, and street talk,
culture polluting their gazes' dawn blue.
It makes you see at last the value of
those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells
of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces
like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)
who knew you from the start, when you were zero,
cooing their nothings before you could be bored
or knew a name, not even you own, or how
this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of comedian Groucho Marx, born in New York City (1890). In 1908 he began acting with his brothers Harpo and Chico, and they became famous as the Marx Brothers. He was known as the most talkative Marx brother, and he's famous for his snappy insults. He said, "Marriage is a wonderful institution. That is, if you like living in an institution." And, "I have nothing but confidence in you, and very little of that."

It's the birthday of poet Wallace Stevens, born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). His father was a lawyer with a strong interest in literature. Wallace went to Harvard and then got a law degree from New York University. His first book of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923. Although he wrote highly imaginative poems, he led a simple, uneventful life as an executive at a Hartford, Connecticut insurance company. Stevens kept his life as a poet separate from his life as an executive. He would wake up at six o'clock to read for two hours before going to work, and he wrote many of his poems while walking home from the office in the evening. He wrote some of his best poetry after he reached the age of sixty, including the collections Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1947), and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950).

One time he was at a party in Florida, and he made a disparaging comment about Ernest Hemingway to a friend. Hemingway's sister overheard the comment, left the party in tears, and immediately told her brother. Hemingway got to the party just as Stevens was saying that if Hemingway were there, he would flatten him in a single blow. Stevens then saw Hemingway and tried to do exactly that, but his punch missed. Hemingway knocked Stevens down several times, and when Stevens finally landed a punch, he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw. The two literary greats later reconciled because Stevens did not want the story to get back to his coworkers at the insurance company.

Wallace Stevens said, "To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds."

It's the birthday of writer Graham Greene, born in Hertfordshire, England (1904). He was the son a school headmaster, and was a very shy child who often tried to run away from home. After several suicide attempts in his teens, his therapist encouraged him to start writing and introduced him to several of his literary friends. Greene got a job as a journalist for the Times in London. He met his future wife when she wrote in to correct a mistake in one of his articles. He worked for the secret intelligence service in Sierra Leone during World War II, and drew on his experience to write his book The Heart of the Matter (1948). He traveled extensively all over the world and associated with people such as Fidel Castro, Manuel Noriega, and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos. His relationship with Torrijos led him to write Getting to Know the General (1948). Greene spent a good part of his life in Vietnam, and that experience gave him the material for one of his most well known books, The Quiet American (1955), which tells the story of an American, Fowler, who has an affair with a Vietnamese girl. When professor Norman Sherry started writing Greene's biography, Greene gave him a map of the world, and marked all of the places he had traveled. Sherry decided to go to all of the spots Greene had visited, and it took him twenty years to complete the book. Greene limited himself to writing just five hundred words per day, and would even stop writing in the middle of a sentence, but he ended up publishing over thirty books.

---

FRIDAY, 3 OCTOBER, 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Only Years," by Kenneth Rexroth, from Sacramental Arts (Copper Canyon Press).

Only Years

I come back to the cottage in
Santa Monica Canyon where
Andrée and I were poor and
Happy together. Sometimes we
Were hungry and stole vegetables
From the neighbors' gardens.
Sometimes we went out and gathered
Cigarette butts by flashlight.
But we went swimming every day,
All year round. We had a dog
Called Proclus, a vast yellow
Mongrel, and a white cat named
Cyprian. We had our first
Joint art show, and they began
To publish my poems in Paris.
We worked under the low umbrella
Of the acacia in the dooryard.
Now I get out of the car
And stand before the house in the dusk.
The acacia blossoms powder the walk
With little pills of gold wool.
The odor is drowsy and thick
In the early evening.
The tree has grown twice as high
As the roof. Inside, an old man
And woman sit in the lamplight.
I go back and drive away
To Malibu Beach and sit
With a grey-haired childhood friend and
Watch the full moon rise over the
Long rollers wrinkling the dark bay.

Literary Notes:

Today is the anniversary of the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany. The two countries had been divided since the end of World War II. The most visible sign of this division was the Berlin Wall that divided the former capital for twenty-eight years.

It's the birthday of English veterinarian and author James Herriot, born James Alfred Wight in Sunderland, England (1916). Growing up, he never wanted to be anything other than a veterinarian. After going to school in Glasgow he dreamed of having a cutting-edge and flashy practice. He instead wound up, in his own words, "sitting on a high Yorkshire moor in shirt sleeves and Wellingtons, smelling vaguely of cows." But he fell in love with Yorkshire and the challenging life of a country veterinarian. After over twenty-five years as a veterinarian, Herriot started writing. He said he wanted to tell people what it was like to be an animal doctor before penicillin and modern medicine, and also about all of the people and funny events that he met on his daily rounds. It took him a long time to decide to finally write down his stories. In the end, his wife challenged him. He was telling her about his day, and said that he would put part of it in his book. She said to him, "Jim, you are never going to write a book." She reminded him that he had been talking about it for twenty-five years and had never written anything. He protested. She replied that old vets don't just suddenly write books. Herriot said, "That did it. I went straight out, bought a lot of paper and got down to the job." His first book was If Only They Could Talk (1970). It took him four years to get it published. The publishers only made 1200 copies, and it was not a success. He thought that this would be his only book. But he still had more stories to tell, and so he wrote another book, It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet (1972). He suddenly became successful when these two works were published together in the United States as All Creatures Great and Small (1972). The book became a bestseller, and Herriot became a famous author.

It's the birthday of etiquette expert Emily Post, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1873). She started her writing career for financial reasons. Her husband had lost his fortune in a great stock panic. After this, he and Post divorced, and she had to raise her two daughters by herself. At first she was a novelist, but after fifteen years, her publisher convinced her to write an etiquette manual. She refused, because she thought that she knew nothing about etiquette and because she hated etiquette books. Then she read one of the books that had been published, and thought that it was completely wrong. So she wrote her own. Post's first etiquette manual was published in 1922. It was titled Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. She continued to write manuals for "high society" until 1960. In addition to her books, Post wrote a syndicated newspaper column that was carried by over two hundred newspapers. She said, "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."

It's the birthday of Thomas Wolfe, born in Asheville, North Carolina (1900). He wrote autobiographical novels, including Look Homeward Angel (1929). In that book he fictionalized his hometown and the people he knew in it. He cast himself as Eugene Gant, a kid who grew up reading history and adventure books. Wolfe spent many years trying to become a playwright. But he was convinced to become a novelist by Aline Bernstein, a married woman twenty years older than Wolfe with whom he had a five-year love affair. He dedicated Look Homeward, Angel to her, and made her the model for several characters in his novels. Many of Wolfe's writings were published after his death at a young age from meningitis. Before leaving on his last trip, he left an eight-foot-tall crate of notebooks and writing with his editor. This included outlines for his next two novels. After his sudden death, the editor went through the writings and created two novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940).

It's the birthday of American novelist Gore Vidal, born Eugene Luther Vidal, in West Point, New York (1925). He's the author of many novels, including Washington, D.C. (1967) and Duluth: A Novel (1983). His essays are collected as United States: Essays, 1952-1992 (1992). Vidal said, "Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn."

---

SATURDAY, 4 OCTOBER, 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Vietnam Scrapbook," by Jeffrey Harrison, from Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books).

Vietnam Scrapbook

Midway through fourth grade, early 1968,
Mrs. Hackemeyer said it was time
we learned about the war in Vietnam,
where, she said, "American boys
are giving their lives to fight communism."
We were American boys, or half of us were,
and we already knew communism was bad,
how it spread like a rash across the map
that pulled down like an illustrated window shade.

The paper maps that Mrs. Hackemeyer passed out
were scented with her perfume and showed a country
shaped vaguely like a sea horse, its slender waist
adorned with a slim, candy-striped belt
we labeled DMZ. We added stars and dots
and printed in Saigon, Hanoi, Khe Sanh,
the Gulf of Tonkin, the Mekong River, Hue—
names so strange they seemed to come
from an Asian version of The Hobbit,

which the librarian was reading aloud to us
in daily installments. Ho Chi Minh
might have been the leader of the evil goblins.
It was another world with its own vocabulary words—
"Charlie," chopper, napalm, punji—
words we lobbed like make-believe hand grenades
during recess, among our screams
of phony agony, our diving death-sprawls.
POWs were thrown into the Jungle Gym.

But they all escaped as soon as the bell rang,
the dead sprang up and ran inside
where Mrs. Hackemeyer tried to teach us
"the horror of war." Horror meant Godzilla,
and Viet Cong, reminded us of King Kong.
Horror made you munch your popcorn faster.
Even after we started pasting photographs
from Time and Life into our notebooks—a task
that lasted weeks—it never broke through.

We clipped the jungle's blooming fireballs
with safety scissors, smeared minty paste
on the screaming napalm victim's back,
pressed the blood- and mud-spattered soldiers
into clean white pages, a little ink
smudging off on our soft, sticky fingertips,
as Mrs. Hackemeyer leaned over us
in her thick, invisible cloud of perfume,
smoke from bombed cities rising up in black plumes.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of sculptor, artist, and adventure writer Frederic Remington, born in Canton, New York (1861). Remington is famous for his realistic and exciting paintings and bronze sculptures of the American West. He first became fascinated by the West after he left home as a young man. Like many young men, he headed out West to find an exciting career and a new life, but he soon lost all of his money to a con-man. He suddenly had to earn a living, and tried out lots of different jobs. He was a storekeeper, a shepherd, a cook on a ranch, a cow puncher and a stock man. The whole time that he was working, he was also drawing pictures. Eventually, Remington returned back East and began to publish his drawings. He suggested to his editor that someone should write stories about the West for him to illustrate. His editor told him that was a great idea, and then told Remington to write the stories himself. So Remington began to write stories about life in the West to go along with his own drawings. He found the West beautiful and heroic, but he also saw that it was disappearing. He wrote, "I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever ... and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded."

It's the birthday of journalist Brendan Gill, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1914). He wrote novels, plays, and essays, and he was a popular columnist for The New Yorker for over fifty years. Gill's career at The New Yorker was long and varied. He wrote fiction and essays. He was a film, theater, and architecture critic. He also wrote books on architecture, and he wrote biographies of Charles Lindbergh, Tallulah Bankhead, Cole Porter, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Gill loved his job and he loved New York. He said, "You feel, in New York City, the energy coming up out of the sidewalks, you know that you are in the midst of something tremendous, and if something tremendous hasn't yet happened, it's just about to happen."

---

SUNDAY, 5 OCTOBER, 2003
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Nostalgia," by Billy Collins, from Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House).

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of Czech writer and President Václav Havel, who was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (1936). When he was young, he worked as a stagehand and eventually began writing plays. His most famous play, The Memorandum (1965), was about an office that is forced to use a made-up language in all of their memos. Havel is also an outspoken political activist. He was one of the leaders of the movement for democratic reform in Czechoslovakia, and he became the first president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. After the country divided, he was elected President of the Czech Republic. He retired earlier this year.

It's the birthday of British screenwriter and novelist Clive Barker, born in Liverpool, England (1952). He has written many dark fantasy and horror short stories and novels, including his well-known series of story collections, Books of Blood (1984-1986). He has also written books for children. The Thief of Always (1993) is about a young boy who is unhappy, and wishes for the days to all go away. The boy is swept into a fantasy world where Christmas comes every night.

It's the birthday of French encyclopedist Denis Diderot, born in Langres, France (1713). Over the course of twenty years, he wrote the great Encyclopedia (vol. 1 1751). The book was banned after the seventh volume came out in 1759. Diderot not only wrote ten more volumes, but type-set them himself, by hand.

---