Monday

Jun. 29, 1998

Death and the Turtle

by May Sarton

MONDAY 6/29

Today's Reading: "Death and the Turtle" by May Sarton from COLLECTED POEMS 1930-1993, published by W.W. Norton & Co.

It's the FEAST DAY OF SAINTS PETER AND PAUL, celebrated on the 29th of June every year since 354. Paul: the patron saint of tentmakers and theologians; he's also the patron of ropemakers because of his escape from a Damascus prison using a rope to lower himself to the ground. Peter: the patron of sailors, as well as keymakers, a reference to the passage in the Gospel of Matthew where he was to carry the keys to the heavenly kingdom.

It's the birthday in 1963, Rheinfelden, Germany, of violinist ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER. Neither of her parents played an instrument, but when she was six years old, after one year of lessons, she entered a local contest for instrumentalists aged 6 to 24, and won. She kept entering the contest and by the time she was 10 the judges asked her not to return because she won all the time. She's playing only Beethoven these days: this spring she toured the States performing the 10 Beethoven Violin Sonatas in a series of sold-out recitals.

It's the birthday in Lyon, France, 1900, of the writer and aviator, ANTOINE de SAINT-EXUPERY. He didn't care much for school as a boy, and as soon as he could became a pilot. He pioneered airmail routes across northern Africa, the South Atlantic and South America in the 1920s, surviving several crashes, and, later, writing about his experiences; novels like Southern Mail (1933), Night Flight (1939), and a nonfiction book, Wind, Sand, and Stars (1939). When the Nazis invaded France he settled in the U.S., and wrote his most popular book, The Little Prince, published in 1943, about a pilot who crashes in the Sahara and makes the acquaintance of a little prince from another planet. Saint-Exupery was shot down by the Germans over the Mediterranean in 1944.

It's the birthday in 1861, in the south-central Minnesota town of Le Sueur, of surgeon WILLIAM JAMES MAYO, who founded with his brother, Charles, the Mayo Clinic. The two boys even before they were out of high school were helping their father as anesthetists in his surgeries. William got his medical degree in Michigan, then came back to Rochester in 1883, just after a tornado demolished part of the town. The local convent set up an emergency hospital and asked Mayo for help, and that's how the Mayo Clinic got started.

It was on this day in 1613 that THE GLOBE THEATRE in London burned, the place where nearly all of Shakespeare's plays were premiered. Shakespeare himself was part-owner of the Globe, and an actor in its productions. It was during a performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, when the King enters Cardinal Wolsey's palace, that a cannon went off and caught the theater's thatch roof on fire. Within an hour, the whole thing burned to the ground. It was rebuilt within a year, this time with a tiled roof, but that building was pulled down 30 years later when the Puritans closed all theaters. A few years ago a reconstruction of the Globe opened near the original site on the River Thames.

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

 

«

»

  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
  • “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.” —Shelby Foote
  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
  • “Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.” —Anthony Powell
  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
Current Faves - Learn more about poets featured frequently on the show