Tuesday
Mar. 12, 2002
The History Teacher
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Poem: "The History Teacher," by Billy Collins from Questions About Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press).
The History Teacher
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
It's the birthday of children's writer Virginia
Hamilton, born in Yellow Springs, Ohio (1936). Her grandfather was a
slave who fled to freedom on the Underground Railroad. Every year he would sit
his ten children down and tell them the story of his escape. She wrote the first
books for children in which the fact that their characters were African-American
wasn't the most important thing about them. Her novel M.C. Higgins the Great
won a Newbury Medal, and the National Book Award as well. In 1992 she was awarded
the Hans Christian Anderson medal, the first time an American had won the prize
in over a decade. She died on February 19, 2002.
It's the birthday of Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louise Kerouac, in Lowell Massachusetts (1922). His family was French-Canadian, and his first language was joual, the working-class French of Quebec. He dropped out of Columbia and took a series of road trips with a lighthearted young man called Neal Cassady, carrying in his knapsack the manuscripts of novels he was working on, as well as a dizzying stock of pharmaceutical supplies. In 1950 he sat down at his kitchen table and typed the entire manuscript of On the Road onto a single roll of teletype paper, so that he wouldn't have to stop to put new sheets in. It took him three weeks. Six years later, it was published, and it made him a celebrity. He made many public appearances as a spokesman for the Beat generation, but he drank steadily, his work deteriorated, and his life began to unravel. He moved back home to live with his mother, and died at the age of forty-seven. The roll of teletype paper sold at auction last year for 2.4 million dollars.
It's the birthday of the philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley, born near Thomastown, Ireland, (1685). As a clergyman, he worried that the ideas of thinkers like Isaac Newton and John Locke were dangerously close to atheism. His arguments were so ingenious, and his conclusions were so arresting, that they sometimes had the effect of prodding his opponents to do better work in order to reply to him. His most surprising philosophical claim was that nothing exists outside the mind-that objects which seem real are nothing more than our perceptions of them. Once, when his contemporaries Samuel Johnson and James Boswell were out for a walk, Boswell told Johnson that although he thought Berkeley's idea was preposterous, he couldn't think of any way to refute it. Johnson stopped and kicked a big rock. "I refute it thus," he said.
It's the birthday of writer and antiquary John
Aubrey, born in Kingston, England, (1626). He's best known for his Brief
Lives, sketches he made to help a friend of his who was writing official
biographies. He wrote about eminent Englishmen from Thomas Hobbes to William
Shakespeare. His portraits include details about what his subjects liked to
eat for breakfast, the texture of their skin, and their preference in hats.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
