Friday
Jul. 5, 2002
Making a Fist
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Poem: "Making a Fist," by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner).
Making a Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my
questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
On this day in 1776, John Dunlap printed five hundred
copies of the Declaration of Independence. Once the Declaration had been
approved on July 4th, a draft was carried to John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer
whose newspaper covered the activities of the Continental Congress. He set up
the Declaration that afternoon in Caslon type and spent all that night and the
next day running the press. He placed himself in harm's way by putting his name
at the bottom; if the Revolution failed, he would be hanged along with the rest.
As soon as the ink dried, the copies were bundled up and carried to the thirteen
colonies on horseback. Today there are twenty-five known copies of his broadside,
most in public collections. In 1989 a man found an unsigned copy stuffed behind
the canvas of a painting he had purchased at a flea market. It was sold in an
online auction for over eight million dollars.
It's the birthday of George Borrow, born in Dumpling Green, Norfolk (1803). He grew up in East Anglia and spent most of his time with the Gypsies there, listening to their stories and learning their language. Eventually they gave him the title Lavengro, or "wordmaster." As an adult, he walked all over the Britain Isles and throughout Europe, looking for Romany people wherever he went. In middle age he settled in Norwich, wrote Zincali (1841), an account of the Gypsies in Spain, and compiled a dictionary of Romany.
On this day in 1687, Newton's Principia -"The
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"-was published. Edmund
Halley went to Cambridge in 1684 to ask Newton about planetary orbits, the subject
of hot scientific debate at the time. He found that Newton had come almost casually
to the conclusion that orbits must be elliptical, and had long since set his
work on the subject aside. He urged Newton to complete and publish his proofs.
In the Principia, Newton described gravitational force in mathematical
terms. Every particle was attracted to every other particle, with more force
if the particles were bigger or closer, and less if they were smaller or farther
apart. He showed that this principle governed the orbits of planets, the movement
of the tides, and the falling of apples. The members of the Royal Society would
have financed the publication themselves, but they had just lost money publishing
a large, ambitious history of fish. Halley paid for it out of his own pocket.
The edition sold out, but not many who bought the book read it, and fewer understood
it. Newton had a nervous breakdown in 1692, set aside his investigations, and
took a position at the Mint, where he pursued counterfeiters with great energy.
His work is regarded as the greatest achievement by a single human mind in recorded
history.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
