Tuesday
Mar. 4, 2003
The Only Day in Existence
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Poem: "The
Only Day in Existence," by Billy
Collins from Nine Horses (Random House).
The Only Day in Existence
The morning sun is so pale
I could be looking at a ghost
in the shape of a window,
a tall, rectangular spirit
peering down at me now in my bed,
about to demand that I avenge
the murder of my father.
But this light is only the first line
in the five-act play of this day-
the only day in existence-
or the opening chord of its long song,
or think of what is permeating
these thin bedroom curtains
as the beginning of a lecture
I must listen to until dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson
this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling.
Literary Notes:
In 1789 on this day, the United States Constitution went into effect.
Composer and violinist Antonio
Vivaldi was born on this day in Venice, Italy, 1678. He composed music
while working as an ordained priest. He didn't enjoy his day job, though, and
he sometimes left the altar in the middle of celebrating mass to quickly jot
down musical ideas. He is best known for The Four Seasons (1725).
It's the birthday of English novelist Alan
Sillitoe, born in Nottingham, England (1928). He worked at a series
of factory jobs, and got to know writer Robert Graves who suggested he write
about his hometown of Nottingham. He did, and the result was Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning (1958), a novel about Arthur Seaton, a lathe operator
in a bicycle factory who has affairs with two sisters, both of whom are married.
He is also remembered for his short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner" (1959).
It's the birthday of crime novelist James
Ellroy, born in Los Angeles, California (1948). His parents where divorced
and when he was ten years old, and during one of the weekends he spent with
his father, Ellroy's mother was murdered. The crime was never solved. Ellroy
and his father resided in a small apartment on Beverly Boulevard in a neighborhood
between Hancock Park and Hollywood. Each week his father gave him two books,
but because Ellroy could not get enough to read, he started to shoplift at Chevalier's,
the local bookstore. He graduated from reading Ken Holt and the Hardy Boys to
reading Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane. He went through
a bad spell in his youth, was in prison, went through heavy drinking, used drugs,
was homeless for a time. He then went into AA, got work as a caddy at a country
club and began writing novels. His L.A. Confidential (1990) was a best
seller. In 1994, after years of being haunted by the murder of his mother, he
decided to try to find her murderer. He wrote the memoir, My Dark Places
(1996), about the search and though he didn't solve the crime, he wrote that
he recovered a truer memory of his mother.
It was on this day in 1952 that Ernest
Hemingway wrote a letter to his publisher saying he'd just finished a new
book -- The Old Man And The Sea. The book began, "He was an
old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days
now without taking a fish." It was his last novel and his shortest, and
it won him his first Pulitzer, and two years later he received the Nobel Prize.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
