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Today in History
January 6 is the birthday of poet Khalil Gibran, born in the mountain village in Bsharri, Lebanon (1883). When Gibran was a boy, his mother decided to leave her alcoholic husband and take her four children to America. They settled in Boston, where they had relatives, and it was there that a charity worker noticed that Gibran appeared to be artistically gifted. He studied art, in addition to his regular schooling. His mother wanted him to learn about his Lebanese heritage too, and so Gibran went to a prep school and college in Beirut when he was 15. He started a literary magazine with a classmate, and was voted “College Poet.” He returned to Boston in 1902, when he was 19. Members of the aristocratic Boston society found him charming, and they began inviting him to social gatherings, where he discussed philosophy and poetry.
One day, a man named Alfred A. Knopf was invited to a gathering at Gibran’s apartment. Knopf was just starting up a publishing company, and when he saw how fascinated people were with Gibran, he decided to offer the man a publishing contract. Gibran’s first two books with Knopf weren’t very successful, but his third was a collection of 26 poetic essays called The Prophet (1923). It didn’t sell well at first, but gradually gained a readership, becoming especially popular in the 1960s; it was eventually translated into more than 30 languages. Gibran is now the third-best-selling poet in history, after William Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.
I was,
And I am.
So shall I be to the end of time,
For I am without end.
I have cleft the vast spaces of the infinite, and
Taken flight in the world of fantasy, and drawn nigh
To the circle of light on high.
Yet behold me a captive of matter.
I have hearkened to the teachings of Confucius,
And listened to the wisdom of Brahma, and sat
Beside the Buddha beneath the tree of knowledge.
Behold me now contending with ignorance and
Unbelieving.
I was upon Sinai when the Lord showed Himself
To Moses. By the Jordan I beheld the Nazarene's
Miracles. In Medina I heard the words of the
Apostle of Arabia.
Behold me now a prisoner of doubt.
I have seen Babylon's strength and Egypt's glory
And the greatness of Greece. My eyes cease not
Upon the smallness and poverty of their works.
I have sat with the witch of Endor and the priests
Of Assyria and the prophets of Palestine, and I cease
Not to chant the truth.
I have learned the wisdom that descended on
India, and gained mastery over poetry that welled
From the Arabian's heart, and hearkened to the
Music of people from the West.
Yet am I blind and see not; my ears are stopped
And I do not hear.
I have borne the harshness of insatiable
Conquerors, and felt the oppression of tyrants and the
bondage of the powerful.
Yet am I strong to do battle with the days.
All this have I heard and seen, and I am yet a
Child. In truth shall I hear and see the deeds of
Youth, and grow old and attain perfection and
Return to God.
I was,
And I am.
So shall I be to the end of time,
For I am without end.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
The Madman
January 2019January is, famously, a month of new beginnings, named after the Roman goddess Janus, that literally two-faced (or two-headed) deity who faced both backwards and forwards, recalling the past even while she looked ahead to the future. January is also, at least if you’re in the upper end of the northern hemisphere, pretty cold and wintry. Anne Sexton, wrote a ‘Letter Written During a January Northeaster’.
Wind and snow loom large again in this classic January poem, written by one of twentieth-century American poetry’s most distinctive voices. Taking a form of a letter written to an unidentified beloved during the cold month of January, ‘Letter Written During a January Northeaster’ was first published in the Hudson Review in 1962 and dwells on the struggle to live day by day (pace Morrissey, for Sexton every day is like Monday), as well as the heartbreak of not receiving any letters from Sexton’s ‘dearest’ addressee.
"Letter Written During a January Northeaster": a poem by Anne Sexton
Monday
Dearest,
It is snowing, grotesquely snowing
upon the small faces of the dead.
Those dear loudmouths, gone for over a year,
buried side by side
like little wrens.
But why should I complain?
The dead turn over casually,
thinking:
Good! No visitors today.
My window, which is not a grave,
is dark with my fierce concentration
and too much snowing
and too much silence.
The snow has quietness in it; no songs,
no smells, no shouts nor traffic.
When I speak
my own voice shocks me.
Tuesday
I have invented a lie,
there is no other day but Monday.
It seems reasonable to pretend
that I could change the day
like a pair of socks.
To tell the truth
days are all the same size
and words aren’t much company.
If I were sick, I’d be a child,
tucked in under the woolens, sipping my broth.
As it is,
the days are not worth grabbing
or lying about.
Monday
It would be pleasant to be drunk:
faithless to my own tongue and hands,
giving up the boundaries
for the heroic gin.
Dead drunk
is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or a foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
I will try it shortly.
Monday
Just yesterday,
twenty eight men aboard a damaged radar tower
foundered down seventy miles off the coast.
Immediately their hearts slammed shut.
The storm would not cough them up.
Today they are whispering over Sonar.
Small voice,
what do you say?
Aside from the going down, the awful wrench,
The pulleys and hooks and the black tongue . . .
What are your headquarters?
Are they kind?
Monday
It must be Friday by now.
I admit I have been lying.
Days don’t freeze
And to say that the snow has quietness in it
is to ignore the possibilities of the word.
Only the tree has quietness in it;
quiet as a pair of antlers
waiting on the cabin wall,
quiet as the crucifix,
pounded out years ago like a handmade shoe.
Someone once
told an elephant to stand still.
That’s why trees remain quiet all winter.
They’re not going anywhere.
Monday
Dearest,
where are your letters?
The mailman is an impostor.
He is actually my grandfather.
He floats far off in the storm
with his nicotine mustache and a bagful of nickels.
His legs stumble through
baskets of eyelashes.
Like all the dead
he picks up his disguise,
shakes it off and slowly pulls down the shade,
fading out like an old movie.
Now he is gone
as you are gone.
But he belongs to me like lost baggage.
—Anne Sexton
(from The Hudson Review, Vol. XV, Number 2, Summer 1962)
Source: www.interestingliterature.com
The Complete Poems
January 8, 1642Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei dies in Italy at age 77. Born February 15, 1564, Galileo has been referred to as the “father of modern astronomy,” the “father of modern physics” and the “father of science” due to his revolutionary discoveries. The first person to use a telescope to observe the skies, Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, sunspots and the solar rotation.
After Galileo published his confirmation that the Earth orbits the Sun, in favor of the Copernican system, he was charged with heresies (ideas that ran counter to teaching of the church) by the Inquisition—the legal body of the Catholic church. He was found guilty in 1633 and sentenced to life imprisonment but due to his age and poor health he was allowed to serve out his sentence under house arrest.
Source: www.history.com
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
On this day January 9, in 1324 Marco Polo, the great Venetian traveller, dies.Marco Polo was born around 1254 in Venice. His family were big travellers, especially his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo.
In 1260 the Polos sensed that the crusader kingdom of Constantinople, known as the Latin Empire, was failing, so sold up their interests there, and set off east, where they established contact with Kublai Khan. When they returned to Venice, they did so as the Khan’s ambassadors.
In 1271 they set off for Asia again, but this time with Marco. They headed first to crusader Acre, then on to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and China, before reaching the Khan’s summer residence at Shangdu (Xanadu) in 1275. They presented him with letters from the pope and holy oil from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The Polos stayed with the Khan for 17 years, moving around different parts of the Mongol Empire, even acting as military advisers at the siege of Xiangfan. The young Marco had a flair for languages, and Kublai Khan enjoyed his tales of far off places. He sent Marco on numerous missions, where he visited much of China and a range of neighbouring countries.
As Kublai Khan neared 80, the Polos sensed their vulnerability if the new Khan was not as friendly. They therefore volunteered to accompany a Mongol princess to Persia, where she was to be married. Her retinue filled 14 ships, and the flotilla sailed to Vietnam, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, and finally Hormuz and Khorasan.
Once she was safely delivered, the Polos entered Turkey, where they were robbed at Trebizond, losing everything. They finally made their way home to Venice via Constantinople, arriving in 1295.
Not long after returning, Marco was captured by the Genoese. However, he was able to spend his incarceration dictating his travels to a romance and chivalry writer named Rustichello, who wrote them down in Franco-Italian, a popular dialect.
After being freed, Marco retired to a quiet life in Venice. On his deathbed, aged 70, he was asked to retract the “fables” he had told in the book of his travels, which he had intended as an instructional book on Asia. He replied that he had not told half of what he had seen.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
On this day January 10 in 1776, writer Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet “Common Sense,” setting forth his arguments in favor of American independence. Although little used today, pamphlets were an important medium for the spread of ideas in the 16th through 19th centuries.Originally published anonymously, “Common Sense” advocated independence for the American colonies from Britain and is considered one of the most influential pamphlets in American history. Credited with uniting average citizens and political leaders behind the idea of independence, “Common Sense” played a remarkable role in transforming a colonial squabble into the American Revolution.
At the time Paine wrote “Common Sense,” most colonists considered themselves to be aggrieved Britons. Paine fundamentally changed the tenor of colonists’ argument with the crown when he wrote the following: “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither they have fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.”
Paine was born in England in 1737 and worked as a corset maker in his teens and, later, as a sailor and schoolteacher before becoming a prominent pamphleteer. In 1774, Paine arrived in Philadelphia and soon came to support American independence. Two years later, his 47-page pamphlet sold some 500,000 copies, powerfully influencing American opinion. Paine went on to serve in the U.S. Army and to work for the Committee of Foreign Affairs before returning to Europe in 1787. Back in England, he continued writing pamphlets in support of revolution. He released “The Rights of Man,” supporting the French Revolution in 1791-92, in answer to Edmund Burke’s famous “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790). His sentiments were highly unpopular with the still-monarchal British government, so he fled to France, where he was later arrested for his political opinions. He returned to the United States in 1802 and died in New York in 1809.
Source: www.history.com
The Common Sense of Thomas Paine
Published in "The Examiner" on 11 January 1818‘Ozymandias’ is perhaps Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most celebrated and best-known poem. A sonnet about the remnants of a statue standing alone in a desert – a desert which was once the vast civilisation of Ozymandias, ‘King of Kings’ – the poem is a haunting meditation on the fall of civilisations and the futility of all human endeavour. Shelley wrote the poem as part of a competition with his friend, Horace Smith.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias
January 12, 1976: Best-selling crime writer Agatha Christie dies.The creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, who sold more than 300 million books in her lifetime, died after years of poor health. The world’s most successful novelist, Dame Agatha Christie, died on this day in 1976 aged 85 at her home in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
The celebrated crime fiction writer, who created famous sleuths Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple among others, passed away having been in poor health for a number of years.
Her 66 crime novels and 153 short stories made her famous across the world, and it is estimated she sold 300 million books in her lifetime. Today, sales of her works are said to have topped two billion; her best-selling individual novel, And Then There Were None, has sold over 100 million copies alone.
Dame Agatha’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 and introduced Poirot, a Belgian detective who had relocated to England during the Great War, and became famous for his extravagant moustache as much as for his ‘little grey cells’.
During the Second World War she wrote ‘final cases’ for Poirot and Marple, to be released when she was too old to write any more. The final Poirot story, Curtain, was published in 1975; Miss Marple’s swansong, Sleeping Murder, followed nine months after her death. Her last public appearance, pictured above, was at the Royal Premiere of the 1974 film version of Murder on the Orient Express, starring Albert Finney as Poirot. She is said to have enjoyed the adaptation, but remarked that Poirot's moustaches were not luxurious enough.
Source: http://home.bt.com
Agatha Christie
James Joyce Dies, January 13, 1941ZURICH, Switzerland, Monday, Jan 13- James Joyce, Irish author whose "Ulysses" was the center of one of the most bitter literary controversies of modern times, died in a hospital here early today despite the efforts of doctors to save him by blood transfusions. He would have been 59 years old Feb. 2.
Joyce underwent an intestinal operation Saturday afternoon at the Schwesternhaus von Rotenkreuz Hospital. For a time he appeared to be recovering. Only yesterday his son reported him to have been cheerful and apparently out of danger. During the afternoon, however, the writer suffered a sudden relapse and sank rapidly. He died at 2:15 A.M. (8:15 P.M., Eastern standard time). His wife and son were at the hospital when he died …
Source: The New York Times ( https://bit.ly/2CgDQCY)
“The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google. There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t electronically documented. These days, it is software that maps our new experiences, our values and beliefs. How should a writer respond? Tom McCarthy on fiction in the age of data saturation …
Source: The Guardian - (https://bit.ly/2CgDQCY)
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses
Anais Nin, a brilliant and innovative author who probed the inner landscapes of the mind in a series of sensitively written diaries she kept up over decades, died late Friday in a los Angeles hospital. She was 73.Although her surrealist explorations of the subsconscious had often proved too obscure for the general public, she seemed to be gaining acceptance in recent years among the young, and among those who valued her vivid expressions of a woman's point of view. The author of works of rare delicacy and fragile beauty, she was also a woman of great determination, who overcame the lack of a publisher in the 1940s by buying a foot-powered press and printing her own work. In addition to the six volumes of "The Diary of Anais Nin," the last of which was published last year - by a commercial publisher - she was also known for a series of other works, including several novels.
The diaries offer keenly perceptive observations of her life in America and in Bohemian Paris, and of many well known literary and cultural figures whom she came to know, including Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Lawrence Durrell, and psychiatrist Otto Rank. Miss Nin herself had been a practioner of psychology for a time. She had also been a fashion mannequin and artist's model, as well as a Spanish dancer, and had given dramatic readings. Although she was years in gaining recognition. Miss Nin, whose perceptions have been compared to those of Proust, seemed destined from childhood to write.
Born in Paris in 1903, she was the daughter of Spanish pianist-composer Joaquin Nin and a French-Danish singer and society woman, Rosa Culmell. "I was a writer from the age of 9," Miss Nin once said. "I signed my stories 'a member of the French Academy,' can you imagine!" When she was 11, her father deserted the family. Her mother took Miss Nin and her brothers to New York, where Miss Nin entered the public schools, and, as a means of helping make endurable the abrupt dislocation in her life, began keeping a diary. After leaving school at 15 to work and study on her own, she was married in 1920 to Ian Hugo, and then went back to France, where she lived in Louveciennes near Paris, until World War II.
In 1930, while in France, she published her first work, a long essay, "D. H. Larence: An Unprofessional Study." In 1931, she wrote "The House of Incest," and in 1935, "Winter of Artifice," a novelette. She also worked steadily on the diaries - lyrical, confessional, realistic, surreal. "At first I wrote about everything that happened," she said, "but as I matured, I became more selective and there are a great many portraits of people."
Searching in her examinations of others, she was not sparing of herself. Strapped for funds, at one point she found herself writing 80 pages a week of pornography for an anonymous "collector". She hated it. "Anger, jealousy, envy, revengefulness, vanity," she said. "I locked them up in a diary."
Although impoverished and unrecognized, she constantly felt impelled to provide both financial and emotional support to many friends in the art and cultural worlds. Eventually there was a breakdown, and in time, a recovery, with new awareness of what she viewed as the essential conflict of modern woman: the need to offer maternal nurturing versus the need for self-fulfillment.
"I write like a medium," she said in one of her diaries. "I fear criticism because I fear it will destroy my spontaneity. I fear restriction. I live by impulse and improvisation and want to write the same way."
When the "Winter of Artifice," though praised by critics, did not attract publishers in New York in the early 1940s. Miss Nin was undaunted.
She obtained a $100 advance from a bookstore, and raised another $100 from friends. She paid $75 for a second-hand press and $100 for type, and began to study printing. She also arranged credit with a bindery. In about three months she had turned out 500 copies of "Winter of Artifice," and sold 400 through a vigorous telephone, mail and door-to-door campaign.
"A real writer does not need the publicity that is granted with equal fervor to a toothpaste," she said. "A real writer only wants his book to be read by those people who want to read it, and if there are 100 of them, it is enough to keep his work alive and sustain his productivity."
Praised by many literary figures, including Miller, Edmund Wilson, and William Carlos Williams, Miss Nin began in time to find a wider readership for her novels with their mystical, hallucinatory depiction of a world often trembling between dream and reality. Her works include 'Ladders of Fire," "Children of the Albatross," "The Four-Chambered Heart," "A Spy in the House of Love" and "The Seduction of the Minotaur."
In the 1960s, a major new York firm began publishing the diaries, which among other themes, focused attention on her struggle as a woman for freedom and recognition. A delicate, sofe-spoken, nurturing, carefully groomed woman who had preservered quietly for years, she found herself much in demand among students and feminists. "Sometimes I feel like I have about 10 million daughters," she said in 1971.
In recent years, with notebook in hand, Miss Nin had been known to spend much of each day writing and editing the still unpublished volumes of her diary. To a great degree her life remained a mystery.
"I will be very frank," she once said. "I need a certain anonymity in my personal life - not only because I need the privacy when I am working - but because there is a kind of plot to my diary.
"Whatever I tell about the present is like giving away the end of the story."
Source: www.thewashingtonpost.com
Delta of Venus
Event Date: January 15, 1759Location: London, England, United Kingdom
The British Museum was opened to visitors on 15 January, 1759. But not just any visitors. Fearing damage to the collections by unruly hordes, the trustees decided that nobody would be admitted without a ticket. The problem was that only a few tickets were issued each day and even then a number of obstacles had to be surmounted before prospective visitors could receive their prize.
They had to go to the museum and apply to the porter for a ticket. If approved, they then had to go back on another day to collect it, and then go back again at an appointed time to be allowed in.
All tickets, like the one shown above, issued to a Mr Masefield, were free, but designated for a particular time. Visitors were taken round in groups of five, each group guided by one of the under-librarians. They were taken round the building very quickly to make way for the next party.
The early trustees would no doubt recoil in horror at the sight of today's ticketless crowds wandering at will around the building, disdainfully snapping with 'selfie' phones. But at least there are no longer any servants who might be expecting a tip!
Source: www.onthisday.com
Masterpieces of the British Museum
January 18, 1989The travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin died 20 years ago something of an enigma.
Bruce Chatwin, in full Charles Bruce Chatwin, (born May 13, 1940, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, died January 18, 1989, Nice, France), British writer who won international acclaim for books based on his nomadic life.
In 1966 Chatwin abandoned a promising career as a director of Impressionist art at the auction firm Sotheby’s in London to study archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. From 1973 he worked for a time as a traveling correspondent for The Sunday Times (London), but he quit in 1976 to begin a pilgrimage through the Patagonia region of southern Argentina and Chile. The book In Patagonia(1977), based on his travels, won awards in Britain and the United States. The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980; filmed as Cobra Verde, 1987) is a fictionalized biography of a Brazilian slave trader in 19th-century Dahomey. In On the Black Hill (1982; filmed 1988), which won the Whitbread literary award, Chatwin explored the lives of twin brothers on an isolated 20th-century Welsh farm. Chatwin’s most commercially successful work, The Songlines (1987), is both a study of Australian Aboriginal creation myths and a philosophical reverie on the nature of nomads. His last novel was Utz (1988; filmed 1992). What Am I Doing Here?, a collection of Chatwin’s essays, was published posthumously.
Source: www.britannica.com
“As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones. There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside. The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.”
“I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.”
“For life is a journey through a wilderness”
-- Bruce Chatwin
Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989
January 19 - 1798It’s the birthday of the man who coined the term “altruism” and who helped found the field of sociology: philosopher Auguste Comte , born in Montpellier, France.
He made friends with a social philosopher who insisted that the goal of philosophy should be improved social welfare, and Comte used this as a guiding principle for the rest of his life’s work. His most famous work was Système de Politique Positive, published in four volumes between 1851 and 1854. It established a basis for sociology.
He said, “Everything is relative, and only that is absolute.”
----
Altruism (or Ethical Altruism) is an ethical doctrine that holds that individuals have a moral obligation to help, serve or benefit others, if necessary at the sacrifice of self interest. More precisely, an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable to everyone except the agent.
The term "altruism" (initially derived from the Latin "alter" meaning "other") was coined by Auguste Comte, the French founder of Positivism, in order to describe his ethical doctrine, which he summed up in the phrase: "Live for others". In more general terms, Altruism is selfless concern for the welfare of others (although its common usage does not necessarily entail any ethical obligation).
Altruism is often seen as a form of Consequentialism, as it indicates that an action is ethically right if it brings good consequences to others. It may be seen as similar to Utilitarianism, although an essential difference is that Utilitarianism prescribes acts that maximize good consequences for all of society, while Altruism prescribes maximizing good consequences for everyone except the actor. It is the opposite of Egoism, which holds that individuals should do what is best for themselves, that it is not only their right but their duty to look after their own interests first.
Source: www.philosophybasics.com
The Philosophy of August Comte
It was on this day January 20 in 1900 that 18-year-old student James Joyce presented his lecture “Drama and Life” to the Literary and Historical Society of Dublin. Joyce was worried about the speech, which he’d written 10 days before. It was full of controversial ideas, it was long, and he feared it would go over the heads of his audience, whose respect was very important to him. His anxiety showed, and he read it without much enthusiasm — he discussed the merits of literature as an art form, dismissed Shakespeare as passé, and praised the writer Henrik Ibsen, who at the time was considered amoral and unworthy of attention, let alone praise. His fears were well founded: the college president threatened to ban the paper, and his peers railed him with challenges and arguments afterward.
One of Joyce’s friends wrote about what happened next: “Joyce rose to reply at about 10 o’clock, when the bell was ringing on the landing outside to signal that it was time to wind up the proceedings. He spoke without a note for at least 30 minutes and dealt with each of his critics in turn. It was a masterly performance and delivered to the accompaniment of rounds of applause from the back benches.”
Source: The James Joyce Centre (http://jamesjoyce.ie/day-20-march/)
James Joyce: A Biography
Two hundred years ago, January 1819, the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote the first and most famous of his idylls: “L’Infinito”.Giacomo Leopardi, one of the greatest Italian poets of all times, was born in Recanati, a town in not far from the Adriatic coast. At the age of twelve Giacomo was so erudite that his private ecclesiastical tutor had to admit that his own scholarship was inferior to his pupil's and that consequently there was nothing more he could teach him. Devoured by an insatiable craving for learning, Giacomo then resolved to continue his studies alone, and for the next seven years, completely unsupervised, spent most of the day and part of the night poring over the books of the family palace's twelve-thousand volume library. He mastered Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and modern languages; completed numerous translations from the classics; wrote several philological works, a history of astronomy, and a hymn to Neptune in Greek which he pretended to have discovered in an ancient manuscript.
By the time he was nineteen years old he had amassed an amazing store of knowledge, but he had also compromised his health: he began suffering from nervous disorders, his eyesight weakened, he became a hunchback. Sadly he realized that he had allowed his youth to pass, that henceforth his life could be only unhappy, and that above all, being so frail and unattractive, he would probably never be loved by a woman. He felt it would require great courage "to love a virtuous man whose only beauty is his soul". These pessimistic thoughts and premonitions pervade all of Leopardi's major works.
In much of his poetry, Leopardi almost cruelly stresses his belief that joy is nothing but the momentary subsidence of pain and that only in death can man find lasting happiness. However from time to time, there appear balancing statements such as the wonderful last line of "L'infinito" -"E il naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare" (And to shipwreck is sweet for me in this sea) - that uncover a completely different aspect of Leopardi: not the optimist, to be sure, but the enraptured admirer of nature's beauty, and the believer in the power of imagination.
"L'infinito" represents one of the summits not only of Leopardi's poetry but of all poetry. Rarely has a poet been able to compress within one hundred words such depth of meaning with such simplicity of language and harmony of sounds. Leopardi called "L'infinito" an "idyll", a definition that perfectly fits the charm and suggestive power of this superb poem, which, to quote Renato Poggioli, "makes familiar and almost dear to the heart of man the alien metaphysical vision of a universe ruled by laws other than those of life and death."
L'INFINITO
Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,
E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
Dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete
Io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s'annega il pensier mio:
E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.
THE INFINITE
Always to me beloved was this lonely hillside
And the hedgerow creeping over and always hiding
The distances, the horizon's furthest reaches.
But as I sit and gaze, there is an endless
Space still beyond, there is a more than mortal
Silence spread out to the last depth of peace,
Which in my thought I shape until my heart
Scarcely can hide a fear. And as the wind
Comes through the copses sighing to my ears,
The infinite silence and the passing voice
I must compare: remembering the seasons,
Quiet in dead eternity, and the present,
Living and sounding still. And into this
Immensity my thought sinks ever drowning,
And it is sweet to shipwreck in such a sea.
(Translated by Henry Reed. Listener 43, no. 1113 (25 May 1950): 924)
Canti
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LauraT wrote: "I've visited the hill descripted in this poem not a long ago: Recanati is only an hour or so from Perugia, where I live, and close tothe seaside. I love Leopardi, one of the few Italian Poets I like!"Every time I read this short poem, I feel like going there on top of that hill ... it's a one's mind place ...
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Ever been there? Magic
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "Every time I read this short poem, I feel like going there on top of that hill ... it's a one's mind place ... "Ever been there? Magic
Thank you so much LauraT!
"
Dali died of heart failure on 23rd January 1989, at his home town of Figueres, a short walk from where he was born.Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist, best remembered in the public's mind as the creator of 'soft watch' paintings like The Persistence of Memory and for his extravagant personal appearance and manner. His final words aren't known but, in 1958, he offered what might be thought of as a suitable epitaph: I do not believe in my death.
Salvador Dali's full name on his death was Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol. He was a notable figure in the history of surrealist art and 20th-century art in general. Opinions of him as an artist and as a man are inevitably skewed by his unusual behavior and lifestyle, which were as out of the ordinary as his artworks, and also by his apparent support of the Fascist General Franco.
He was rejected by his father, following his bizarre lifestyle and pronouncements and after taking up with a married Russian woman much older than himself - Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, better known as Gala. As his life progressed, Dali, although a hugely successful painter and sculptor and an international celebrity, became increasingly strange in his behaviour and increasingly dependent on his then wife and muse Gala. He is quoted as saying: Without Gala, divine Dali would be insane.
Actually, many people thought he was. Opinions on Dali are divided. Some see him as a harmless but eccentric showman, others as a madman, others again as a profound creative artist. Dali himself denied the often applied description of 'eccentric'. In a TV interview in the 1960s, when asked if he considered himself to be eccentric, he said: No! Dali iss no ecc-centric. Dali iss CON-CENTRIC! A rather eccentric response, if there ever was one.
In the 1980s, towards the end of his life, Dali did become clearly deranged. Gala had become senile and is thought to have been been dosing the artist with unprescribed medication. After Gala's death in 1980, Dali went downhill rather quickly. He had several accidents and illnesses which may well have been self-inflicted and/or suicide attempts.
Source: www.phrases.org.uk
Salvador Dali: The Making of an Artist
On January 28, 1754 a new word was born ...On that day a very important letter was sent to Horace Mann. Not the Horace Mann who was born in Franklin, Massachusetts, and remembered as the father of public education, but Sir Horace Mann, the British diplomat to Florence in the 18th century. This aforementioned letter was sent by another Horace—Horace Walpole. Walpole was 4th Earl of Orford, as well as a historian, antiquarian, and prolific letter writer.
Walpole is said to have cultivated letter-writing as an art, corresponding with Sir Horace Mann for 45 years. He’s remembered for several magnificent works of writing, but one piece in particular (luckily) happened to influence the English language.
On the letter sent 262 years ago to a man with the same name as Boston’s education reformer, Walpole wrote the following:
“…this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.”
He continued, saying “serendipity” came from the title of a “silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip; as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of…”
Oxford Dictionary notes that Serendip was an old name for Sri Lanka—apparently a place of happy and unexpected discoveries in the fairy tale that Walpole read. Thus, “serendipity” was coined.
Besides having the same name as the recipient of this serendipitous letter, New England-bred Horace Mann had one other thing in common with Earl Horace Walpole: the two were members of the Whig party, known in Britain and the States for being staunch conservatives who supported the monarchy. The word serendipity is only distantly, tangentially related to Boston, we suppose, but isn’t everything?
Source: www.bostonmagazine.com
The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary
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LauraT wrote: "You've skipped the 27 January, Holocaust Memorial Day. The chosen date is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Soviet Union in 1945"You're right LauraT, but I didn't skip this important date. Unfortunately I had a very high temperature. If you surf back in time on this thread, last year I did remember that shocking date
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LauraT wrote: "Sorry to hear that Antonio! ANd yes, I was remembering it before, that you wrote about it last year!"Posso suggerire di leggerti questo interessante articolo rilanciato per l'occasione dalla TRECCANI e scritto da Ben Gurion? Grazie e buona lettura. https://bit.ly/2MADETG
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On this day January 29 in 1912, a 34-year-old female immigrant mill-worker of Italian origins was shot and killed by Massachusetts police whilst peacefully picketing in the Lawrence Textile Strike. Her name was Anna LoPizzo.Anna LoPizzo was a striker killed during the Lawrence Textile Strike (also known as the Bread and Roses Strike), considered one of the most significant struggles in U.S. labor history. Eugene Debs said of the strike, "The Victory at Lawrence was the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized labor."[ Author Peter Carlson saw this strike conducted by the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as a turning point. He wrote, "Wary of [a war with the anti-capitalist IWW], some mill owners swallowed their hatred of unions and actually invited the AFL to organize their workers.
Anna LoPizzo's death was significant to both sides in the struggle. Wrote Bruce Watson in his epic Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream, "If America had a Tomb of the Unknown Immigrant paying tribute to the millions of immigrants known only to God and distant cousins compiling family trees, Anna LoPizzo would be a prime candidate to lie in it."..... (read on)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Lo...
The IWW: Its First Seventy Years 1905-75
In London, King Charles I is beheaded for treason on January 30, 1649.Charles ascended to the English throne in 1625 following the death of his father, King James I. In the first year of his reign, Charles offended his Protestant subjects by marrying Henrietta Maria, a Catholic French princess. He later responded to political opposition to his rule by dissolving Parliament on several occasions and in 1629 decided to rule entirely without Parliament. In 1642, the bitter struggle between king and Parliament for supremacy led to the outbreak of the first English civil war.
The Parliamentarians were led by Oliver Cromwell, whose formidable Ironsides force won an important victory against the king’s Royalist forces at Marston Moor in 1644 and at Naseby in 1645. As a leader of the New Model Army in the second English civil war, Cromwell helped repel the Royalist invasion of Scotland, and in 1646 Charles surrendered to a Scottish army. In 1648, Charles was forced to appear before a high court controlled by his enemies, where he was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Early in the next year, he was beheaded.
The monarchy was abolished, and Cromwell assumed control of the new English Commonwealth. In 1658, Cromwell died and was succeeded by his eldest son, Richard, who was forced to flee to France in the next year with the restoration of the monarchy and the crowning of Charles II, the son of Charles I. Oliver Cromwell was posthumously convicted of treason, and his body was disinterred from its tomb in Westminster Abbey and hanged from the gallows at Tyburn.
Source: www.history.com
A Coffin for King Charles: The Trial and Execution of Charles I
31st January, 2019 will be… Backward Day. Don’t you know what it is?
Backward Day. The day when the world gets turned upside down and inside becomes out and madness becomes sanity and day becomes night, at least in concept. There’s just too much seriousness in the air, and sometimes you really just have to bend all the rules and let it all hang out.
Backward Day has a really long history, far older than the name of the holiday itself. In almost every culture there came a time of year when all the societal rules got turned on their head. Rome had Saturnalia, a day when all social norms were turned on their head. Gambling was no longer forbidden, and the masters took the day serving their slaves at the high table. During no other time was free speech actually permitted, especially amongst the slaves, but during Saturnalia, all manner of insult was allowed.
There are other cultures throughout the world that celebrate this changing of the guard, this overcoming of mores and exemplifying of wildness. In the end, it all comes down to questioning the way the world is established and the rules that we have in place to govern our behavior. Backward Day isn’t just a day of silliness, but of mental revolution.
How to celebrate Backward Day? It all starts when you get up in the morning. Wear your clothes inside out and your underwear as your outerwear, or be a bit more reasonable and slip into your pajamas. Have a nice hot pizza for breakfast, and answer the phone with “Goodbye! Thank you for calling!” When you get to work tell your boss you’re glad he made it in today, and hand him a dollar as a bonus for all his hard work.
When lunchtime comes around, have yourself a nice big helping of dessert. Greet everyone throughout the day with a goodbye, and as you walk out the door, say hello to everyone and tell them to have a great day. These are just some of the wonderful doses of insanity you can add to everyone’s day on Backward Day.
That night, when it’s time to go bed, turn off that alarm, get into your work clothes, and crawl into bed. (Ok… Turn the alarm back on. You’ll need that tomorrow) This is the great way to celebrate Backward Day, and add a little madness to the mundanity of life, and free your mind from the tyranny of ‘normal’.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
The Backward Day
Antonio wrote: "31st January, 2019 will be… Backward Day. Don’t you know what it is?
Backward Day. The day when the world gets turned upside down and inside becomes out and madness becomes sanity and day become..."
Backward Day -- hmmm.... I am intrigued but not sure that I want to participate in such a reversal.
Leslie wrote: "Antonio wrote: "31st January, 2019 will be… Backward Day. Don’t you know what it is?
Backward Day. The day when the world gets turned upside down and inside becomes out and madness becomes sanit..."
Free yourself from the tyranny of normality !!!...
February 1 World Hijab Day....... is an annual event founded by Nazma Khan in 2013. The event takes place each year in 140 countries worldwide. Its stated purpose is to encourage women of all religions and backgrounds to wear and experience the hijab. Event organizers describe it as an opportunity for non-Muslim women to experience the hijab.
February 1st, 2013, marked the first annual World Hijab Day (WHD) in recognition of millions of Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab and live a life of modesty. The brainchild of this movement is a New York resident, Nazma Khan, who came up with the idea as a means to foster religious tolerance and understanding by inviting women (non-Hijabi Muslims/non-Muslims) to experience the hijab for one day. By opening up new pathways to understanding, Nazma hopes to counteract some of the controversies surrounding why Muslim women choose to wear the hijab.
Nazma knows exactly what she’s talking about. The social activist came to this country from Bangladesh at the tender age of eleven where she found herself being the only hijabi in middle school. She remembers her experience as a difficult one. “Growing up in the Bronx, in NYC, I experienced a great deal of discrimination due to my hijab, ‘she reflects. ‘In middle school, I was ‘Batman’ or ‘ninja’. When I entered University after 9/11, I was called Osama bin laden or terrorist. It was awful. I figured the only way to end discrimination is if we ask our fellow sisters to experience hijab themselves.”
It’s estimated that people in 190 countries take part in World Hijab Day every year. WHD has many volunteers and ambassadors worldwide to conduct WHD events in order to bring awareness about hijab. These ambassadors come from all walks of life. In addition, WHD has been endorsed by many world renowned individuals including scholars, politicians, and celebrities worldwide. WHD has been covered in mainstream news media including New York Times, BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Huffington Post, etc to name a few.
There were many milestones since the inception of World Hijab Day. One of them was the recognition of the day by New York State in 2017. The same year, the House of Commons of the U.K. hosted an event marking the day, where Prime Minister Theresa May also attended. The event was organized by Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, SNP MP for Ochil and South Perthsire. SNP MP Tasmina wrote in THE TIMES: “Given the current climate, World Hijab Day is even greater importance. We must stand up and clearly say that women have a right to choose what they want to wear-whenever, wherever, and however. World Hijab Day is an event that we should be proud of celebrating, not just for religious tolerance but for women’s rights around the world.”
Source: https://worldhijabday.com/about-us/
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic StateWINNER OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. In this intimate memoir of survival, a former captive of the Islamic State tells her harrowing and ultimately inspiring story ...
A mad King George III chases Frances Burney in Kew Garden on February 2, 1789“I strolled into the Garden; I had proceeded, in my quick way, nearly half the round, when I suddenly perceived, through some Trees, two or three figures … I concluded them to be workmen, and Gardeners;–yet tried to look sharp, — and in so doing, as they were less shaded, I thought I saw the Person of his Majesty!
Alarmed past all possible expression, I waited not to know more, but turning back, ran off with all my might — But what was my terror to hear myself pursued! — to hear the voice of the King himself, loudly and hoarsely calling after me “Miss Burney! Miss Burney!–”I protest I was ready to die; I knew not in what state he might be at the time; I only knew the orders to keep out of his way were universal; that the Queen would highly disapprove any unauthorised meeting, and that the very action of my running away might deeply, in his present irritable state, offend him.
Heavens how I ran! — I do not think I should have felt the hot Lava from Vesuvius, — at least not the hot Cinders, had I so ran during its Eruption. My feet were not sensible that they even touched the Ground.
When they were within a few yards of me, the King called out “Why did you run away?–“ Shocked at a question impossible to answer, yet a little assured by the mild tone of his voice, I instantly forced myself forward, to meet him — though the internal sensation which satisfied me this was a step the most proper, to appease his suspicions and displeasure, was so violently combatted by the tremor of my nerves, that I fairly think I may reckon it the greatest effort of personal courage I have ever made.
The effort answered, — I looked up, and met all his wonted benignity of Countenance, though something still of wildness in his Eyes. Think, however, of my surprise, to feel him put both his hands round my two shoulders, and then kiss my Cheek! I wonder I did not really sink, so exquisite was my affright when I saw him spread out his arms! — Involuntarily, I concluded he meant to crush me; — but the Willis’s, who have never seen him till the fatal illness, not knowing how very extraordinary an action this was from him, simply smiled and looked pleased, supposing, perhaps, it was his customary salutation! I have reason, however, to believe it was but the joy of a Heart unbridled now, by the forms and proprieties of established customs, and sober Reason …
Source: Fanny Burney, Diary 1789 (https://bit.ly/2BgpNNN)
The Diary of Fanny Burney
February 3 is the anniversary of the death in 1468 of Johannes Gutenberg, generally acknowledged as the father of European printing: the democratizer of knowledge. Gutenberg is considered the father of mass communication thanks to his invention of the printing press and metal movable type. But was he really the first to print books? Five centuries after his death, questions remain.
"Everyone knows Johannes Gutenberg, although you hardly know anything about him," says deputy director of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Elke Schutt-Kehm. Not even his exact death date has been definitively confirmed, though he is thought to have died on February 3, 1468.
However, on the likely 550th anniversary of Gutenberg's death, this much is clear: Gutenberg is the inventor of the mechanical printing press with metal movable type, which helped the Reformation achieve its crucial breakthrough. For this accomplishment, he is considered one of the important historical figures of the second millennium.
Gutenberg's place and exact date of birth is unknown, but he was born around the year 1400, most likely in Mainz but perhaps in Eltville on the other side of the Rhine in the Rheingau region west of Frankfurt. He came from the wealthy Gensfleisch merchant family, but he later changed his birth name — as was then fashionable — and adopted the name of the family estate: "Hof zum Gutenberg."
Gutenberg possibly studied in Erfurt (in central present-day Germany), according to an entry in the matriculation books of the university. Around the year 1428, the Gensfleisch family left Mainz due to clashes between the leading families of the city. Where Gutenberg stayed after this time is not known. However his stay in Strasbourg (then a semi-autonomous city in the Holy Roman Empire) from 1434 is recorded.
Today a French city, Strasbourg offered Gutenberg numerous employment opportunities. Among other things, he worked in the coin and goldsmith trade, founded a finance company and produced pilgrimage souvenirs. Some indications suggest that he also paved the way for his later revolutionary invention while in the city. His Strasbourg soujourn lasted a total of ten years.
Back in Mainz, Gutenberg continued his work on his idea for a book printing press with the help of businessman Johannes Fust and writer Peter Schöffer. Between 1452 and 1454 he was able to develop a printing press with interchangeable metal letters. And since Gutenberg was also an accomplished craftsman — and an entrepreneur who was willing to take risks — he himself built the printing press.
For centuries, books had been produced through the labor-intensive process of writing by hand, which mostly took place in the workshops of monasteries. Only the clergy and upper classes could afford these expensive products — let alone be able to read them. But Gutenberg's printing press meant that text could be brought in one stroke to a page — and the material could be reproduced as often as desired. It was an invention that revolutionized the exchange of knowledge and enabled new ideas to circulate widely among the population.
In 1450 Gutenberg began his most ambitious project: Within two years and with the help of his 20 employees, he printed 180 copies of religious reformer Martin Luther's Bible. It is not only the first, but also the most beautiful book ever printed, says the Gutenberg Museum's Schutt-Kehm.
Gutenberg's technique spread rapidly. By the year 1500 printing companies throughout Europe produced not only learned works but also texts attacking the indulgences and pomp of the Roman Catholic church. About 100 years later the first newspaper appeared.
But was Gutenberg really the first to make book printing possible? The answer is no. Book printing with interchangeable letters had already been developed in China in the 11th century and was widely used in Korea in the 13th century. But while in Asia the letters for printing were created from wax or carved out of wood, Gutenberg developed his own technique with a manual casting instrument and a printing press. "He was the first to produce serial standardized individual parts," said Schutt-Kehm. It was a different approach and technically a huge step, the deputy director added. And so Gutenberg's invention ultimately revolutionized the world, according to Schutt-Kehm. "Gutenberg democratized knowledge and took the first step toward knowledge for all."
Source: Made for Minds (https://bit.ly/2Bhmy97)
Gutenberg's Apprentice
On February 4th 2004 a young website with a baby-blue banner was born. Founded in a dormitory at Harvard, TheFacebook.com tapped into people’s instinctive desire to see and be seen. Few guessed how successful it would become. In 2008 Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who had bought the social-networking rival MySpace, called Facebook the “flavour of the month”; the following year this newspaper warned in an article about Facebook that it is “awfully easy for one ‘next big thing’ to be overtaken by the next.” Instead Facebook has stayed on top by spreading wildly across America and the world and buying competitors, including the photo-sharing app Instagram and the messaging firm WhatsApp. Around two-thirds of American adults use its original social network. At its peak, the average user spent nearly an hour a day on Facebook’s platforms. Few companies have exerted such a strong influence on society, changing people’s communication habits, reuniting lost contacts, shaping their perception of world events and redefining the meaning of the word “friend”. “Every once in a while, changes in technology come along which are so profound, that there is a before and an after. Facebook is one of those,” says Roger McNamee, author of a forthcoming book called “Zucked”. Birthdays are an occasion for reflection … (read on)
Source: The Economist (https://econ.st/2RB1xvh)
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal
Antonio wrote: "February 1 World Hijab Day....... is an annual event founded by Nazma Khan in 2013. The event takes place each year in 140 countries worldwide. Its stated purpose is to encourage women of all rel..."
I'd never heard of this before. It's encouraging to see the number of countries participating in it. Thank you for sharing this, Antonio.
A classic poem for February. Ezra Pound, ‘1915: February’. Pound (1885-1972) sent this poem to H. L. Mencken for publication, but in fact it remained unpublished until after Pound’s death. In his letter to Mencken which enclosed the poem, Pound wrote that he thought ‘1915: February’ had ‘some guts’, but he confessed that he may have been ‘blinded by the fury in which I wrote it’. It’s certainly an angry poem, about the manufacturing of weapons for the First World War, weaving in monstrous imagery from the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and early medieval sagas.
The smeared, leather-coated, leather-greaved engineer
Walks in front of his traction-engine
Like some figure out of the sagas,
Like Grettir or like Skarpheddin,
With a sort of majestical swagger.
And his machine lumbers after him
Like some mythological beast,
Like Grendel bewitched and in chains,
But his ill luck will make me no sagas,
Nor will you crack the riddle of his skull,
O you over-educated, over-refined literati!
Nor yet you, store-bred realists,
You multipliers of novels!
He goes, and I go.
He stays and I stay.
He is mankind and I am the arts.
We are outlaws.
This war is not our war,
Neither side is on our side:
A vicious mediaevalism,
A belly-fat commerce,
Neither is on our side:
Whores, apes, rhetoricians,
Flagellants! in a year
Black as the dies irae.
We have about us only the unseen country road,
The unseen twigs, breaking their tips with blossom.
Source: www.poetryexplorer.net
Poems and Translations
February, 2019 Library Lovers’ MonthLearn about Library Lovers’ Month. “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” (Marcus Tullius Cicero)
Stop hugging that library. No wait, my mistake, I forgot that it’s Library Lovers Month- and it seems to have come at just the right time as many local libraries are struggling during the economic downturn. So why love your local library? Libraries are a sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life; they offer security and peace and quiet. They are also a place where you can focus surrounded by like minded people with the desire to acquire knowledge.
History of Library Lovers’ Month
It’s important to understand that not everything is available on the internet (yet), libraries can have vast digital stores of qualitative and quantitative information escaping from opinion led snippets and snapshots from online. There may be some crossover of information but in most cases libraries are a much more economically viable solution when looking for information than the internet.
It’s also important to know that libraries offer services that aren’t available on the internet, including free assistance in finding obscure information and borrowing a book that may not be available in the admittedly immense catalogue one can find on the internet. One of the things that people often forget is that being a librarian isn’t like getting a job at the local supermarket. You want to be a Librarian? Be prepared to get a degree in Library Science. Yes, this is a thing that exists, and it’s necessary to become a librarian.
There’s more to a Library than just the books too! There are meetings that gather there that include everything from people from the Society for Creative Anachronism and other local organizations. There’s also magazines and periodicals, microfiche of local newspapers reaching far back into antiquity, and that’s just a start!
How to celebrate Library Lovers’ Month
Love your library for what it is, a community meeting place or treasure trove of ideas. There is so much to be found there, including new books to read and guidance on research with papers you may have due. The people who frequent the library tend to be intellectuals, so who knows what kind of interesting conversations you could get into? Why not push against the declining attendance of libraries and go and learn something new that will expand your knowledge of who you are, of where you live or what you do?
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
A “must” to read today. “Hours in a library. From 1916: Virginia Woolf considers why we read – and what we gain from studying the canon.
“Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point out that there is no connexion whatever between the two. A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated, solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading … (read on here at link)
TLS (https://bit.ly/2Ig9VwO)
The Library Book
It's good to be back reading "On this day in history". I've always enjoyed your work. It's well written, interesting, informative and entertaining. Keep it up.
Norton wrote: "It's good to be back reading "On this day in history". I've always enjoyed your work. It's well written, interesting, informative and entertaining. Keep it up."Thanks Norton. Welcome back to this place that is part of my digital library. Yes, we all know nowadays that there are different places of mind called "libraries". To me, a library either papery or digital is "a place of mind" where all humans can meet and talk about their past present and future condition ....
February 7, 1992Maastricht Treaty, formally Treaty on European Union, international agreement approved by the heads of government of the states of the European Community (EC) in Maastricht, Netherlands, in December 1991. Ratified by all EC member states (voters in Denmark rejected the original treaty but later approved a slightly modified version), the treaty was signed on February 7, 1992, and entered into force on November 1, 1993. The treaty established a European Union (EU), with EU citizenship granted to every person who was a citizen of a member state. EU citizenship enabled people to vote and run for office in local and European Parliament elections in the EU country in which they lived, regardless of their nationality. The treaty also provided for the introduction of a central banking system and a common currency (the euro), committed members to implementing common foreign and security policies, and called for greater cooperation on various other issues, including the environment, policing, and social policy.
Source: www.britannica.com
The Maastricht Treaty: Second Thoughts After 20 Years
February 8, 1577 Robert Burton was born. The book to end all books.An Oxford University scholar, he is best known for his classic 1621 work, “The Anatomy of Melancholy”, a 17th-century compendium of human thought that is funnier than it sounds He was also a mathematician and an amateur astrologer.
“It's the best book ever written. I use the word "book" with care. It's not a novel, a tract, an epic poem, a history; it is, quite self-consciously, the book to end all books. Made out of all the books that existed in a 17th-century library, it was compiled in order to explain and account for all human emotion and thought. It is not restricted to melancholy, or, as we call it today, depression; but then a true study of it will have to be - if you have the learning and the stamina - about everything. That is why there are about 1,400 pages in this edition, why the only other edition, from Clarendon Press, runs to three volumes (it also costs a bomb compared to this and is, anyway, out of print), and why Burton never, strictly speaking, finished it: there was always something else to go in.
For it is not just Burton's thoughts on the subject of melancholy, but the thoughts of everyone who had ever thought about it, or about other things, whether that be goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, drink, kissing, jealousy, or scholarship. Burton, you suspect, felt the miseries of scholars keenly. "To say truth, 'tis the common fortune of most scholars to be servile and poor, to complain pitifully, and lay open their wants to their respective patrons... and... for hope of gain to lie, flatter, and with hyperbolical elogiums and commendations to magnify and extol an illiterate unworthy idiot for his excellent virtues, whom they should rather, as Machiavel observes, vilify and rail at downright for his most notorious villainies and vices." And that's a good quote to be getting on with: it shows you that Burton is on the side of the angels, that he's prepared to stick his neck out, and that he is funny.
This last point is important. The lazy browser won't even pick this book off a shelf, let alone open it. When opened at random, it offers not only dense slabs of 17th-century prose, but insane lists that seem to go on for ever, meandering digressions, whole chunks of italicised Latin. The slack browser who gets the gist of the introduction, "Democritus to the Reader" (Democritus was the laughing philosopher; another clue that this is a comedy), will realise that as far as Burton is concerned, everyone on earth is either stupid or mad (himself included). Say that you're taking this on holiday, as poor Alain de Botton did, and you get heaved straight into Pseuds' Corner.
Which is terribly unfair. The only reason you should not take it on holiday is because it will make your luggage too heavy. It is the ideal book to dip into, though. No one on earth is going to expect you to read it cover to cover. (Although I know one person who is doing just that.) It takes only a couple of minutes to get acclimatised to Burton's rhythms and phrasing. Once you do, you realise that he is a rollicking, more-ish writer, from an age that produced the nation's best prose. The Latin is all translated, apart from a bit about the aphrodisiac diet of the Sybarites, as this is a reprint of the 1932 edition. And not only that, but it's useful: it makes you less melancholy. So buy it now.”
Source: The book to end all books (https://bit.ly/2MYxn4A)
The Anatomy of Melancholy
February 9, 2019 - It’s Pizza Day!Pizza Day, your time to get your pizza eating game on! Yes, you heard correctly! A whole day – 24 happy hours – to celebrate that yummy carb that almost no one can do without! From the humble beginning to today’s gourmet offerings pizza has captured the heart and stomachs of people around the globe. Do you like the traditional cheese and pepperoni? Are you more adventurous and need to show that in your pizza toppings? Now is time to show the world!
You can say that Pizza Day started in the 10th century in Naples, Italy. This is when records first show the presence of pizza. It started out as a simple flatbread spread with sauce and sprinkled with cheese. I bet the women who most likely made this as a creative snack for their families had no idea the sensation that they had whipped up.
Drive around any American city and I am sure you will be able to find a pizza place on almost every corner. From the chains that boast a perfect pizza exactly like every other one made from any of their stores to the quaint mom and pop restaurants that share their family traditions with us year after year.
Which do you prefer? Personally, I like them both. Sometimes those commercials and funny jingles just get into my mind and make me drive over for a slice! Pizza made its mark on America in 1905. In New York City, a pizzeria called Lombardi’s created the spark that would light hearts across the country from then until now – and with no conceivable end in sight! Amazingly, they are still in business! If you want to taste that first real pizza to hit American shores, head over to Little Italy in Manhattan and check them out.
Do I really need to tell you how to celebrate this awesome day? Ok, ok, I will offer a few suggestions just to get you started! How creative are you? Are you up to making your own pizza from scratch? I bet it’s easier than you think! Come on, let’s head into the kitchen and take a look around. Pull out your favorite cookbook or hit up a search engine and search for pizza recipes.
Wow! Look at all those options. Pick one that speaks to you and get going. Make trying a new from scratch pizza a tradition for Pizza Day! Not a fan of the kitchen? That’s ok! Every city and town has many choices as well when it comes to this fabulous dish. Head out and try a new pizzeria – or two! Make it a great family adventure. Let the kids help map out where to go. Maybe pick toppings out at random and try something you’ve never had before. You never know, it may become your new favorite. Does your family already take part in this holiday? If not, make sure you start now. Share your ideas and favorite recipes with us!
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
I'm making a pizza ...
I'm making a pizza the size of the sun,
a pizza that's sure to weigh more than a ton,
a pizza too massive to pick up and toss,
a pizza resplendent with oceans of sauce.
I'm topping my pizza with mountains of cheese,
with acres of peppers, pimentos, and peas,
with mushrooms, tomatoes, and sausage galore,
with every last olive they had at the store.
My pizza is sure to be one of a kind,
my pizza will leave other pizzas behind,
my pizza will be a delectable treat,
that all who love pizza are welcome to eat.
The oven is hot, I believe it will take
a year and a half for my pizza to bake.
I can hardly wait til my pizza is done,
my wonderful pizza the size of the sun.
Jack Prelutsky
Pizza: A Global History----
Where Did The Word “Pizza” Come From, Anyway?
The origin of the word pizza. The word pizza is Italian for pie, and we English borrowed (and loved it) from Italian in the 1930s. But just how that word wound up in the Italian language boggles etymologists. It may have come from the Latin pix meaning “pitch” or Greek pitta, but others say that it originated in a Langobardic word bizzo meaning “bite.”
Who made the first pizza?
The common belief is that Italians invented pizza, but a baked bread with toppings has many other ancestors in other cuisines. Italy’s version of the dish, especially from Naples, is the one we are most familiar with, though pissaladière from Provence, coca from Catalan, and lahma bi ajeen from the Middle East all bear a remarkable resemblance to pizza.
Supposedly, this archetypal pizza, an open-faced pie slathered in tomato sauce and mozzarella, was ushered in by the baker Raffaele Esposito in Naples. In 1889, he made a patriotic pie topped with mozzarella, basil, and tomatoes, ingredients in the colors of the Italian flag, in honor of King Umberto and Queen Margherita’s visit. It is rumored the Queen enjoyed the pie, and thus, it became known as a Margherita.
In the US, Italian immigrants sold pizza in their stores, and the first pizzeria was opened in 1905 by Gennaro Lombardi at 53 1/3 Spring Street in New York City, but pizza did not truly not catch on stateside until World War II. Stationed in Italy, many American and European soldiers tasted pizza and brought an appetite for this now-ubiquitous dish home with them.
Yum.
Source: www.dictionary.com
February 11, 1963‘Words’ was one of the last poems Sylvia Plath wrote before her tragic suicide on 11 February 1963, in a London apartment she had decided to rent because W. B. Yeats had once lived there. ‘Words’ was written on 1 February. A very difficult poem.
Words
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.
The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock
That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road—-
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.
Sylvia Plath
1932-1963
------------------------
“As the poem’s title implies, ‘Words’ is a meditation on the very stuff of poetry, although it is neither wholly favourable nor wholly damning about the power of words. We begin, in summary, with a single word: ‘Axes’. Its plural picking up on the poem’s plural title, ‘Axes’ immediately invites us to draw a link between title and opening line: words are axes, in that they are cutting, powerful, but also potentially deadly. After one has struck the wood of the tree or log with an axe, the wood ‘rings’. (There’s a nice suggestion of the lineage and history of words here, in that ‘wood rings’ punningly summons the idea of telling the age of a tree by counting its number of rings. Words, too, come with a history of their own: as Dennis Potter once said, the problem with words is that you never know whose mouth they’ve been in.) Like that axe felling a tree or slicing a log, words echo, and the echoes travel away from the ‘center’ (the one who has spoken or written those ‘words’?), galloping away like horses.
The horses image is another one which signals Plath’s ambivalence: horses are associated closely with people, and a horse is an animal that has largely been brought under man’s control. We can train horses, use them for travel, and so forth. But they can also be worried or frightened and revert to their wild, ‘fight or flight’ state, in which case they might veer off course, out of control, galloping away from the one who should have them under control. Is this what words are like: when we write them we believe we have mastered them, but they have a life of their own and quickly move out and away from us? Indeed, there is another buried pun in Plath’s fifth line, since ‘off from the center’ is the literal origin of the word ‘eccentric’ (i.e. ex-centric). And eccentricity and madness are associated with a loss of control over one’s words, among other things.
The tree image is continued in the second stanza, with the idea of the tree’s sap as tears, a fluid that weeps from the tree much as our words are wrought out of our own misery and pain (as was certainly the case with Sylvia Plath). But there is a search for order and control again here, because the sap/tears are like water flowing in a river or ocean, seeking to calm itself so it can become a mirror, a still pool that reflects the world back in a way that makes sense. (This is a rather complex and clever image, almost metaphysical in its ingenuity: the tears we cry end up on the page like water flowing, but we try to bring our pain under control and turn it into something orderly, like art, which – like the still waters of a pool or river – can ‘hold the mirror up to nature’, as Hamlet puts it.)
As we move from the second into the third stanza, the rock under those wild waters becomes a skull, decaying (it is being consumed by algae or ‘weedy greens’ growing upon it). A macabre metaphor for the way the living ‘feed’ off the words of the dead, much as we readers of Plath gain sustenance from reading the work of a poet who died in 1963? Perhaps. Here there is a parallel with Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘The Death of the Author’, but also with W. H. Auden’s elegy for W. B. Yeats, in which Auden declares that the words of the dead poet are ‘modified in the guts of the living’: the living keep the dead poet’s words alive, even if they modify their meaning.
And then, to conclude this summary, we find ourselves sliding from the third into the fourth and final stanza, with Plath encountering her words ‘on the road’: they have gone out there into the world, and are now ‘dry and riderless’. Picking up on the horse-image from the first stanza, these words are wild and free, like a horse without a rider, much as the poet’s words float free of the poet’s control once she has sent her poem out into the world. Is Plath here anticipating the way these poems will be received after her death? She may have known, so near to her suicide, that she would never see them in print, but that they may well see the light of day after her death.
Plath ends ‘Words’ with another reprise, this time of the image of the water providing a reflection – in this case, a reflection of the ‘fixed stars’ which govern the life of the poet. Words may be free, but the poet who creates them is not (there’s a suggestion of astrology in this reference to fixed stars: both Plath and Hughes were into their horoscopes). If this final image of the pool suggests that the poem – now completed both in metaphor and reality as we reach the final lines – has settled down, like those wild flowing waters, in order to reflect the truth of the world, then what the poem reflects, like the pool, is the feeling of being trapped, doomed, fated, which Plath herself is trying to reflect in her late poems in particular. ‘Words’ is a tragic acknowledgment of the fact that, whilst the poetry may escape, the poet may not.
‘Words’ is, in a sense, an analysis of the ways in which a poet’s words take on a life of their own once they leave the poet who wrote them. This is a liberating thing – the horse-image chimes with ‘Ariel’, Sylvia Plath’s poem recalling her youthful horse-rides when she felt free and could escape, like T. S. Eliot’s Cousin Nancy, the constraints of twentieth-century society – but it also represents a loss of control.”
Source: https://interestingliterature.com
The Collected Poems
February 12It's the birthday of two men who were born on exactly the same day February 12 in 1809: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln was born on this day near Hodgenville, Kentucky (1809). Though he's generally considered one of the greatest presidents in our country's history, fairly little is known about his early life. Unlike most presidents, he never wrote any memoirs. We know that he was born in a log cabin and had barely a year of traditional schooling. His mother died when he was nine, and he spent much of his adolescence working with an ax. But when he was in his early 20s, he showed up in New Salem, Illinois, having decided to remake himself as a professional man, and to study law.
The Impeachment of Abraham LincolnCharles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England (1809). On the famous voyage to the southern tip of South America when he was only 22, Darwin brought with him a book called Principles of Geology by Sir Charles Lyell, which suggested that the earth was millions of years old. And along the journey, Darwin got a chance to explore the Galapagos Islands. These islands were spaced far enough apart that the animals on them had evolved over time into different species. It took him a long time to publish his findings, mainly because he was afraid of being attacked as an atheist. But about 20 years after he first came up with the idea, he published his book On the Origin of Species (1859).
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation
Event Date: February 13, 1945Location: Dresden, Germany
Waves of British bombers began reducing one of the world's most beautiful cities to rubble on this day. Thousands were to die in the ensuing firestorm as all-out war against Nazi Germany was intensified.
The bombing of Dresden in East Germany, a medieval city formerly renowned for its rich artistic and architectural treasures, remains controversial. The war was coming to an end with Hitler holed up in his Berlin bunker, the Russian Red Army racing towards the German capital from the east and the British and Americans advancing from the west.
Besides, many saw Dresden's contribution to the Nazi war effort as minimal, its defences were slight and the Russians would have had little trouble capturing the city. It seemed an unlikely target for a major attack.
But Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, head of Britain's Bomber Command and nicknamed "Bomber Harris", believed that any city that had anything to do with the Nazi war effort was a legitimate target.
On this night, 1,300 Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers descended on Dresden in two waves, dropping more than 1,400 tons of high-explosive bombs and more than 1,100 tons of incendiaries, destroying 90 per cent of the city and killing thousands of people. The city’s air defences were so weak that only six planes were shot down.
A massive firestorm developed over eight square miles engulfing the narrow, medieval streets. The more the city burned, the more oxygen was sucked in – and the greater the firestorm became. It is estimated that the temperature reached 1,800 deg Fahrenheit.
The following morning, as fire-fighters tried to tackle the inferno, 529 bombers of the USAAF (U.S. air force) attacked, causing even greater chaos. On February 15, another 200 U.S. bombers continued their assault on the city.
All told, bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped more than 950 tons of high-explosive bombs and more than 290 tons of incendiaries on Dresden.
Given the high number of civilian casualties – estimates now ranging from 35,000 to 135,000 – and the relatively few strategic targets, some have called the bombing of Dresden a war crime. However, both the British and the American militaries defended the bombing as necessary.
It had been pointed out that Dresden was not simply a cultural centre – it had factories producing weapons and equipment for the war effort and its railway could send troops to the front for the fight against the Russians.
But many historians believe that one purpose of the devastating attack was to give a signal to Russia. The Russians were allies but Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt were uneasy about Josef Stalin's ambitions and post-war plans.
The reasoning went that the bombing of Dresden would show the Russians the awesome power of the Allies and act as a warning to Stalin not to stray from agreements he had made at war conferences.
An internal RAF memo dated a few weeks earlier seems to confirm this view. It said: “Dresden is the largest unbombed city the enemy has got.
"The intention of the attack is to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance – and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
After reunification in 1990, Germany undertook extensive reconstruction of the city – work that is ongoing. Dresden has been restored to much of its former grandeur as a centre for art and culture.
Footnote: Germany dropped 35,000 tons of bombs on Britain over eight months in 1940-41, killing an estimated 39,000 people. In total, Britain and the U.S. dropped about 1.9 million tons of bombs on Germany over seven years. The number of civilian casualties is unknown because of the shifting population and widespread movement of refugees.
Source: www.onthisday.com
Why Dresden Was Bombed: A Review Of The Reasons And Reactions
On this day February 14 in 1842, the most desirable place to be in New York was at the Valentine's Day "Boz Ball," held in honor of the novelist Charles Dickens, who published his early stories under the pseudonym "Boz." He had not yet published most of his most great books: A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1849), A Tale of Two Cities (1849), and Great Expectations (1860) were all still to come. But already he was a huge celebrity. Dickens and his wife, Catherine, had arrived in Boston on January 22nd, and the city welcomed them with all sorts of events, until "Boston" was being called "Boz-town." New Yorkers were determined to outdo Boston, so they organized a planning committee. Boston's major Dickens event had been a dinner for men only, so New York decided to give a ball and include women. The ball was at the Park Theater, New York's largest venue, which could hold 3,000 people. Three thousand tickets sold out immediately at $5 apiece, which was quite a bit in those days. Only the most elite society members were welcome — each guest was thoroughly vetted before being allowed to attend. New Yorkers who didn't make it in were trying to spend up to $40 to get a ticket.
The Boz Ball was unprecedented. Thousands of dollars were spent on decorations. There was a bust of Dickens with a bald eagle hanging above it, holding a laurel wreath. There were huge banners, decorated with scenes from his books. There were elaborate displays to represent each state. The New Yorkers were dressed in their finest. People had trouble dancing because there was simply not enough room, but they did it anyway, and the dances alternated with performances from Dickens' books. In a letter to a friend, Dickens called it "the most splendid, gorgeous, brilliant affair you ... can possibly conceive."
Source: www.thewritersalmanac.org
Dickens in America
February 15, 1564It's the birthday of scientist and writer Galileo Galilei, born in Pisa, Italy, who defended the scientific belief that the Earth was not the center of the Universe and was tried by the Roman Inquisition for heresy. He once prophesied that, in the future, "There will be opened a gateway and a road to a large and excellent science into which minds more piercing than mine shall penetrate to recesses still deeper."
Galileo was a mathematics professor at Padua when he first heard about a new invention from the Netherlands, the telescope. When he couldn't get his hands on one to even look at, he worked out the mechanics on his own. The spyglass everyone had been talking about could magnify objects to three times their original size. The instrument Galileo made with lenses he ground himself, magnified all the way up to 20 times. He was able to see the valleys and mountains of the moon, the Milky Way, and to discover four moons of Jupiter. In 1610, Galileo published the story of his telescope and the results of his studies as The Starry Messenger.
Galileo had been corresponding with German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who also believed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system. Kepler had been urging Galileo to go public with his theories for years and, though Galileo was tried and convicted by the Church for heresy, he was never tortured or excommunicated as the dominant narrative goes—in reality, he remained a loyal Catholic his entire life.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Selected Writings
Mod
Location: Dresden, Germany
Waves of British bombers began reducing one of the world's most beautiful cities to rubble on this day. Thousands were to die in the ensuin..."
I've read somewhere that in Dresden that night died more people than in Hiroshima...
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It’s the official end of the holiday season, which begins with All Hallows’ Eve, and it’s the day on which many people take down their Christmas decorations or risk bad luck for the coming year. Poet Robert Herrick wrote, “Down with the rosemary, and so / Down with the bays and mistletoe; / Down with the holly, ivy, all, / Wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas Hall.” It’s a last Yuletide hurrah before everyone returns to the mundane workaday world of the rest of the year.
Though the origin of the celebration dates back to the Roman Saturnalia, most of the traditional observances of the holiday that have survived date back to medieval England. English settlers in the Colonies brought the Twelfth Night tradition with them. In colonial Virginia, it was customary to hold a large and elegant ball. Revelers chose a king and queen using a traditional English method: a bean and a pea were baked inside a plum cake. The man who found the bean was crowned the Twelfth Night King, and likewise the woman who found the pea. It was the king’s duty to host the next year’s Twelfth Night ball, and the queen was given the honor of baking the next year’s cake. George and Martha Washington didn’t usually do much for Christmas except attend church, but they often hosted elaborate Twelfth Night celebrations. It was also their anniversary; they’d been married on January 5, 1759. Martha Washington left behind her recipe for an enormous Twelfth Night cake among her papers at Mount Vernon. The recipe called for 40 eggs, four pounds of sugar, and five pounds of dried fruit.
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Christmas became the primary holiday of the season in America, and at that point, Twelfth Night celebrations all but disappeared in this country. Many still celebrate it in the United Kingdom, with wassailing, Twelfth Night cakes, and the arrival of the Holly Man.
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Twelfth Night, in full “Twelfth Night; or, What You Will”, comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1600–02 and printed in the First Folio of 1623 from a transcript of an authorial draft or possibly a playbook. One of Shakespeare’s finest comedies, Twelfth Night precedes the great tragedies and problem plays in order of composition. The original source appears to have been the story Apollonius and Silla in Barnabe Riche’s Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581), based in turn on a number of Continental versions that included an Italian comedy called Gl’ingannati (1531; “The Deceived”), published anonymously, and a story in Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554–73).
“Twelfth Night” combines love, confusion, mistaken identities, and joyful discovery. After the twins Sebastian and Viola survive a shipwreck, neither knows that the other is alive. Viola goes into service with Count Orsino of Illyria, disguised as a young man, "Cesario." Orsino sends Cesario to woo the Lady Olivia on his behalf, but Olivia falls in love with Cesario. Viola, in the meantime, has fallen in love with Orsino.
At the estate of Lady Olivia, Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s kinsman, has brought in Sir Andrew Aguecheek to be her suitor. A confrontation between Olivia's steward, Malvolio, and the partying Toby and his cohort leads to a revenge plot against Malvolio. Malvolio is tricked into making a fool of himself, and he is locked in a dungeon as a lunatic. In the meantime, Sebastian has been rescued by a sea captain, Antonio. When Viola, as Cesario, is challenged to a duel, Antonio mistakes her for Sebastian, comes to her aid, and is arrested. Olivia, meanwhile, mistakes Sebastian for Cesario and declares her love. When, finally, Sebastian and Viola appear together, the puzzles around the mistaken identities are solved: Cesario is revealed as Viola, Orsino asks for Viola’s hand, Sebastian will wed Olivia, and Viola will marry Count Orsino. Malvolio, blaming Olivia and others for his humiliation, vows revenge.
Sources: www.writersalmanac.com - www.folger.edu - www.britannica.com