birthdays
Happy Birthday Mark Strand
I still like your poem in the Gallivan Center downtown the best:
Visions of the end may secretly seduce
our thoughts like water sinking
into water, air drifting into air;
clouds may form, when least expected,
darkening the glass of self,
canceling resemblances to what we are.
Even here, while summer sunlight
falling through the golden
folds of afternoon
brightens up the air, we mark
our progress by how much
we leave behind. And yet,
this vanishing is burnished
by a slow, melodious light,
as if our passage here
were beautiful because
no turning back is possible.
It is our knowledge of the end
that speaks for us, that has us weave,
as slowly as we can, an elegy
to all our walks. It is our way
of bending to the world’s will
and giving thanks.
Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian
It’s Bach’s birthday today, in 1685. Here’s a happy little piece from the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin: the Prelude from the E Major Partita.
I love the ending, starting about 2:40.
The E Major Partita has always sounded like spring to me, which is appropriate since yesterday was the equinox.
3.14
Birthdays
It’s the sixth “birthday” of this blog today, which took me by surprise. (I have big plans in the works to give the blog a facelift and get a new portfolio site up, and I wanted to have it done by the blog birthday. Obviously, I thought it was later in the month.) But 1,565 posts, 3 jobs, several relationships, and one cat later, here we are.
It’s also the birthday of my oldest friend, who I think has been reading for all six years and has helped with the technical end of things for the same amount of time. Happy birthday, Amber!
Happy Birthday, Edna
It’s the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay today. You have to love a woman who wrote sonnets and built an artists’ colony.
IV
I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,–
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
(From from A Few Figs from Thistles (1922).
Hooray For Winter Birthdays
Big Day
Some big historical events happening today, courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac:
1. The 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
2. Willa Cather’s birthday.
3. The anniversary of the first fully clear photograph of the Earth from space, taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972, and known as “The Blue Marble.”
I Declare It Carl Sagan Day
Happy birthday to Carl Sagan today! To celebrate Carl Sagan Day, you could watch the introduction to the Cosmos series, which is still the most popular science program ever produced for television*:
Or you could read this from Ann Druyan, which is simultaneously heartbreaking and joyful:
Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again…But the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is…We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. That pure chance could be so generous and so kind; that we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, “in the vastness of space and the immensity of time”; that we could be together for twenty years; that is something which sustains me…That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.
Happy birthday, Carl. I like to picture you somewhere in that “ship of the imagination” from Cosmos.
*You’ve all heard that a sequel to Cosmos is in the works for 2013, right? Ann Druyan is helping to write/produce and Neil DeGrasse Tyson will host. I can’t wait.
Happy Birthday, Beryl
It’s the birthday of Beryl Markham today. She was a horse trainer, pilot, and author (probably) of the memoir West With the Night, which I should read again and you should read too, if you haven’t. (It impressed the hell out of Hemingway.)
She was friends with Karen Blixen, lovers with Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and was the first woman to fly solo from east to west across the Atlantic. Beryl was fierce! Let’s all be more like her.