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Today in History
February 16, 1740. It’s the birthday of the printer Giambattista Bodoni, born in Saluzzo, Italy. I intend to remember this artist printer because I was born in a family of traditional post Gutenberg printers. My father taught me to read and write using mobile lead letters.
He came from a family of engravers, and by the time he died, he had opened his own publishing house that reprinted classical texts, and he had personally designed almost 300 typefaces. His typeface Bodoni is still available on almost any word processing program.
The son of a printer, Bodoni left home as a boy to go to Rome, where he served an apprenticeship at the press of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the missionary arm of the Roman Catholic church. In 1768 he was asked to assume management of the Royal Press (Stamperia Reale), the press of the Duke of Parma. There he produced Italian, Greek, and Latin books and printed materials for court use.
Bodoni at first employed old-style typefaces with much decorative detail. He was gradually won over to the typographical theories of a French printer, Pierre Didot, however, and by 1787 was printing pages almost devoid of decoration and containing modern typefaces of his own design. The typeface that retained the Bodoni name appeared in 1790. Of the many books that he produced during this period, the best known is his Manuale tipografico (1788; “Inventory of Types”), a folio collection of 291 roman and italic typefaces, along with samples of Russian, Greek, and other types. A second edition of his book was published by his widow in 1818.
By 1790 Bodoni had become widely known; important travelers visited his press, and collectors sought his books. The Duke of Parma gave him a larger press and more independence; he no longer had to confine himself to the duke’s projects. Although his books were better known for their beauty and typographical excellence than for textual accuracy, he printed many important works, the most famous of which were his fine editions of the writings of Horace and Virgil in 1791 and 1793, respectively, and Homer’s Iliad in 1808. The last years of his life brought Bodoni international fame. He received compliments from the pope and was honoured with a pension by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Source: www.britannica.com
Giambattista Bodoni: His Life and His World
Martin Luther died on 18 February 1546 in Eisleben.Luther was a German theologian whose writings inspired the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben. His father was a copper miner. Luther studied at the University of Erfurt and in 1505 decided to join a monastic order, becoming an Augustinian friar. He was ordained in 1507, began teaching at the University of Wittenberg and in 1512 was made a doctor of Theology. In 1510 he visited Rome on behalf of a number of Augustinian monasteries, and was appalled by the corruption he found there.
Luther became increasingly angry about the clergy selling 'indulgences' - promised remission from punishments for sin, either for someone still living or for one who had died and was believed to be in purgatory. On 31 October 1517, he published his '95 Theses', attacking papal abuses and the sale of indulgences.
Luther had come to believe that Christians are saved through faith and not through their own efforts. This turned him against many of the major teachings of the Catholic Church. In 1519 -1520, he wrote a series of pamphlets developing his ideas - 'On Christian Liberty', 'On the Freedom of a Christian Man', 'To the Christian Nobility' and 'On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church'. Thanks to the printing press, Luther's '95 Theses' and his other writings spread quickly through Europe.
In January 1521, the Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther. He was then summoned to appear at the Diet of Worms, an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire. He refused to recant and Emperor Charles V declared him an outlaw and a heretic. Luther went into hiding at Wartburg Castle. In 1522, he returned to Wittenberg and in 1525 married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, with whom he had six children.
Luther then became involved in the controversy surrounding the Peasants War (1524 - 1526), the leaders of which had used Luther's arguments to justify their revolt. He rejected their demands and upheld the right of the authorities to suppress the revolt, which lost him many supporters.
In 1534, Luther published a complete translation of the bible into German, underlining his belief that people should be able to read it in their own language. The translation contributed significantly to the spread and development of the German language.
Luther's influence spread across northern and eastern Europe and his fame made Wittenberg an intellectual centre. In his final years he wrote polemics against the Jews, the papacy and the Anabaptists, a radical wing of the reforming movement.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses
February 18th, 1821. From Lord Byron Journal in ItalyThe news are that the Neapolitans have broken a bridge, and slain four pontifical carabiniers, whilk carabiniers wished to oppose. Besides the disrespect to neutrality, it is a pity that the first blood shed in this German quarrel should be Italian. However, the war seems begun in good earnest for, if the Neapolitans kill the Pope’s carabiniers, they will not be more delicate towards the Barbarians. If it be even so, in a short time “there will be news o’ thae craws,” as Mrs. Alison Wilson says of Jenny Blane’s “unco cockernony” in the Tales of my Landlord. In turning over Grimm’s Correspondence to-day, I found a thought of Tom Moore’s in a song of Maupertuis to a female Laplander.
“Et tous les lieux
Où sont ses yeux,
Font la zone brûlante.”
This is Moore’s
“And those eyes make my climate, wherever I roam.”
But I am sure that Moore never saw it; for this was published in Grimm’s Correspondence in 1813, and I knew Moore’s by heart in 1812. There is also another, but an antithetical coincidence
“Le soleil luit,
Des jours sans nuit
Bientôt il nous destine;
Mais ces longs jours
Seront trop courts,
Passés près de Christine.”
This is the thought, reversed, of the last stanza of the ballad on Charlotte Lynes, given in Miss Seward’s Memoirs of Darwin, which is pretty – I quote from memory of these last fifteen years.
“For thy first night
I’ll go To those regions of snow,
Where the sun for six months never shines;
And think, even then
He too soon came again,
To disturb me with fair Charlotte Lynes.”
To-day I have had no communication with my Carbonari cronies; but, in the mean time, my lower apartments are full of their bayonets, fusils, cartridges, and what not. I suppose that they consider me as a depôt, to be sacrificed, in case of accidents. It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object – the very poetry of politics. Only think – a free Italy!!! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus. I reckon the times of Cæsar (Julius) free; because the commotions left every body a side to take, and the parties were pretty equal at the set out. But, afterwards, it was all prætorian and legionary business – and since! – we shall see, or, at least, some will see, what card will turn up. It is best to hope, even of the hopeless. The Dutch did more than these fellows have to do, in the Seventy Years’ War.
February 19th, 1821.
Came home solus – very high wind – lightning – moonshine – solitary stragglers muffled in cloaks – women in masks – white houses clouds hurrying over the sky, like spilt milk blown out of the pail – altogether very poetical. It is still blowing hard – the tiles flying, and the house rocking – rain splashing – lightning flashing – quite a fine Swiss Alpine evening, and the sea roaring in the distance. Visited – conversazione. All the women frightened by the squall: they won’t go to the masquerade because it lightens – the pious reason! Still blowing away. A[lborghetti]. has sent me some news to-day. The war approaches nearer and nearer. Oh those scoundrel sovereigns! Let us but see them beaten – let the Neapolitans but have the pluck of the Dutch of old, or the Spaniards of now, or of the German protestants, the Scotch presbyterians,163 the Swiss under Tell, or the Greeks under Themistocles – all small and solitary nations (except the Spaniards and German Lutherans), and there is yet a resurrection for Italy, and a hope for the world.
Source: Lord Byron, Ravenna Journal 1821 (https://bit.ly/2SMMvIb)
The Letters and Journals of Lord Bryron
February 21, 2019 International Mother Language DayLanguages, with their complex implications for identity, communication, social integration, education and development, are of strategic importance for people and planet. Yet, due to globalization processes, they are increasingly under threat, or disappearing altogether. When languages fade, so does the world's rich tapestry of cultural diversity. Opportunities, traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking and expression, valuable resources for ensuring a better future, are also lost.
At least 43% of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given a place in education systems and the public domain, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world.
International Mother Language Day has been observed every year since February 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
Languages are the most powerful instruments of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage. All moves to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.
Every two weeks a language disappears taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage.
Linguistic diversity is increasingly threatened as more and more languages disappear. Globally 40 per cent of the population does not have access to an education in a language they speak or understand. Nevertheless, progress is being made in mother tongue-based multilingual education with growing understanding of its importance, particularly in early schooling, and more commitment to its development in public life.
Multilingual and multicultural societies exist through their languages which transmit and preserve traditional knowledge and cultures in a sustainable way.
Do you have a favorite proverb in your mother tongue?
To celebrate International Mother Language Day 2019, the Office of the United Nations Ombudsman and Mediation Services invites you to send us your favorite proverb in your mother tongue on the following topics: peace, harmony, conflict resolution/competence to deal with conflict, mindfulness, resilience, well-being. The proverbs will be compiled, and the most appropriate ones will be selected to be published on our website and other digital communication tools.
Source: http://www.un.org/en/events/motherlan...
The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongue
On this date Febraury 22 in 1632, Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The two systems in question were the Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories of cosmology. Ptolemy, following the tradition of Aristotle, believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and everything — Sun, Moon, planets, and stars — revolved around it. Copernicus, on the other hand, posited that the Sun is the center of the universe, and though we seem to be standing still, we are in fact hurtling through space as we circle the star.
Galileo had had a series of interviews with Pope Urban VIII some years before, in which he discussed his tide theory as proof that the Earth moved through space. The pontiff granted him permission to write the book — which Galileo originally called Dialogue on the Tides — but he demanded that Galileo treat Copernican theory in a hypothetical way only. Galileo presented the material as a series of discussions between two philosophers — who each took the position of one of the theories — and a neutral but well-educated layman. In order to get the book past the censors, Galileo had to present it as an equal consideration of both theories, but he was already convinced that the Ptolemaic model held no water.
The book was popular in its day, but it alienated Pope Urban VIII. Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, who ruled that he was “vehemently suspect of heresy” and too close to endorsing Copernican theory. The Dialogue was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books, and Galileo was ordered to recant and recite weekly psalms of penitence. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest, and none of his later books were permitted to be published in his lifetime. The Dialogue remained on the Index of Forbidden Books until 1835.
On this date in 1630, Quadequine, brother of Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoag tribe, introduced popcorn to the English colonists. He offered the treat as a token of goodwill during peace negotiations. The colonists called it popped corn, parching corn, or rice corn, and it was popped on top of heated stones or by placing the kernels, or cobs, into the hot embers of a fire. The discovery of popcorn was not new; people had been consuming it since 300 B.C. In 1948 and 1950, ears of popcorn believed to be 4,000 years old were discovered in the Bat Caves of west central New Mexico. In 1650, the Spaniard Cobo said of the Peruvian Indians: “They toast a certain kind of corn until it bursts. They call it pisancalla, and they use it as a confection.” The popularity of popcorn has rarely waned, even during the Depression, when its relative inexpensive cost, at 5 or 10 cents a bag, made it one of the few luxuries even the down-and-out could afford. Americans consume more than 17.3 billion quarts of popcorn each year.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
John Keats, young poet of “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn”, died in Rome on February 23 1821. He was just 25. After two years of illness, he had travelled to Italy to find a cure for the “family disease” that had already claimed his younger brother Tom – pulmonary tuberculosis. As the first shovelful of earth thudded on to the poet’s coffin, back in London his beloved Fanny Brawne still awaited good news of his recovery. Shelley immediately seized on Keats’s premature death to create a myth of doomed Romantic genius, and for generations of readers his elegy Adonais has represented the reality of Keats, “the loveliest and the last”, whose promise would forever seem unfulfilled.
What killed that bright star of English Romanticism, John Keats? Was it a bad review, as Lord Byron joked when he said that Keats was “snuff’d out” by an article? Or was it, as is usually assumed, TB – the disease that killed Tom Keats in the autumn of 1818 and infected the poet as he tried to nurse his brother? Publication of an excoriating review of Keats’s Endymion coincided with his earliest symptoms of consumption, which should make Byron’s jest give us pause. So should another cause of the young poet’s untimely demise: poor Keats died at 25 because, like his poet-hero Thomas Chatterton, he had poisoned himself with the disastrous treatments of the time .....
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
John Keats: A New Life
Event Date: February 24, 1825Location: Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom
Thomas Bowdler, a doctor and philanthropist – the man who took all the naughty bits out of Shakespeare – died on this day, although he would probably have preferred this sentence to have read “went to sleep on this day.”
In 1807 he published his first edition of “The Family Shakspeare” – he liked to spell the Bard’s name that way. The book contained 24 versions of Shakespeare plays, all with words, expressions and sometimes even plots changed to be more “family friendly.”
He explained that nothing had been added to the original text, but he had omitted words and expressions “which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a Family.”
In the preface to his work, Bowdler wrote: “My great objects are to remove from the writings of Shakespeare some defects which diminish their value, and at the same time to present to the public an edition of his plays which the parent, the guardian and the instructor of youth may place without fear in the hands of his pupils, and from which the pupil may derive instruction as well as pleasure: may improve his moral principles, while he refines his taste: and without incurring the danger of being hurt with any indelicacy of expression.
“The language is not always faultless. Many words and expressions are of so indecent Nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased. Of these the greater part were evidently introduced to gratify the bad taste of the age in which he lived, and the rest may perhaps be ascribed to his own unbridled fancy.
“But neither the vicious taste of the age nor the most brilliant effusions of wit can afford an excuse for profaneness or obscenity; and if these can be obliterated the transcendent genius of the poet would undoubtedly shine with more unclouded lustre.”
Thus, in Hamlet, the death of Ophelia was no longer a suicide, but referred to as an accidental drowning.
In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth’s famous line, “Out, damned spot!” read instead, “Out, crimson spot!”
In all plays “God!” as an exclamation was replaced with “Heavens!“
In Henry IV Part 2 Doll Tearsheet (a prostitute) was omitted from the story entirely.
In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio’s “the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon” was changed to “the hand of the dial is now upon the point of noon”.
Bowdler was working in a prudish age and his volumes sold in impressive numbers. By 1850, eleven editions of The Family Shakspeare had been published. He lived on the Welsh coast at Swansea where he died, aged 70.
His work brought a new word to the English language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “bowdlerise” means to remove the parts of a book, play, etc. thought likely to shock or offend.
Source: www.onthisday.com
The Bowdler Shakespeare 6 Volume Paperback Set: In Six Volumes; In Which Nothing Is Added to the Original Text; But Those Words and Expressions Are Omitted Which Cannot with Propriety Be Read Aloud in a Family
February, 2019 is Library Lovers’ MonthLet 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.
In spite of all this, we can easily conjure up a picture which does service for the bookish man and raises a smile at his expense. We conceive a pale, attenuated figure in a dressing gown, lost in speculation, unable to lift a kettle from the hob, or address a lady without blushing, ignorant of the daily news, though versed in the catalogues of the secondhand booksellers, in whose dark premises he spends the hours of sunlight – a delightful character, no doubt, in his crabbed simplicity, but not in the least resembling that other to whom we would direct attention. For the true reader is essentially young. He is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open minded and communicative, to whom reading is more of the nature of brisk exercise in the open air than of sheltered study; he trudges the high road, he climbs higher and higher upon the hills until the atmosphere is almost too fine to breathe in; to him it is not a sedentary pursuit at all .... (contd.)
Source: www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/hou...
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
26th February, 2019 will be...For Pete’s Sake DayLearn about For Pete’s Sake Day
Oh, for Pete’s sake! Not another pointless holiday?
For Pete’s Sake Day celebrates one example of a ‘minced oath’, where an offensive word or phrase is substituted by something more acceptable in society. Other examples include ‘For crying out loud!’, and ‘Sugar!’. Such euphemisms have been used for centuries whenever people hit thumbs with hammers, burn hands on hot plates, or sit on sharp things while in polite company. Why has Pete been singled out for special attention?
In the case of this particular minced oath, Pete is likely to refer to St Peter. However, if there’s a Pete in your life, why not do something for his sake? It doesn’t have to be much – making him a cup of tea or a nice sandwich would be good!
If you are Pete-less, perhaps you can celebrate by saying ‘For Pete’s Sake’ whenever you get an opportunity.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
Longman Dictionary Of English Idioms
28th February, 2019 will be Digital Learning DayWhat do we mean by digital learning?
Digital learning is any instructional practice that effectively uses technology to strengthen a student’s learning experience. It emphasizes high-quality instruction and provides access to challenging content, feedback through formative assessment, opportunities for learning anytime and anywhere, and individualized instruction to ensure all students reach their full potential to succeed in college and a career.
Digital learning encompasses many different facets, tools, and applications to support and empower teachers and students, including online courses, blended or hybrid learning, or digital content and resources. Additionally, digital learning can be used for professional learning opportunities for teachers and to provide personalized learning experiences for students.
Digital learning advances school reform by increasing equity and access to educational opportunities, improving effectiveness and productivity of teachers and administrators, providing student-centered learning to ensure college and career readiness for all students, and recognizing teachers as education designers.
Why celebrate Digital Learning Day?
With so many new types of digital devices, educational software and mobile apps continuously developed, it’s hard to keep up with the latest and greatest advancements in educational technology. In some classrooms and out-of-school programs across the country, educators are doing some pretty amazing things with technology. Yet, these pockets of innovation are confined to a small number of schools and communities. Digital Learning Day was started as a way to actively spread innovative practices and ensure that all youth have access to high-quality digital learning opportunities no matter where they live.
Started in 2012, Digital Learning Day has provided a powerful venue for education leaders to highlight great teaching practice and showcase innovative teachers, leaders, and instructional technology programs that are improving student outcomes. This grassroots effort blossomed into a massive nationwide celebration as teachers realized that Digital Learning Day is not about technology, it’s about learning. It’s not about laying off teachers for laptops, it’s about enhancing the role of the teachers.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
Getting Smart: How Digital Learning Is Changing the World
March 1, Unplugging DayJust what is the Day of Unplugging? Well, it is no secret that we are increasingly connected to the world around us. Smartphones, tablets, WiFi access and the Internet have enabled us to be connected to the entire world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every single day of the year. This offers endless possibilities and has of course widened many people’s horizons immensely by showing them what the world is like thousands of miles away.
However, there are also times in our lives when we seem to forget just how necessary it is to step back from out digital devices and other gadgetry and actually perform the ancient art of speaking with people around us and observe the world that is all around us, and not just the pixels forming images of reality on the screen in front of us.
Not to mention how much we could help the environment by deciding to set our electrical equipment aside every now and then and just meet up with the people we’re endlessly e-chatting with for a coffee. The Day of Unplugging was created to do all of these things and more.
The National Day of Unplugging was created by Reboot, a nonprofit Jewish community that was originally established in 2003. However, you do not need to be Jewish, or even religious at all to participate.
The idea behind the day was to challenge people to keep their electronic devices unplugged and unused for 24 hours in order to give themselves the chance to take a break and spend time relaxing with family, friends, or alone. This is definitely something that would be useful to everyone, regardless of religion or lack of it. Reboot believes that such time taken to “reboot” or systems will make us happier, more content with our lives, and more aware of the things that matter.
Celebrating this day is quite simple. All that one is required to do is to disconnect from the virtual “matrix” which has come to define every waking moment of our lives. So power down that laptop, leave the smartphone at home and avoid email for twenty-four hours. Instead, take a walk in a local park, and don’t just rush through the park to get it over with, either.
Take the time to observe the way the squirrels scamper up and down the trees, or the way the water flows in a stream, or how a mother duck looks after her young. Don’t just look at it as if it were a picture in a book, realize that you are a part of it, a part of nature, and appreciate that. Or you could go have a cup of coffee with a friend during which you talk about every issue that comes to mind, the large and the small, because these are the things that life is made of, all of them.
And of course do not take your phone out to text while nodding absent-mindedly, as that would defeat the entire purpose of the outing. In this sense, the art of “powering down” can produce some truly relaxing results, so put down that smartphone and take advantage of this truly pleasurable experience.
Source:/www.nationaldayofunplugging.com
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
2nd March, 2019 is Dr. Seuss DayDr. Seuss Day is a full twenty-four hours to make a mess with the Cat in the Hat, dance around with the Fox in Sox, hear a Who with Horton, count the red and blue fish, help the Grinch see the error of his ways, and listen to Sam I Am’s friend complain about his dish of green eggs and ham, the ungrateful hairball!
Theodor Seuss Geisel, commonly known by his pen name Dr. Seuss, was a writer, poet and cartoonist. Though best known as a children’s author (he released a whopping forty-six books for tykes), his career also saw him work as an illustrator for advertising campaigns and a political cartoonist during the Second World War. He was also a true perfectionist, known to discard 95% of his material before settling on a theme for a new book, sometimes spending up to a year writing a single story, and preferring payment upon completion, rather than in advance.
March 2nd is a celebration of his life and works, as it was on this day in 1904 that he entered the world. Having lived eighty-seven years and made an incredible impact on numerous generations, he died in 1991 at his home in La Jolla, California. His many bizarre, colourful and zany tales are still cherished by young and old alike, and, having been translated into more than twenty languages, are read all across the world every single day.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss
Event Date: March 3, 1875Location: Paris, France
Carmen, now one of the most popular and frequently performed operas in the world, had its premiere on this day in Paris. But its story of an army officer's seduction – and betrayal – by a voluptuous and sensuous cigarette factory worker stunned its French audience and the first performance was greeted with stony silence.
Until this ‘vulgar’ new opera came along and shook the public, the composer, Georges Bizet, had enjoyed moderate success.
But nobody was prepared for the opera's theme of erotic obsession, the sight of women smoking on stage and the parade of “low-life” characters.
One critic noted that the audience in Paris was “shocked by the drastic realism of the action”. Others said that the audience was scandalised by the opera’s "obscenity" and "immorality".
Critics went on to have a field day, condemning Carmen as “vulgar”, “undramatic” and “contemptible”. What's more, a noted librettist and dramatist of the day, Jean Henri Dupin, wrote: "I won't mince words. Carmen is a flop, a disaster! It will never play more than twenty times. The music goes on and on. It never stops. There's not even time to applaud."
Performances did continue after the disastrous premiere but as word spread of the critical onslaught and the negative audience reaction, the opera house had to give away free tickets to fill seats.
Bizet was stunned by the reception his work received. He believed he had written something greater than all his other works and had written in a letter to a friend that he had “absolute certainty of having found my path”.
He added: “They make out that I am obscure, complicated, tedious, more fettered by technical skill than lit by inspiration. Well, this time I have written a work that is full of clarity and vivacity, full of colour and melody.”
Today's critics would agree with him. In the first Act Carmen and her fellow cigarette-factory workers stream out at the end of a day. In the colourful scene local young men surround them and start to flirt – but singing the unforgettable Habanera, Carmen explains her heart can’t be tied down: "Love is a rebellious bird that none can tame".
When she is arrested for an attack on another woman with a knife, Carmen comes up with an escape plan that involves seducing the soldier Don José. The pair become lovers and run away together, but their happiness will be short-lived and end in tragedy.
On the night of Carmen’s 31st performance Bizet died of a heart attack, still believing his opera was a failure. He would never know that his scandalous opera about an irrepressible young Spanish woman would go on to become one of the best known and best loved pieces of music of all time.
The tragedy of the composer's death at the tender age of 36 reawakened interest in Carmen, and it was soon revived with great success. Within months, a second production in Vienna was acclaimed a masterpiece and in the next three years it was produced in most of the major opera houses of Europe.
After that, it conquered the world – and has continued to do so to this day.
Source: www.onthisday.com
Carmen de Prosper Mérimée
March 4 - "The day nothing happened"I’m sure that something did happen on this day March 4 in History. Only in a poem, however, is possible that nothing happened. There is also a book you can read free here below. It is a sci-fi story which will take place next June 18th. Let’s wait and see ...
The Day Nothing Happened
On that day in history, history
took a day off. Current events
were uneventful. Breaking news
never broke. Nobody
of any import was born, or died.
(If you were born that day,
bask in the inverted glory
of your unimportance.)
No milestones, no disasters.
The most significant thing going on
was a golf tournament (the Masters).
It was a Sunday. In Washington,
President Eisenhower
(whose very name induces sleep)
practiced his putt
on the carpet of the Oval Office,
a little white ball crossing
and recrossing the presidential seal
like one of Jupiter’s moons
or a hypnotist’s watch.
On the radio, Perry Como
was putting everyone into a coma.
But the very next day,
in New York City,
Bill Haley & His Comets
recorded “Rock Around the Clock;”
and a few young people
began to regain consciousness …
while history, like Polyphemus
waking from a one-day slumber,
stumbled out of his cave,
blinked his giant eye, and peered around
for something to destroy.
by Jeffrey Harrison
"The Day Nothing Happened" by Jeffrey Harrison from Into Daylight. © Tupelo Press, 2014.
The Day That Nothing Happened
March 6, 1475 Michelangelo was born.Considered one of the greatest artists of all time. Most celebrated for the paintings in the Sistine Chapel and his statue of David, he made countless other masterpieces.
Many people don’t realize that beyond being a sculptor and painter Michelangelo was also a poet. Michelangelo took great pride in his artwork he had a much more humble view of his poetry calling it, “something foolish”. Michelangelo wrote over 300 poems. Many of his most impressive sonnets were written to his close friend Vittoria Colonna. Along with his poems of admiration and devotion are poems of a spiritual and mystical nature.
CELESTIAL LOVE
No mortal thing enthralled these longing eyes
When perfect peace in thy fair face I found;
But far within, where all is holy ground,
My soul felt Love, her comrade of the skies:
For she was born with God in Paradise;
Nor all the shows of beauty shed around
This fair false world her wings to earth have bound:
Unto the Love of Loves aloft she flies.
Nay, things that suffer death, quench not the fire
Of deathless spirits; nor eternity
Serves sordid Time, that withers all things rare.
Not love but lawless impulse is desire:
That slays the soul; our love makes still more fair
Our friends on earth, fairer in death on high.
Translation of "Celestial Love" by John Addington Symonds (1840-1893).
DANTE
What should be said of him cannot be said;
By too great splendor is his name attended;
To blame is easier than those who him offended,
Than reach the faintest glory round him shed.
This man descended to the doomed and dead
For our instruction; then to God ascended;
Heaven opened wide to him its portals splendid,
Who from his country's, closed against him, fled.
Ungrateful land! To its own prejudice
Nurse of his fortunes; and this showeth well
That the most perfect most of grief shall see.
Among a thousand proofs let one suffice,
That as his exile hath no parallel,
Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he.
Translated into English by H.W. Longfellow (1807-1882).
THE DOOM OF BEAUTY
Choice soul, in whom, as in a glass, we see,
Mirrored in thy pure form and delicate,
What beauties heaven and nature can create,
The paragon of all their works to be!
Fair soul, in whom love, pity, piety,
Have found a home, as from thy outward state
We clearly read, and are so rare and great
That they adorn none other like to thee!
Love takes me captive; beauty binds my soul;
Pity and mercy with their gentle eyes
Wake in my heart a hope that cannot cheat.
What law, what destiny, what fell control,
What cruelty, or late or soon, denies
That death should spare perfection so complete?
English translation of "The Doom of Beauty" was composed by John Addington Symonds (1840-1893).
Source: https://www.michelangelo-gallery.com/...
Michelangelo's Notebooks: The Poetry, Letters, and Art of the Great Master
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The United Nations instituted International Women's Day, celebrated every year on March 8, to commemorate the contribution of women in the socio-political sphere as well as in global peace and security.International Women's Day can be traced back to the women's suffrage movement starting in the 19th century. Over many decades, women achieved tremendous progress in many areas of life. Women's emancipation from traditional roles took on new meaning when they traveled into space and fought alongside men in combat.
Insightful Quotes About Womenhood
Mahatma Gandhi
"Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacity."
Farrah Fawcett
"God gave women intuition and femininity. Used properly, the combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met."
Harriet Beecher Stowe
"Women are the real architects of society."
Charles Malik
"The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world."
Barbara Bush
"Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. I wish him well!"
Virginia Woolf
"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size."
Timothy Leary
"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."
Ville Valo
"Women are always beautiful.."
Loretta Young
"A charming woman doesn’t follow the crowd. She is herself."
Philip Moeller
"Women are seldom silent. Their beauty is forever speaking for them."
Nancy Pelosi
"Women are leaders everywhere you look -- from the CEO who runs a Fortune 500 company to the housewife who raises her children and heads her household. Our country was built by strong women and we will continue to break down walls and defy stereotypes."
Melinda Gates
"A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman. But the search to find that voice can be remarkably difficult."
Eleanor Roosevelt
"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission."
Robert Elliott Gonzales, "Poems and Paragraphs"
"All the world's a stage, and it's a dead easy guess which sex has all the speaking parts."
Louise Otto
"The history of all times, and of today especially, teaches that women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves."
Margaret Sanger
"A free race cannot be born of slave mothers."
Mel Gibson
"I love women. They're the best thing ever created. If they want to be like men and come down to our level, that's fine."
Ellen DeGeneres
"I really don't think I need buns of steel. I'd be happy with buns of cinnamon."
Joseph Conrad
"Being a woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men."
Margaret Thatcher
"If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman."
Christabel Pankhurst
"Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us."
Roseanne Barr
"The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it."
Erma Bombeck
"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else."
David Bower
"Dream the dreams that have never been dreamt."
Source: www.thoughtco.com
Women Building The World: A Poetic International Women's Day Collection
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keTF4...
Done by the class of the daughter of a friend of mine in Venice. I like it a lot also because it reminds me of what we are doing here: talking in variuos "languages" (even if we use on English for clarity, we speack so many different languages and come from so many different worlds!), always with respect
LauraT wrote: "No mimosas, but repsecthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keTF4...
Done by the class of the daughter of a friend of mine in Venice. I like it a lot also because it reminds me of what we are doin..."
Also respect of different idendities ...
March 9, 1892It’s the birthday of English poet, novelist, and gardener Vita Sackville-West in Kent, England.
Sackville-West had a decade-long affair with fellow writer Virginia Woolf. Woolf used her as the inspiration for the androgynous title character of her famous novel Orlando: A Biography (1928). Sackville-West’s son Nigel once referred to the novel as “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature.” She spent her childhood in the enormous Knole House, which was designed as a “calendar house”: it had 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances, and seven courtyards.
The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf
Event Date: March 10, 1876Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
On this day in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell reputedly spoke to his assistant Thomas A. Watson with the first recognizable sentence transmitted by phone: “Mr. Watson come here, I want you.” It was the briefest of conversations, but it proved to be a pioneering moment in telecoms history.
Scottish-born Bell made the call over 100ft of wire during trials in his Boston laboratory in the US, summoning his electrician assistant from the adjoining room.
In his journal for that day, Bell writes: “To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.”
The two men changed places and Bell listened as Watson read passages from a book over the device. Bell records: “It was certainly the case that articulate sounds proceeded from the speaker. The effect was loud but indistinct and muffled.”
Just three days earlier, Bell had been granted a US patent for his invention. But it wasn’t an instant success. Communications company Western Union rejected the opportunity to buy the rights for $100,000, believing it wasn’t a rival to the telegraph. A decision it later regretted.
In September that year, a non-working model of Bell’s phone was exhibited at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Glasgow by physicist and engineer Sir William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin. He dubbed it: “The greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph.” Three months later, Bell was awarded his UK patent. The first pair of practical telephones seen in Great Britain arrived in July 1877, brought by Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer and Electrician of the Post Office.
The first telephone service in the UK was offered by The Telephone Company set up in 1878 to market Bell’s telephone, a predecessor of today's BT.
David Hay, head of heritage and archives for BT, said: "Although today there is controversy over the true inventor of the telephone, there is no doubt that Bell was the most significant pioneer who made the commercial opportunity of the telephone a reality, both in the USA and in the UK. And BT is directly descended from the company that first commercialized Bell’s telephone patent in the UK."
Source: www.onthisday.com
Who Was Alexander Graham Bell?
Born today March 11 in 1544 in the Italian city of Sorrento, poet Torquato Tasso is perhaps most well-known for his work Jerusalem Delivered which presented a mythical account of the First Crusade. Often noted as one of the most popularly read poets in Europe, Tasso suffered from mental health problems throughout his life. His father was a famous lyric poet from noble birth and enjoyed the patronage of the Prince of Salerno until the political atmosphere changed. Whilst Tasso was a child, his father was declared a rebel and the boy spent some of his childhood with his mother under the tutelage of a Jesuit school in Naples. Tasso was precocious in his studies and moved to join his father again in Rome when 8 where the two lived in relative poverty for a while.
His father accepted a place in the Court of Urbino in 1557 and Tasso was noted as an intelligent and witty companion to the then Duke of Urbino. For the rest of his childhood, Tasso was lucky enough to live in comfortable refinement and by the time he was nearly 20 he found himself at the castle in Ferrara. There he gained the reputation as a philosopher critic with his work Discourses on the Art of Poetry. Although his father died shortly after, this was a happy period for the poet and writer and he became something of an idol in the Italian court of the day.
In 1570, now under the patronage of two princesses, Tasso traveled to Paris with the then cardinal. But Tasso’s outspoken liveliness and lack of tact caused him to leave after only a year and return to Italy where he went into service with the cardinal’s brother. During this time, Tasso wrote Aminta and completed his seminal work Jerusalem Delivered in 1574.
Jerusalem Delivered is an epic poem that was popular with the people and literary critics at the same time, quickly seen as one of the major classics of European literature. It was Tasso’s best work and afterwards his life seemed to stumble as if he had achieved all that he was meant to. He gave the epic poem to a number of eminent poets and critics who each wanted to force changes upon the work. Tasso had already been suffering from health problems and began to suffer fevers and other strange maladies as his epic poem was carefully dissected by others.
Back at the court of Ferrara Tasso’s health began to worsen even more. The other courtiers would often insult him and shortly after he developed some mania that his servants were all conspiring to persecute him. In 1576, Tasso got into an argument with a gentleman called Maddalo and drew his sword. Unfortunately this altercation was witnessed by the Duchess of Urbino and Tasso was arrested but then released by the Duke who took him to his country estate for ‘a change of air’.
Increasingly paranoid, however, Tasso thought that the Duke intended to murder him and escaped sometime later into the country, returning to his sister’s home in Sorrento. He wrote to the court asking to be accepted back, which was duly granted, but his mental health issues persisted, resulting in his being sent to the asylum at St Anna. He wrote little poetry during this period and became upset when he heard that his masterpiece Jerusalem Delivered was being published without his permission.
Whilst he left St Anna’s in 1586, he continued to suffer ill health but, in 1592, his luck seemed to have changed with a pension from the Pope and a ceremony that was planned to crown him as poet laureate for Italy. Tasso’s health gave way in 1595 before he was crowned and he died at the age of 51 whilst in Rome.
Whilst he left St Anna’s in 1586, he continued to suffer ill health but, in 1592, his luck seemed to have changed with a pension from the Pope and a ceremony that was planned to crown him as poet laureate for Italy. Tasso’s health gave way in 1595 before he was crowned and he died at the age of 51 whilst in Rome.
Source: www.mypoeticside.com
Jerusalem Delivered
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Someone all students in Italy never fogets!!!!
March 12, 1945 - Today is the date attributed to the death of Anne Frank. But the exact date is of course unknown, for the 15-year-old Jewish diarist was just one of some 18,000 to die from the typhus epidemic that spread like wildfire through Bergen-Belsen during March 1945, as the overcrowded concentration camp struggled to cope with the influx of Jewish prisoners from the east in the face of the Soviet advance. And as the Nazi war machine at long last began to collapse, its infamous and obsessive record-keeping gave way to disorder. So, all that is known for certain about the death of Anne Frank is that it was sometime around this date, her body thrown into a mass grave. For two years, she and her family evaded extermination hidden in the Secret Annex.
Following their capture and arrest, she evaded the human infernos of Auschwitz before being relocated to Bergen-Belsen. But by March 1945, Anne Frank had finally lost that unsullied hope that would someday inspire millions. Her mother had remained in Auschwitz, where she died of starvation. Just weeks earlier, her sister Margot died of dysentery in front of Anne’s eyes. Unaware that her father was still alive, and so without anything left to live for, Anne threw off her lice- and flea-ridden prison garb, wrapped her emaciated naked body in a blanket, and died alone. Just three weeks later, on 15th April 1945, the British liberated Bergen-Belsen.
Excepting Adolf Hitler himself, Anne Frank is surely the most memorable figure to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. Her poignant account of the greatest evil imaginable revealed a gifted writer and profound thinker who humanised the inhumane. From beyond that unidentified mass grave near Bergen-Belsen, she became one of the most powerful voices of the twentieth century. And so, while we regrettably cannot know the exact date of her heartbreaking demise, let us nevertheless take this opportunity to remember and salute her.
Source: www.onthisdeity.com
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
On this date March 13 in 2003, the journal Nature reported the discovery of 350,000-year-old fossilized human footprints in Italy. They are arguably the oldest known human footprints; an older set, dating back three and a half million years, was discovered in Tanzania in 1979, but they probably belonged to hominids not directly related to our species, Homo sapiens. The Italian footprints reported in Nature are about eight inches long and four inches wide, and their makers were probably no taller than five feet.The oldest human footprints have been found in volcanic ash in Italy.They were made by individuals scrambling down the flanks of an active volcano about 350,000 years ago.
Italian scientists, who identified three separate fossilised trackways, say the people that made them walked on two feet using their hands only to steady themselves on a difficult descent.
"They're the oldest footprints to be found of the genus Homo, the group that we belong to," the researchers told the BBC.
Commentators say the prints were probably made by Homo heidelbergensis, a forerunner of Neanderthals, that dominated Europe at this time. 'A shocking experience'. Paolo Mietto and colleagues from the University of Padua studied the trackways, known to locals as "devil's trails", and say they are particularly detailed. The prints were found in the western margin of the Roccamonfina volcanic complex in southern Italy, in a pyroclastic flow dated between 385,000 and 325,000 years ago.
"We found three sets of footprints. One set came down in a zig-zag, while another showed that the person didn't run but walked normally," Dr Mietto told BBC News Online. Occasional handprints are also visible, suggesting that the hands were used for steadying the individual during the steep descent, but otherwise each person walked upright. On one of the trackways, the footprints make two sharp turns, presumably made in order to also negotiate the descent more easily.
"Finding the footprints was a shocking experience - an astounding experience because I wasn't expecting to find something like that. It was astounding because the footprints were so well preserved," said Dr Mietto. Commenting on the discovery, Professor Clive Gamble, director of the Centre for Palaeolithic Archaeology at Southampton University, UK, told BBC News Online: "By 385,000 years ago, hominids are hunting and making really quite elaborate stone tools. But we still don't have much evidence of campsites. These were very well adapted and successful hominids …. (cont.d)
Source: www.news.bbc.co.uk
Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
14th March, 2019 will be ... Pi DayPi, wonderful pi. It plays into so many aspects of our lives and goes on forever and ever and ever and ever and eve… You get the point. Every year there comes a certain day that shares numerical values with Pi, and on that day there is a celebration of Pi with every kind of Pie you can imagine. You see, pies are round, and Pi is circumference over diameter, a number that, while being functionally infinite, also happens to be a constant in every circle ever. Pi day celebrates the long history of this fantastic number, and the long journey science has taken (and is still on) to seek the end of a number known to be infinite in length.
The history of pi day is, without a doubt, intrinsically tied to the origins of the number itself. The need for pi is as old as the wheel itself, and many techniques have been tried in many cultures to capture this elusive number in mathematics. The reach for the whole of this number was difficult, with ancient mathematical cultures only being able to barely find out to the seventh decimal, and Indian mathematicians (some of the greatest of their time) could only manage to decipher it out to five.
Pi is truly one of the most fascinating numbers in existence, and the quest for the ultimate end of Pi has been sought for time out of mind. This seems a fool’s errand, given that it seems to extend infinitely in mathematical loops beyond and nothing has ever been found to contest this, this is particularly remarkable when you consider the following: modern techniques have been used to calculate pi out to millions of digits, and at no point has the pattern ever been found to reliably repeat itself.
Ahhh an easier and more delicious question has never been posited! How do we celebrate Pi day? Why, by eating a great deal of Pie! Remember, Pies are circles, Pi describes circles, and through that we find that everything in the universe can be described with a pi(e). Other ways to celebrate this most amazing and transcendental of days (Pi is a transcendental number, look it up) is to research this number and discover all the amazing secrets it hides. Once you really get to understand the depths and complexities of it, you’ll understand why Pi day exists to celebrate a simple combination of digits.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
Easy as Pi: The Countless Ways We Use Numbers Every Day
I have 2 rhubarb custard pies in the oven right now to take to work for Pi day!
Evelyn wrote: "I have 2 rhubarb custard pies in the oven right now to take to work for Pi day!"Enjoy!
March 15 is the Ides of March, the day Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by conspirators in 44 B.C.E.The ambitious Julius had a tense relationship with the Roman Senate. The Senate felt he was a threat to the Republic, and that he had tyrannical leanings. The Senate had the real power, and any titles they gave him were intended to be honorary. They had conferred upon him the title of "dictator in perpetuity," but when they went to where he sat in the Temple of Venus Genetrix to give him the news, he remained seated, which was considered a mark of disrespect. Thus offended, the Senate became sensitive to any hints that Julius Caesar viewed himself as a king or — worse — a god. The tribunes arrested any citizen who placed laurel crowns on statues of Julius, and Julius in turn censured the tribunes.
Senators Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus formed a group called the Liberators, who met in secret to conspire against Julius. Several assassination plots were put forward and rejected for one reason or another, but finally they settled on attacking him at a meeting of the Senate in the Theatre of Pompey. Only senators were allowed to be present, and knives could be easily concealed in the drapery of their togas.
In the days leading up to the assassination, several people warned Caesar not to attend the meeting of the Senate. Even his wife Calpurnia begged him not to go on the basis of a dream she had had, but Brutus convinced him that it would be unmanly to listen to gossip and the pleadings of a mere woman, so Julius set off. According to Plutarch, he passed a seer on his way. The seer had recently told Julius that great harm would come to him on the ides of March. Julius recognized the seer, and quipped, "The ides of March have come." The seer remarked, "Aye, Caesar; but not gone." When Julius arrived at the Senate, he was set upon by Brutus, Cassius, and the others, who stabbed him dozens of times. He slowly bled to death, and for several hours afterward, his body was left where he fell.
The assassination that was meant to save the Republic actually resulted, ultimately, in its downfall. It sparked a series of civil wars and led to Julius' heir, Octavian, becoming Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
The Ides of March
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Even if I'm Italian and we've studied Roman History and Caesar's life many times during my school years, it is Shakespeare that is linked with him in my heart and mind!
LauraT wrote: "My first exam at University was English Litrerature, with a monographic course on Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.Even if I'm Italian and we've studied Roman Histo..."
The Bard is in everybody's heart and mind. Thanks Laura
Event Date: March 19, 1813Location: Ujiji, Tanzania, Africa
David Livingstone, born on this day, became not only a famous African explorer, he also turned into one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th Century.
Among his attributes, he was a pioneering medical missionary, a scientific investigator and an anti-slavery crusader, at the same time as being an enthusiastic supporter of colonial expansion and trade.
In 1866 he set out to find the source of the River Nile, but when nothing was heard from him journalist Henry Morton Stanley was commissioned in 1869 to find the explorer.
Livingstone, it must be said, had an ulterior motive for seeking the Nile's source. Though it was an ancient mystery, mere geographical accomplishments took second place to his passionate desire for ending the East African Arab-Swahili slave trade. He is reported to have said: "The Nile sources are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power with which I hope to remedy an immense evil."
In fact, he never did find the source. It was discovered by Sir Richard Francis Burton, English scholar, traveller and translator of the Arabian Nights. Livingstone at least had the consolation of being the first European to see the Mosi-o-Tunya (the "Smoke that Thunders") waterfall. Describing it later, he wrote: "Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight." Livingstone honoured his Queen by calling it Victoria Falls.
Pushing through what is now Tanzania with more than 100 porters, many of whom deserted or became incapacitated by tropical disease, Stanley was to finally encounter his quarry in the town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Livingstone was clearly thin, ill and weak – and surrounded by a possibly unfriendly tribe.
Theologian and writer the Very Rev William Garden Blaikie was later asked by Livingstone's family to write a biography of the adventurer. His book, The Life of David Livingstone, published in 1880, includes an account of the historic encounter:
'As I advanced towards him,' says Mr Stanley, 'I noticed he was pale, looking wearied, had a grey beard, wore a bluish cap with a faded gold band round it, had on a red-sleeved waistcoat and a pair of grey tweed trousers.
'I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of such a mob, – would have embraced him, only he being an Englishman, I did not know how he would receive me; so I did what cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing – walked deliberately to him, took off my hat and said:
'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
'Yes,' said he, with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly.
I replace my hat on my head, and he puts on his cap, and we both grasp hands, and then I say aloud:
'I thank God, Doctor, I have been permitted to see you.'
He answers: 'I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.'
A greeting hardly as stirring as Veni Vidi Vici, or I Have A Dream, but the words became famous partly because of their humour: apart from Livingstone there was no white man around for hundreds of miles.
David Livingstone died two years later from malaria, aged 60.
Source: www.onthisday.com
David Livingstone: The Unexplored Story
March 20 is the first day of spring, the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The Earth is tilted on its axis, so as it travels around the sun each pole is sometimes tilted toward the sun and sometimes tilted away. It is this tilt that causes the seasons, as well as the shortening and lengthening of daylight hours. On this day, the North and South Poles are equally distant from the sun, so we will have almost exactly the same amount of daytime as nighttime.
Emily Dickinson said: “A little Madness in the Spring / Is wholesome even for the King.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Spring still makes spring in the mind,
When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old.”
Mark Twain said: “It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want — oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
Held every year on 21 March, World Poetry Day celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity. Practiced throughout history – in every culture and on every continent – poetry speaks to our common humanity and our shared values, transforming the simplest of poems into a powerful catalyst for dialogue and peace.
UNESCO first adopted 21 March as World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999, with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard. World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media. As poetry continues to bring people together across continents, all are invited to join in.
MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR-GENERAL
"Every form of poetry is unique, but each reflects the universal of the human experience, the aspiration for creativity that crosses all boundaries and borders of time, as well as space in the constant affirmation of humanity as a single family. That’s the power of poetry!"
— Audrey Azoulay, Director-General, on the occasion of 2019 World Poetry Day
Source: www.en.unesco.org
World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time
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March 24, 1603 - the Passing of Queen Elizabeth I.John Manningham was an English lawyer and diarist who wrote this especially moving entry on the passing of Queen Elizabeth I:
"March 24, 1603. This morning about three at clocke hir Majestie departed this lyfe, mildly like a lambe, easily like a ripe apple from the tree. Dr Parry told me that he was present, and sent his prayers before hir soule; and I doubt not but she is amongst the royall saints in Heaven in eternall joyes.
"About ten at clocke the Counsel and diverse noblemen having bin a while in consultacion, proclaymed James the 6, King of Scots, the King of England, Fraunce, and Irland, beginning at Whitehall gates; where Sir Robert Cecile reade the proclamacion and after reade againe in Cheapside.
"The proclamacion was heard with greate expectacion and silent joye, noe greate shouting. I thinke the sorrowe for hir Majesties departure was soe deep in many hearts they could not soe suddenly showe anie greate joy, though it could not be lesse than exceeding greate for the succession of soe worthy a king. And at night they shewed it by bonefires, and ringing. Noe tumult, noe contradicion, noe disorder in the city; every man went about his business, as readylie, as peaceably, as securely, as though there had bin noe change, nor any newes ever heard of competitors. God be thanked, our king hath his right!"
Source: www.onthisday.com
The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age
March 28, 1941: Virginia Woolf dies. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Adeline Virginia Woolf, née Stephen 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941, was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is a 1962 Broadway play about the troubled marriage of a middle-aged couple named Martha and George. The play critiques the idea of the perfect American family and challenges social expectations about life, love and family. The play was written by American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee, whose other plays include the Zoo Story, a Delicate Balance, Seascape and the Sandbox. Albee’s plays are considered critiques on modern society and often highlight the growing pains and disillusionment of the 1960s.
Since the play first premiered in 1962, the title has confused many and made people wonder if the play was actually about Virginia Woolf. Author Caroline Zoob, who wrote a book titled Virginia Woolf’s Garden about her years as a caretaker at Virginia Woolf’s country home, Monk’s House, stated that one of the most frequent questions she overheard visitors ask when touring the house was: “So why were people so afraid of her then?”
Although the title does reference Virginia Woolf, the play is not about her at all. Yet, there are still a number of connections between the two. The title itself is a play on words that Albee saw scrawled on a mirror in a Greenwich Village bar one night in 1954, according to an interview with Albee in the Paris Review: “I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf . . . who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke.”
The original title of the play was Exorcism and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” was just a line in the play. Albee later adopted it as the subtitle of the play and then some time after that decided to make it the main title. Martha sings the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” in the play and in the 1966 film but in live stage productions the song is usually changed to “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” due to licensing restrictions.
Similarity to Lappin and Lapinova:
Around 1962, Albee wrote to Leonard Woolf and asked if it would be okay to use Virginia’s name in the title. Leonard gave his permission and when the play came to London, he went to see it with his friend Peggy Ashcroft. He later wrote to Albee, praising the play and suggesting a possible connection between it and a similar story Virginia once wrote: ‘We both enjoyed it immensely. It is so amusing and at the same time moving and is really about the important things in life. Nothing is rarer, at any rate, on the English stage. I wonder if you have ever read a short story which my wife wrote and is printed in A Haunted House? It is called ‘Lappin and Lapinova.’ The details are quite different but the theme is the same as that of the imaginary child in your play.”
Albee never claimed to have read the short story but the plot is somewhat similar. In Lappin and Lapinova, a married couple having trouble coping with a dreary childless marriage invent a secret fantasy world where both the husband and wife are rabbits. Virginia and Leonard never had children themselves, upon the advice of Virginia’s doctors who said her mind was too fragile to cope with motherhood, and it was the Woolf’s marriage, or perhaps marriage in general, that may have inspired the short story, according to the book “Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf”: “Susan Dick posits that ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ is the work alluded to when Woolf wrote to Vanessa Bell on October 24, 1938 that ‘marriage, as I suddenly for the first time realised walking in the Square, reduces one to damnable servility. Can’t be helped. I’m going to write a comedy about it.’ The story is about a young wife, Rosalind Thorburn, who attempts to mitigate the dreariness of her marriage by engaging her husband in an elaborate narrative about two rabbits. Rosalind’s Shakespearean name name links her to Orlando; but ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ is, in fact, a kind of reverse Orlando, in which the marriage of two utterly dissimilar people depends entirely on the painstaking creation of a ‘little language’ that inevitable collapses.”
Like the two main characters, Leonard and Virginia also had animal nicknames for each other. Virginia’s nickname was “Mandril” and Leonard’s was “Mongoose,” which they would use in letters to each other, such as in a letter Leonard once wrote to Virginia where he stated: “I hope the Mandril went to its box early and isn’t worried by anything in the world.” Although Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf doesn’t involve animals, the two stories otherwise share a similar plot about a couple trying to avoid reality by living in a fantasy world.
Source: www.virginiawoolfblog.com
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
March 29, 1772Today we celebrate the extraordinary scholar, philosopher, mystic and prophet, Emanuel Swedenborg, who left this world – just as he had predicted – two hundred and forty-four years ago today. Prophecy it was that brought greatest fame to Swedenborg, probably his most astonishing example of second sight occurring when – 300 miles away at a party in Gothenburg – he informed fellow guests that a great fire had broken out in his native Stockholm and would be extinguished just three doors from his own house. In every detail of the fire, Swedenborg was correct. Subsequently, he endeared himself to Sweden’s Queen Louisa Ulrike when, by disclosing information that only she could have known, Swedenborg brought her news of her deceased brother from the afterlife. But prophecy was just one of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s arsenal of talents, and, like T.C. Lethbridge, he only achieved his vision states when deep into his 50s, after a long working life of extraordinary scholarship and endeavour. Indeed, had Swedenborg not entered into these mystical states, he most surely would have been remembered as one of the great scholars of his age – bringing forth book upon book, tome upon tome; the width of his collective works must be measured on the shelf not by the inch but by the foot or even by the yard.
It is not the place of this On This Deity entry to lambast its readers with a seemingly endless inventory of Swedenborg’s works or feats of magic; rather we must understand that in Emanuel Swedenborg we find a rare, nay the rarest Gurdjieffian approach. That is, that by a combination of rigorous scholarly hard work and acceptance of the physical and the laborious solving of important State problems, the ever persistent Swedenborg “broke on through” to inhabit in his later years what appears to have been an almost permanent vision state. If it is true, however, that almost half a century before those visions commenced, Swedenborg – as has been claimed – transported six of King Charles XII’s warships across a fifteen-mile isthmus of land in only six weeks, then we can only conclude that for this great World Genius, the mystery and magic of his later life was even in his youth never more than a lightning flash away.
Source: www.onthisdeity.com
The Works of Emanuel Swedenborg
Beau Brummell, byname of George Bryan Brummell, (born June 7, 1778, London—died March 30, 1840, Caen, Fr.)English dandy, famous for his friendship with George, Prince of Wales (regent from 1811 and afterward King George IV). Brummell was deemed the leader of fashion at the beginning of the 19th century.
Brummell’s grandfather was a shopkeeper in the parish of St. James, London, who let lodgings to the aristocracy; his father was private secretary to Lord North from 1770 to 1782 and subsequently high sheriff of Berkshire. From his early years Brummell paid great attention to his dress. At Eton, where he was sent to school in 1790 and was extremely popular, he was known as “Buck Brummell,” and at Oxford, where he spent a brief period as an undergraduate at Oriel College, he preserved this reputation for fashion and added to it that of a wit. He returned to London, where the Prince of Wales, to whom he had been presented at Eton, gave him a commission in his own regiment (1794). Brummell soon became intimate with his patron, and, in 1798, having then reached the rank of captain, he left the service.
In 1799 he succeeded to a fortune of about £30,000 (a bequest from his father, who had died in 1794). Setting up a bachelor establishment in Mayfair, he became, as a result of the Prince of Wales’s friendship and his own good taste in dress, the recognized arbiter of fashion and a frequenter of all society’s gatherings. For a time his influence was unchallenged, but eventually gambling and extravagance exhausted his fortune, while his tongue proved too sharp for his royal patron. They quarreled in 1812, and, although Brummell did not immediately lose his place in society, his debts increased so much that on May 16, 1816, he fled to Calais to avoid his creditors. There he struggled on for 14 years, always hopelessly in debt. From 1830 to 1832 he was British consul at Caen. In 1835 he was imprisoned for debt, but his friends once more came to the rescue and provided him with a small income. He soon lost all his interest in dress; his personal appearance was slovenly and dirty, and he began to live fantasies in the past. In 1837, after two attacks of paralysis, shelter was found for him in the charitable asylum of Bon Sauveur, Caen, where he spent his final years.
Source: www.britannica.com
Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style
31st March, 2019 will be World Backup DayHave you backed up your data recently? Every day people, businesses, even games lose huge amounts of valuable data because they fail to follow this one basic procedure.
World Backup Day is set aside as a reminder to back up your files, even if it’s once a year! A backup is a reserve copy of all the files you’d be loathe to use. There’s nothing more traumatizing than having losing your phone, or having your hard drive crash, and having hundreds of valuable and irreplaceable documents or photos suddenly gone beyond retrieval.
No matter how secure or safe you feel your data and equipment is, it’s important to back up your files. 30% of people don’t have any way to save their important files in the event that tragedy strikes. In our electronic based world, there are hundreds of ways to suddenly have things go terribly awry. 29% of all disasters are caused by accidents, costing valuable time and money as the resources they affected are lost forever. You may feel your computer is safe, but 1 in 10 of all computers, including household and business computers, are infected with a virus that may suddenly cause all of your data to be gone beyond retrieval.
“But my phone is always on me!” I hear you say! Wonderful! That’ll make it easier for you to be one of the 113 phones stolen every minute, each day. In this modern digital world, many of us live from our phones. Whether it’s for business, or just personal use, these electronic assistants often contain gigs of valuable documents, pictures, videos, and music. Do you really want to chance losing all of that when backup options are so easy and available?
“Easy? How do I backup my files and protect myself?” There ya go! Now we’re asking the right questions! There are a myriad of ways you can use to backup your files, most phones are connected to some form of backup system. iPhones are tied directly into iTunes, which can back up all of your valuable data, you just need to hook that thing up to your computer and update the files daily! You can even do it as part of charging, just plug it in to your computer, set it to backup, and it’ll go about the process automatically while it takes a charge.
Android phones are intrinsically tied to Google, and with the availability of Google Docs and the Google backup, it’ll tie all of your data in to your profile, uploading it to a secure location while allowing you to choose which ones to share! Google Docs can also be used to store all of your valuable files online! The bonus here is that from google docs you can access your files from any computer, saving you from having to wait for your system to be back up before you get those important files back!
Another option is open that is the ‘all inclusive’ option. If you’d prefer to back up everything instead of just bits and pieces, there are tons of places online that will give you reviews of dozens of options for full backup services. Take some time to cruise through them and decide which one is right for you. Remember, if the only copy you have of your important files is all in one place, it only takes one accident, one small disaster for you to lose them all. So take the time to backup your files, and stop yourself from becoming one of this year’s April’s Fools.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
April 1stToday is April Fools' Day, a day for good-natured pranks, hoaxes, and general silliness. The earliest recorded association between April 1st and foolishness is in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in 1392, although this may be a result of misinterpretation rather than Chaucer's intention: in "The Nuns' Priest's Tale," there is a line "Since March began thirty days and two ..." which is probably a reference to the May 2nd betrothal of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia, and not "March 32nd" as readers interpreted it. In any case, the story features Chanticleer, a vain rooster, being tricked by a fox, and some believe that's how the date became associated with harmless trickery.
Many cultures have lighthearted celebrations around this time of year, and, in the Northern Hemisphere, it may be related to the spring equinox. One explanation for the April Fools' holiday seemed plausible, until it was revealed as a hoax itself — Joseph Boskin, a professor of history at Boston University, said the practice dated back to the reign of Emperor Constantine, who was challenged by his jesters that a fool could run the empire as well as he did. Constantine appointed Kugel the jester "king for a day," and one of Kugel's acts was to decree an annual day of merriment. The Associated Press ran with the story, and didn't realize Boskin had made the whole thing up until a couple of weeks later.
One April Fools' Day announcement that was not a hoax was in 2004, when Google announced its new Gmail service. People couldn't be blamed for thinking it was a prank, given Google's propensity for April Fools' leg-pulling, and the announced 1-gigabyte online storage for e-mail was far larger than anything any other company had offered.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Fools Rush In: An April Fools Day Anthology
The month of April 2019April is, by proclamation and curriculum now, the poet’s month. “April” (or “Aprill”) is the third word of one of the first great poems in the English language, The Canterbury Tales, and the first word in what does its best to feel like the last great English poem, The Waste Land. April—“spungy,” “proud-pied,” and “well-apparel’d” April—is also, along with its springtime neighbor May, the most-mentioned month in Shakespeare, and has given a poetic subject to Dickinson, Larkin, Plath, Glück, and countless others. Why? Do we like its promise of rebirth, its green and messy fecundity? Its hopefulness is easy to celebrate or, if you’re T. S. Eliot, cruelly undercut, rooting his lilacs in the wasteland of death.
Source:
A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the YearWhen April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire’s end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weal
Befell that, in that season, on a day
In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay
Ready to start upon my pilgrimage
To Canterbury, full of devout homage …
---
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Mod
And a famous Italian singer - Francesco Guccini, in a song where he described all months of the year, says
"Quali segreti scoprì in te il poeta, che ti chiamò crudele?
Which secrets saw in yuo the Poet, who named thee cruel?"
Richard Wilbur, (1921 - 2017) American poet associated with the New Formalist movement. He wrote the following poem.April 5, 1974
The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law,
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.
“April 5, 1974” by Richard Wilbur from Collected Poems. © Harcourt, 2004.
“With quietness and precision, Wilbur gives us a narrative of a incident in early spring. It happens as the poet is "strolling" in a "dull pasture," words which could suggest a life of unthinking habit. He has gotten into something of a rut, maybe. As he stares at the ground, what appears to be a radical change in the universe's physical constitution turns out to be the optical effect of a "subtle flood of steam" which has risen and drifted as the earth begins to thaw.
What seemed to be an unprecedented rebellion of "matter" itself against "natural law" was not really anything outrageous or new, but only part of the natural course of things. Still, there is sense that for the poet something new has happened-- "There was a subtle flood of steam/ moving upon the face of things." For him, "the face of things," his perceptual experience of the world, has been changed in a way that though "subtle" is deeply important. This movement of the steam has been a "flood"-- and even more Biblically, it has "moved upon the face of things," just as "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" in the act that began creation.
The "rippling of the land," though an illusion, is a real indication of a new, unexpected vitality, for "It came of winter's giving ground." As though making a crucial concession in an argument, the earth begins to lose its rigidity-- like "a set mind" realizing that its way of imagining the world, while not wholly false, has been too limited. Winter is not the whole story. To a mind thus restricted, the disturbing experience of "doubt" turns out to be a blessing, since it opens the way not to chaos and meaninglessness, but to "mother-wit," a perceptiveness that is older, more expansive, shrewder, more weathered, more generous.”
Source: Long Live the Weeds (https://bit.ly/2FRU5YU)
Collected Poems, 1943-2004
This post is dedicated to Laura TIt was on this day April 6 in 1327 that ...
Italian poet Petrarch (1304) first set eyes on “Laura,” the ethereal woman he would use as his muse for more than 300 sonnets. He met Laura on a Good Friday at St. Clare Church in Avignon. Some historians think she was a woman named Laura de Noves, a married woman and mother, and most agree she never responded to Petrarch’s overtures. She died during the Black Death of 1348. The first 263 poems Petrarch wrote for her are known as the Rime in Vita Laura. After she died, the remaining poems were known as Rime in Morte Laura. Petrarch’s works for Laura laid the groundwork for the sonnets of the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without Petrarch.
About his unconsummated love for Laura, Petrarch wrote: “In my younger days, I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair — my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.”
‘Benedetto sia ’l giorno, et ’l mese, et l’anno,’
Benedetto sia 'l giorno, e 'l mese, e l'anno,
e la stagione, e 'l tempo, e l'ora, e 'l punto,
e 'l bel paese, e 'l loco ov'io fui giunto
da' duo begli occhi che legato m'hanno;
e benedetto il primo dolce affanno
ch'i'ebbi ad esser con Amor congiunto,
e l'arco, e le saette ond'i' fui punto,
e le piaghe che 'nfin al cor mi vanno.
Benedette le voci tante ch'io
chiamando il nome de mia donna ho sparte,
e i sospiri, e le lagrime, e 'l desio;
e benedette sian tutte le carte
ov'io fama l'acquisto, e 'l pensier mio,
ch'è sol di lei, sì ch'altra non v'ha parte.
-----
Blessed be the day, and the month, and the year,
and the season, and the time, and the hour, and the moment,
and the beautiful country, and the place where I was joined
to the two beautiful eyes that have bound me:
and blessed be the first sweet suffering
that I felt in being conjoined with Love,
and the bow, and the shafts with which I was pierced,
and the wounds that run to the depths of my heart.
Blessed be all those verses I scattered
calling out the name of my lady,
and the sighs, and the tears, and the passion:
and blessed be all the sheets
where I acquire fame, and my thoughts,
that are only of her, that no one else has part of.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Petrarch in English
Happy Birthday Internet? April 7, 1969 is one of the many dates people cite as the Internet's birthdayThe Internet celebrates its birthday, putting it on the cusp of middle age and making its sign an Aries, which is "masculine" and extroverted, says the Internet. But maybe it was actually born in September? Or October? Is it even 42? Some people swear the Internet doesn't look a day over 28. Here are some the leading claims for days the Internet was born.
April 7 , 1969
The first Request for Comment document is drafted by an engineer on the Pentagon's ARPAnet project, a precursor to the modern Internet. Tony Long of Wired argues this represents the "symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology."
September 2, 1969
UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock establishes the first local connection between two computers in his lab. Matthew Moore of The Telegraph called this "the most appropriate" of all the anniversaries. Discovery magazine and National Geographic both identify this as the true date of birth.
October 29 1969
Kleinrock's computer at UCLA transmits the first host-to-host message to a machine at the Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock, for his part, identifies this as the "first breath of life the Internet ever took." PC World's Jared Newman agrees "[If we can all agree that communication--e-mail, chat, social networking--is what makes the Internet tick," writes Newman, "Kleinrock's first message was the most significant early step towards what we have today.
January 1 , 1983
Wired's Justin Jaffe nominates the day the switch was made Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol as the real date to remember. "The transition from NCP to TCP/IP may not have been the sexiest moment in Internet history" he concedes, but notes the new protocol was needed to "accommodate the much larger and more complicated network [researchers] foresaw as the Internet's future."
Source: www.theatlantic.com
A History of the Internet and the Digital Future
Mod
It was on this day April 6 in 1327 that ...
Italian poet Petrarch (1304) first set eyes on “Laura,” the ethereal woman he would use as his muse for more than 300..."
Oh thanks!!!! With my bookclub where I work we've had a meeting on Petrarc and his Laura!!!
John Donne, preaching today April 22 in 1622 at the open air pulpit in the churchyard of St Mary Spital, a monastic hospital dissolved in 1538 to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London.I
Our God is not out of breath, because he hath blown one tempest, and swallowed a Navy: Our God hath not burnt out his eyes, because he hath looked upon a Train of Powder: In the light of Heaven, and in the darkness of hell, he sees alike; he sees not onely all Machinations of hands, when things come to action; but all Imaginations of hearts, when they are in their first Consultations; past, and present, and future, distinguish not his Quando; all is one time to him: Mountains and Vallies, Sea and Land, distinguish not his Ubi; all is one place to him: When I begin, says God to Eli, I will make an end; not onely that all Gods purposes shall have their certain end but that even then, when he begins, he makes an end: from the very beginning, imprints an infallible assurance, that whom he loves, he loves to the end: as a Circle is printed all at once, so his beginning and ending is all one.
II
The drowning of the first world, and the repairing that again; the burning of this world, and establishing another in heaven, do not so much strain a mans Reason, as the Creation, a Creation of all out of nothing. For, for the repairing of the world after the Flood, compared to the Creation, it was eight days to nothing; eight persons to begin a world upon, then; but in the Creation, none. And for the glory which we receive in the next world, it is (in some sort) as the stamping of a print upon a Coyn; the metal is there already, a body and a soul to receive glory: but at the Creation, there was no soul to receive glory, no body to receive a soul, no stuff, no matter, to make a body of. The less any thing is, the less we know it: how invisible, how unintelligible a thing then, is this Nothing! We say in the School, Deus cognoscibilior Angelis, We have better means to know the nature of God, than of Angels, because God hath appeared and manifested himself more in actions, than Angels have done: we know what they are, by knowing what they have done; and it is very little that is related to us what Angels have done: what then is there that can bring this Nothing to our understanding? what hath that done? A Leviathan, a Whale, from a grain of Spawn; an Oke from a buried Akehorn, is a great; but a great world from nothing, is a strange improvement. We wonder to see a man rise from nothing to a great Estate; but that Nothing is but nothing in comparison; but absolutely nothing, meerly nothing, is more incomprehensible than any thing, than all things together. It is a state (if a man may call it a state) that the Devil himself in the midst of his torments, cannot wish.
III
The light of the knowledge of the glory of this world, is a good, and a great peece of learning. To know, that all the glory of man, is as the flower of grass: that even the glory, and all the glory, of man, of all mankind, is but a flower, and but as a flower; somewhat less than the Proto-type, than the Original, than the flower it self; and all this but as the flower of grass neither, no very beautiful flower to the eye, no very fragrant flower to the smell: To know, that for the glory of Moab, Auferetur, it shall be contemned, consumed; and for the glory of Jacob it self, Attenuabitur, It shall be extenuated, that the glory of Gods enemies shall be brought to nothing, and the glory of his servants shall be brought low in this word: To know how near nothing, how meer nothing, all the glory of this world is, is a good, a great degree of learning.
IV
Some things the Angels do know by the dignity of their Nature, by their Creation, which we know not; as we know many things which inferior Creatures do not; and such things all the Angels, good and bad know. Some things they know by the Grace of their confirmation, by which they have more given them, than they had by Nature in their Creation; and those things only the Angels that stood, but all they, do know. Some things they know by Revelation, when God is pleased to manifest them unto them; and so some of the Angels know that, which the rest, though confirm'd, doe not know. By Creation, they knew as his Subjects; by Confirmation, they know as his servants; by Revelation, they know as his Councel. Now, Erimus sicut Angeli, says Christ, There we shall be as the Angels: The knowledge which I have by Nature, shall have no Clouds; here it hath: that which I have by Grace, shall have no reluctation, no resistance; here it hath: That which I have by Revelation, shall have no suspition, no jealousie; here it hath: sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a respiration from God, and a suggestion from the Devil. There our curiosity shall have this noble satisfaction, we shall know how the Angels know, by knowing as they know. We shall not pass from Author, to Author, as in a Grammar School, nor from Art, to Art, as in an University; but, as that General which Knighted his whole Army, God shall create us all Doctors in a minute. That great Library, those infinite Volumes of the Books of Creatures, shall be taken away, quite away; no more preaching, no more reading of the Scriptures, and that great School-Mistress, Experience, and Observation shall be remov'd, no new thing to be done, and in an instant, I shall know more, than they all could reveal unto me. I shall know, not only as I know already, that a Bee-hive, that an Ant-hill is the same Book in Decimo sexto, as a Kingdom is in Folio, That a flower that lives but a day, is an abridgment of that King, that lives out his threescore and ten yeers; but I shall know too, that all those Ants, and Bees, and Flowers, and Kings, and Kingdoms, howsoever they may be Examples, and Comparisons to one another, yet they are all as nothing, altogether nothing, less than nothing, infinitely less than nothing, to that which shall then be the subject of my knowledge, for, it is the knowledge of the glory of God.
Source: http://kjandrews.co.uk/shadowrounds/t...
John Donne: The Reformed Soul
April 28 - "Biological Clock Day"The words ‘biological clock’ may conjure up images of dancing babies, but there’s much more to the biological clock than that last minute urge to make babies that supposedly kicks in at a certain point in a woman’s life.
For a start, both men and women have a biological clock, as being celebrated by Biological Clock Day, and it affects their behaviour and mood on a daily basis. It maintains a sleep-wake pattern that fits in with the light and dark of a day on Earth. More formally known as the circadian rhythm, it monitors light, temperature and other environmental factors to influence things like alertness, energy levels, hunger and motivation.
The technology of today’s world can upset the balance of the biological clock, so celebrate Biological Clock Day by setting aside some time to re-regulate it; create a regular bedtime routine, minimise naps and eat regularly.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing
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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 d..."
True ...