Fun_People Archive
22 Nov
LIT BITS V3 #326

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 100 10:01:28 -0800
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #326

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #326
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Wednesday, 22 November 2000; on this day,

379 years ago (1621),

     John Donne is elected Dean of St. Paul's.

181 years ago (1819),

     George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is born on Arbury Farm in Warwickshire.

131 years ago (1869),

     Andre Gide, who will win the 1947 Nobel Prize for Literature, is born
     in Paris.

86 years ago (1914),

     Jean Cocteau is rejected for military service as physically unfit.

84 years ago (1916),

     Jack London dies of a kidney disease at 40, in Santa Rosa, California.
     Ford Madox Ford remarks: "Like Peter Pan, he never grew up, and he
     lived his own stories with such intensity that he ended by believing
     them himself."

37 years ago (1963),

     The creator of the _The Chronicles of Narnia_, C. S. Lewis, dies in
     Oxford, England.

37 years ago (1963),

     After a writing career that had almost been preempted by blindness
     from keratitis, Aldous Huxley (_Brave New World_, _Eyeless in Gaza_,
     _The Doors of Perception_), dies in Los Angeles, California.

7 years ago (1993),

     "It is not, in my view, a very good novel...but it sincerely presented
     my abhorrence of the view that some people were criminal and others
     not. A denial of the universal inheritance of sin is characteristic
     of Pelagian societies," writes Anthony Burgess of his famous futurist
     novel _A Clockwork Orange_.  Burgess dies in London on this day.

Today's poem:

              The Good-Morrow

     I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
     Did, till we lov'd? were we not wean'd till then?
     But suck'd on countrey pleasures, childishly?
     Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?
     T'was so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee.
     If ever any beauty I did see,
     Which I desir'd, and got, t'was but a dreame of thee.

     And now good morrow to our waking soules,
     Which watch not one another out of feare;
     For love, all love of other sights controules,
     And makes one little roome, an every where.
     Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
     Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne,
     Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one.

     My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
     And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
     Where can we finde two better hemispheares
     Without sharp North, without declining West?
     What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
     If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
     Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die

                                                  John Donne

© 2000 Peter Langston