Monday Jan. 19, 2015

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Excerpt from “The Raven”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
                                                                 Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
                                                                 Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”

Excerpt from “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. Public Domain.   (buy now)

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, observed annually on the third Monday of January to honor the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Before 1986, King’s birthday, January 15, was observed as a holiday in many states. It was in 1986 that President Ronald Reagan named the third Monday in January as an official national holiday to honor the slain civil rights leader. The holiday is observed as a day of service in many communities, and by events such as candlelight walks and prayer breakfasts. In Atlanta, the day is marked by a memorial service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King himself served as pastor.

It was on this day in 1937 that Howard Hughes broke the record for the fastest transcontinental flight. The previous record was held by Hughes himself, who had set it a year earlier. He completed the trip in 7 hours and 28 minutes, breaking his earlier record by more than two hours.

Hughes had made a last-minute decision to attempt the flight after he heard that someone else might try to break his record; he said that he wanted the other pilot to have a more challenging number to work with. Hughes set off from Los Angeles at 2:14 a.m. The sky was overcast, so he flew above the clouds — at 14,000 feet for most of the trip. He barely saw the ground at all — once in Arizona, once going over the Mississippi River, and then more regularly once he neared his destination. He hit a tough patch over the Sierras — he was experimenting with his new oxygen mask, and it wasn’t getting him enough oxygen, so he was getting faint. He let out a scream in order to equalize the pressure inside and outside his head, and that helped him. Finally he got his mask adjusted correctly, but then he ran out of oxygen over Indiana and had to continue without it.

Everyone thought that he was going to land at Chicago, not Newark, so they were not ready to receive him. Newark was a busy airport, and there was a plane about to take off just where Hughes wanted to land, so he had to fly in circles around the landing field for about 20 minutes. By that time, a crowd had gathered.

When he touched down in Newark, Hughes climbed out of the cockpit with a smile. His face was darkened from the exhaust smoke, and he admitted that he was very tired and a bit shaky, but he shared the statistics of his flight as well as he knew them.

Hughes was a movie producer and business tycoon who became one of the richest men in the world. He said, “I want to be remembered for only one thing: my contribution to aviation.”

It’s the birthday of the man who coined the term “altruism” and who helped found the field of sociology: philosopher Auguste Comte (books by this author), born in Montpellier, France (1798).

He made friends with a social philosopher who insisted that the goal of philosophy should be improved social welfare, and Comte used this as a guiding principle for the rest of his life’s work. His most famous work was Système de Politique Positive, published in four volumes between 1851 and 1854. It established a basis for sociology.

He said, “Everything is relative, and only that is absolute.”

It’s the birthday of Patricia Highsmith (books by this author), born in Fort Worth, Texas (1921). She started thinking about writing crime novels when she was a teenager, after she read a book of case histories about criminals.

She published her first novel, Strangers on a Train, in 1950. It’s the story of two men, Bruno and Guy, who meet by chance while taking a train. In chatting, they discover that they each have someone they want out of the way. Bruno suggests they swap murders, and when Guy turns him down, Bruno carries out his murder anyway and then stalks and blackmails Guy until he holds up his end of the deal. Alfred Hitchcock turned the novel into a movie the following year.

It’s the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe (books by this author), born in Boston in 1809. When he was two, both his parents died from tuberculosis, and Edgar was taken in by a wealthy tobacco merchant named John Allan, and Edgar Poe became Edgar Allan Poe. He went to the University of Virginia, and for years he was in and out of the Army and West Point, publishing several books of poems, including Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829).

He first made his name writing some of the most brutal book reviews ever published at the time. He was called the “tomahawk man from the South.” He described one poem as “an illimitable gilded swill trough,” and he said, “[Most] of those who hold high places in our poetical literature are absolute nincompoops.” He particularly disliked the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Poe also began to publish fiction, and he specialized in humorous and satirical stories because that was the style of fiction most in demand. But soon after he married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia, he learned that she had tuberculosis, just like his parents, and he began to write darker stories. One of his editors complained that his work was growing too grotesque, but Poe replied that the grotesque would sell magazines. And he was right. His work helped launch magazines as the major new venue for literary fiction.

But even though his stories sold magazines, he still didn’t make much money. He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe.

It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” considered some of the greatest Gothic horror stories in English literature.

Near the end of his wife’s illness, he published his most famous poem, “The Raven,” about a young man visited by a raven in the middle of the night, and who comes to believe that the bird is possessed by the spirit of his dead lover, Lenore. It begins,

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —”

For many years after his death, Poe was considered by critics in this country to be a mere sensationalist writer of Gothic tales. But much of his work was translated into French, where he inspired a generation of surrealist poets and fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, who said that he prayed every morning to God, to his father, and to Poe. Today Poe is credited with having invented the psychological horror story and the detective story.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

 

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