Wednesday Jan. 21, 2015

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Sic Vita

Like to the falling of a Star;
Or as the flights of Eagles are;
Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue;
Or silver drops of morning dew;
Or like a wind that chafes the flood;
Or bubbles which on water stood;
Even such is man, whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.

      The Wind blows out; the Bubble dies;
      The Spring entombed in Autumn lies;
      The Dew dries up; the Star is shot;
      The Flight is past; and Man forgot.

"Sic Vita" by Henry King. Public Domain. 

Today is the birthday of Civil War general Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, born in Clarksburg, Virginia (1824). He was orphaned as a child, and grew up with various relatives. He entered West Point at the very bottom of his class, but he studied hard and worked his way toward the top. He distinguished himself in the military during the Mexican War, but eventually he gave up his active military career to teach at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. Jackson was a Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy — a subject similar to modern-day physics. He was not a very good instructor. His superintendent wrote: “He was no teacher, and he lacked the tact required in getting along with his classes.” The subject was difficult, so most cadets were predisposed to dislike it, and Jackson wasn’t good at explaining complicated concepts. On top of that, he was formal and stiff and had no sense of humor, at least not in the classroom — although one contemporary biographer was quick to defend Jackson on that account, writing: “He had other aims in life than of being a recounter of funny stories, yet when the ludicrous presented itself he fully enjoyed it.” Jackson’s students disliked him, and he was often the target of jokes. Despite all that, his years in Lexington were good ones, although they began tragically, when his wife died in childbirth. He remarried, and he and his wife lived in a nice house. He said, “Lexington is the most beautiful place that I remember of having ever seen.” Jackson particularly enjoyed gardening and growing vegetables for his family. He was very concerned with healthful eating, and he followed a strict diet and various regimens — hydrotherapy, no reading by artificial light, no alcohol or caffeine, etc.

On this day in 1525, a group of Swiss Protestants, originally known as the Swiss Brethren, formed their first congregation. The Brethren, who faced persecution for their resistance to civil authority, later came under the leadership of a Dutch minister named Menno Simons, from whom they received their common name, the Mennonites. In the United States, the Old Order Amish are among the spiritual descendants of the original Mennonite congregation. The first Mennonites in the New World arrived and settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. The United States now has the largest Mennonite population in the world.

Marie Smith Jones, chief of Alaska’s Eyak people, died on this date in 2008. Jones was the last fluent native speaker of the Eyak tongue; it died with her and thus became the first Native Alaskan language to be declared “extinct.” Jones had devoted her life to the preservation of her language: recording it, helping to create a dictionary, and trying to formalize its grammar so it could be taught to others. Two years later, a French college student named Guillaume Leduey came forward and said that he had been teaching himself Eyak for several years, using DVDs made available by the Alaska Native Language Center. Leduey came to Alaska for the first time at the age of 21, and returned the following year to help set up Eyak language workshops in Anchorage and Cordova. He is now considered fluent, but since there are no native speakers of the language, and since no one else has achieved more than symbolic proficiency, the language is still considered “dormant.”

It’s the birthday of blues singer and songwriter Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter (sometimes noted as January 20 or January 29), born in Mooringsport, Louisiana (1888). He’s best known for his songs “Goodnight Irene,” “Midnight Special,” and “Rock Island Line,” and for his skill in playing 12-string guitar. He was an inmate at Angola Prison in Louisiana when a white man named John Lomax arrived with his 18-year-old son, Alan, asking to record any songs the prisoners knew. Lomax was traveling across the South making field recordings for the Library of Congress. Lomax helped Leadbelly obtain a pardon and took him to New York where he was a big hit. Alan Lomax said that Lead Belly “sang the blues wonderfully, but he was much bigger than that. He encompassed the whole black era, from square dance calls to the blues of the ’30s and ’40s.”

It’s the 110th birthday of designer Christian Dior, born in Granville, a seaside town in the north of France (1905). He bowed to pressure from his father and studied political science. But as soon as he graduated, he opened a small art gallery. The gallery was only in business for three years; when it closed, Dior made ends meet by selling sketches of hats and frocks he’d designed. He worked in a series of fashion houses before and during World War II, and served as a soldier in the south of France. At one point, he was designing clothes for Nazi wives while his sister was serving in the French Resistance. In 1946, Dior founded his own fashion house; the following year, he caused a sensation by launching a line of luxurious, feminine fashions. His collection, dubbed the “New Look” by Harper’s Bazaar, featured dresses with delicate shoulders, cinched waists, and full skirts. The war-weary public went crazy for his creations. The war had imposed rationing on many things, including fabric, but Dior’s New Look dresses used an extravagant 20 yards of material. Dior said: “We were emerging from the period of war, of uniforms, of women-soldiers built like boxers. I drew women-flowers, soft shoulders, fine waists like liana and wide skirts like corolla.”

It’s the birthday of Louis Menand (books by this author), born in Syracuse, New York (1952) and raised near Boston. He is one of the few people who works as both a full-time professor and as a journalist. He is a Harvard professor and an academic whose first book was Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context (1987). But he is also a popular journalist outside of academia: he is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he writes for The New York Review of Books. In 2001, he published The Metaphysical Club, a history of intellectual ideas in America, particularly the shift in thinking that happened after the Civil War. It won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2002. His most recent book is The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (2010).

He said: “I just try, like any writer, to be entertaining and interesting. I want people to get some pleasure and to learn something. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s about T.S. Eliot or about Tom Clancy.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®