Aliteracy, fraternite, egalite

The first magazine in the U. S. was published on this day in 1741.

"I see no point in reading." -- Louis XIV of France (1638-1715).

He’d taken to reading early on, as a way of filling up time. But beyond that, a good reader and a good book could create a world unto itself, and shut out the real one. He’d been a good reader, however, only at times. For the most part it had been a mere habit, an unhealthy one at that it seemed to him now. All those ill-read books! He’d gone through thousands of them, most of them no more than a title now, if not utterly forgotten. What did he remember, say, of Moby Dick or Madame Bovary? “The heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” That was Melville, wasn’t it? Or was it Flaubert? The universe was as inhospitable to Emma as it was to Ishmael, equally cruel, capricious and senseless on land or at sea. That was what he’d carried away from books. The inscrutable pointlessness of life. The hostility it had in store for us. A hero or heroine, brimming with hope and good will, sets out in a novel to engage with life, prepared for a skirmish, for its inevitable bumps and bruises, and ends up crushed, demolished.


Life took you where it would, but who needed books to learn that?  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten

You might lose your place

John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was born on this day in 1608.

"Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again." -- Samuel Johnson.

Her stories weren't corny, though

American novelist Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873, in Virginia.


When she was 10 years old, she moved to Nebraska, where she grew up and which she later made the setting of her most famous novels, O Pioneers! and My Antonia.

H. L. Mencken said of her and her books:

"I don't care how well she writes; I don't give a damn what people in Nebraska do."

We always dreaded reading it

Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) was born today in 1832.

"I know little of women. But I've heard dread tales." -- Harold Pinter.

Billowby went behind the bar, tucked the pumpkin under his arm and carried it into the kitchen. Sully hadn’t given a thought to the essay since the night Billowby had brought it up. He’d been obsessed—possessed was the word—with his story, in particular the character of Boone, and dressing up as a bum had seemed only natural. He’d been running it by Linda, who’d given it the thumbs-up for the most part. She’d thought his portrait of Viveca Dupree was a little one-dimensional, and he’d told her that that was about as deep as his knowledge of women went.  --  Chapter 24, The Misforgotten.

One lump or two?

Dale Carnegie, the author of one of the best-selling books in history, How to Win Friends and Influence People, was born today in 1888.

"The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee." – John D. Rockefeller.

Rae Ann had ragged him for not regarding other people’s thoughts, but how could he have? His mind had always been full to overflowing with thoughts of himself. She meant other people’s feelings, he knew, and she was right on that count. He’d never cared much for people’s feelings, maybe because that was the least important thing about them. Politeness was overrated, when it involved holding people at arm’s length. With anyone whose friendship he’d ever valued he’d skipped the formalities, and, yes indeed, he had tried to imagine what such friends were thinking, but his speculation had always been self-referential and invariably ended in the surmise, actually the certainty, that they were thinking about themselves.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten

God bless Herman Melville

Moby-Dick was published on this day in 1851. The author, Herman Melville, had a nervous breakdown four years later, in part because of his novel's dismal sales. After unsuccessful lecture tours, Melville found work as a customs inspector on the New York City docks. His oldest son committed suicide in 1867.


Melville's death on September 28, 1891, in New York, was noted with only one obituary notice. Moby-Dick sold only 3,000 copies during his lifetime.

An unfinished work, Billy Budd, Foretopman, was unpublished until 1924. The protagonist of the story, set during the war between England and France, is the innocent and angelic Billy Budd, the favorite of everyone on the crew of the HMS Bellipotent except John Claggart, the sadistic master-at-arms. Claggart falsely accuses Billy of being involved in a mutiny. Billy, unable to answer the charge because of his stammer, accidentally kills Claggart.
The ship's captain, Vere, has seen through Claggart's plot but fears rebellion if Billy isn't punished. He calls a court, which condemns Billy, who goes cheerfully to his fate and is hanged from the yardarm, right after crying out "God bless Captain Vere." When Vere is mortally wounded during an engagement with the French, he murmurs as his last words Billy's name.

"Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried," Melville wrote in Moby-Dick; "it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored..."

By day they churned down the river, Camille at the wheel, he and Cutterback drunk. They blasted music (Themes from the Great Westerns), roaring at the top of their lungs. At night they’d dock and take over a bar. Cutterback arm-wrestled all comers. They ate catfish, mountains and pyramids of it. After Camille had gone to bed they sat up on deck, listening to the water lapping at the hull. Cutterback sang, drawing out the lines he particularly relished. Sully had brought along Moby Dick. He read aloud the passages he’d marked. All men were mesmerized by the deep, Ishmael had said. They saw in it the ungraspable phantom of life.  --  Chapter 42, The Misforgotten.

A head made of marble

The great sculptor Auguste Rodin (The Thinker) was born on this day in 1840.

"A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man."  --  Samuel Johnson.

   “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library,” Sully read. Samuel Johnson. Sully had never cared much for Johnson, or for Boswell, that seventeenth-century equivalent of a jock-sniffer, and this observation, like so many of Johnson’s, seemed either slightly or totally off-kilter. A library was the vindication of human hopes, wasn’t it, their realization or elaboration crystallized in books? Indirectly, though, the great lexicographer had hit home with this sally, as almost everyone who worked here at the library, Sully fancied, could present a striking example, to one degree or another, of blasted hopes.   --  Chapter 21, The Misforgotten.

Not to mention without existentialism

Birth date of Jean-Paul Sartre, French existentialist and author, born in 1905. Sartre wrote:

"The world could get along very well without literature; it could get along even better without man."

As he’d walked to Bookwitch’s office, his head had been reeling to such an extent that he’d had to steady himself against the wall once or twice. In her presence, he’d had small epiphany, had realized that it wasn’t Bookwitch—Bookwitch was benign—but books that were the tyrant. It was books that had pulled him this way and that, that were suffocating him now. He’d wanted to be done with them, with the Great Books and the good books, with all the characters in books clamoring to be heard, to be heeded... -- Chapter 43, The Misforgotten.

You do, however, need this book

On this day in 1947, the first commercial around-the-world flight began.

On this day in 1972, the Watergate scandal was uncovered.

"The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded." -- Gustave Flaubert.

What did he remember, say, of Moby Dick or Madame Bovary? “The heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” That was Melville, wasn’t it? Or was it Flaubert? The universe was as inhospitable to Emma as it was to Ishmael, equally cruel, capricious and senseless on land or at sea. That was what he’d carried away from books. The inscrutable pointlessness of life. The hostility it had in store for us. A hero or heroine, brimming with hope and good will, sets out in a novel to engage with life, prepared for a skirmish, for its inevitable bumps and bruises, and ends up crushed, demolished.
Life took you where it would, but who needed books to learn that? -- The Misforgotten, Chapter 22.