Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1850), who was a sickly, moderately successful essayist and travel writer, living in France, when one evening he walked to a friend's house, looked in through the window, and fell instantly in love with a woman sitting there at the table. To make a grand entrance, he opened the window, leapt inside, and took a bow. The woman was Fanny Osbourne and she was both American and unhappily married. She had come to Europe to get away from her husband, but after spending months getting to know Stevenson, she decided to go back to California.
Stevenson got a telegram from her a few weeks after she'd returned to the United States, and he decided on the spot to drop everything and go persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him. His health, as always, was terrible, and the trip to the United States almost killed him. He collapsed on Fanny Osbourne's doorstep, but she nursed him back to health. She did divorce her husband, and they got married in San Francisco and spent their honeymoon in a cabin near an abandoned silver mine.
They moved back to Scotland with her son from her previous marriage, and one rainy afternoon the following summer Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to entertain his new stepson. The map gave him and idea for a story and in a single month he had written his first great novel, Treasure Island (1883), about the young Jim Hawkins, who finds a treasure map and goes on a journey to find the treasure. He meets pirates, survives a mutiny, and gets to know a one-legged cook named Long John Silver. The book has been in print for 124 years now.
Around the same time that Treasure Island was published, Stevenson woke up one morning and told his family that he did not want to be disturbed until he had finished writing a story that had come to him in a dream. It took him three days to write it, but when he read the story aloud to his wife, she said it was too sensationalistic. So he sat down and rewrote the whole thing. By the end of the week he was fairly happy with the result, which he called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), about a scientist who invents a chemical that changes his personality from a mild-mannered gentleman to a savage criminal.
Those two books made Stevenson rich and famous. He spent the rest of his life traveling from one place to the next, producing about 400 pages of published work a year. He finally settled on the island of Samoa, where his health improved greatly, and in the last five years of his life, he wrote 10 more books. He died at the age of 44, not from his respiratory illness, but from a stroke. His contemporaries saw him as one of the greatest writers of his generation, but he's now remembered mainly as a writer of adventure stories. Critics wish he had finished the last novel he had been working on, about colonial life in Samoa, because the fragments that survive are among his best work.
Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, "Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."
18. The Land of Nod
FROM breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do—
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.
__________
A Thought (From Child's Garden of Verses)
It is very nice to think
The world is full of meat and drink,
With little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place.
_____________
*A friend is a gift you give yourself.
*All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
*Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
*Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
*Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
*For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
*He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.
*I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.
*I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
*If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
*If we take matrimony at it's lowest, we regard it as a sort of friendship recognised by the police.
*If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
*It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
*Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.
*Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.
*No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable.
*Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.
*Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?
*Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
*Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
*Quiet minds can't be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
*The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
*The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
*The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
*You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
No comments:
Post a Comment