Sir Francis Bacon, 1561 - 1626

English essayist, philosopher, poet, historian, and statesman Sir Francis Bacon was born in London, England (1561). He spent much of his intellectual life challenging Aristotle's view that knowledge should begin with universal truths. He said, "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties." In Novum Organum (1620), Bacon wrote that scholars should build their knowledge of the world from specific, observable details. His theory is now known as the scientific method, and is the basis of all experimental science. His scientific method eventually killed him. When driving in the country one day, he got the idea to test the effect of cold on the decay of meat, bought a fowl, and stuffed it with snow. Later that day he came down with a cold, which killed him.

Bacon was a pioneer of modern scientific thought. He was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, keeper of the great seal for Elizabeth I. Bacon studied at Cambridge University and at Gray's Inn and became an MP in 1584. However, he was unpopular with Elizabeth, and it was only on the accession of James I in 1603 that Bacon's career began to prosper. Knighted that year, he was appointed to a succession of posts culminating, like his father, with keeper of the great seal.

However, Bacon's real interests lay in science. Much of the science of the period was based on the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. While many Aristotelian ideas, such as the position of the earth at the centre of the universe, had been overturned, his methodology was still being used. This held that scientific truth could be reached by way of authoritative argument: if sufficiently clever men discussed a subject long enough, the truth would eventually be discovered. Bacon challenged this, arguing that truth required evidence from the real world. He published his ideas, initially in 'Novum Organum' (1620), an account of the correct method of acquiring natural knowledge.

Bacon's political ascent also continued: in 1618 he was appointed lord chancellor, the most powerful position in England, and in 1621 he was created viscount St Albans. Shortly afterwards, he was charged by Parliament with accepting bribes, which he admitted. He was fined and imprisoned and then banished from court. Although the King later pardoned him, this was the end of Bacon's public life. He retired to his home at Gorhambury in Hertfordshire, where he continued to write. He died in London on 9 April 1626.

*Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
*Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
*If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
*The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies.
*A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.
*Knowledge is power.
*It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self.
*For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike.
*A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.
*One of the Seven [wise men of Greece] was wont to say: That laws were like cobwebs, where the small flies are caught and the great break through.
*Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man’s knowledge.



OF TRUTH

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be, that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them, as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor, which men take in finding out of truth, nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love, of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians, examineth the matter, and is at a stand, to think what should be in it, that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant; but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell; this same truth, is a naked, and open day-light, that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs, of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond, or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds, of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum doemonum, because it filleth the imagination; and yet, it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt; such as we spake of before. But, howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgments, and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. The first creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the sense; the last, was the light of reason; and his sabbath work ever since, is the illumination of his Spirit. First he breathed light, upon the face of the matter or chaos; then he breathed light, into the face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth light, into the face of his chosen. The poet, that beautified the sect, that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well: It is a pleasure, to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure, to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle, and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below; so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling, or pride. Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

To pass from theological, and philosophical truth, to the truth of civil business; it will be acknowledged, even by those that practise it not, that clear, and round dealing, is the honor of man's nature; and that mixture of falsehoods, is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these winding, and crooked courses, are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice, that doth so cover a man with shame, as to be found false and perfidious. And therefore Montaigne saith prettily, when he inquired the reason, why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace, and such an odious charge? Saith he, If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men. For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood, and breach of faith, cannot possibly be so highly expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal, to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men; it being foretold, that when Christ cometh, he shall not find faith upon the earth.

South Africa

Dan Barry born Feb. 11, 1958

Dan Barry inaugurated the "This Land" column for The New York Times in January of 2007, after writing the "About New York" column since June 2003. Mr. Barry joined The Times in September 1995, and has served as the newspaper’s city hall bureau chief, Long Island bureau chief, acting police bureau chief and general assignment reporter for the Metropolitan Desk. Over the years he has written extensively for The Times about city politics, police brutality and life in upstate New York, among other topics, and was a major contributor to the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the World Trade Center disaster and its aftermath. He also contributed to the coverage of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.


Born in Jackson Heights, Queens, on Feb. 11, 1958, Mr. Barry graduated from St. Bonaventure University in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He dug ditches, worked in Long Island delicatessens and earned a master’s degree in journalism from New York University before becoming a reporter for The Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., in 1983.

In 1987, he joined the Providence Journal-Bulletin, where he covered the Rhode Island state government and organized crime, and wrote regular essays for the Sunday magazine. From January 1991 to July 1995, he was a member of the newspaper’s five-member investigative team.

In 1992, Mr. Barry and two other reporters won a George Polk Award for an investigation into the causes of a state banking crisis. In 1994, he and the other members of the investigative team won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about the state’s court system; the series led to various reforms and the criminal indictment of the state’s Supreme Court chief justice. His other honors include the 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting, for his coverage of the first anniversary of Sept. 11, and the 2005 Mike Berger Award, from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which honors in-depth human interest reporting.

Mr. Barry has also written two books: "Pull Me Up: A Memoir," published in May 2004, and "City Lights: Stories About New York," a collection of his About New York columns, published in November 2007. He lives in Maplewood, N.J., with his wife, Mary Trinity, and their two daughters, Nora and Grace.

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888)

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the {AE}gean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)


I LEANT upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seem'd to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seem'd fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carollings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

*to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

*A wretched soul, bruised with adversity,
We bid be quiet when we hear it cry;
But were we burdened with like weight of pain,
As much or more we should ourselves complain.

*Action is eloquence.

*And since you know you cannot see yourself,

*so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of.

*And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol'n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

*Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

*Be great in act, as you have been in thought.

*Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind,
As man's ingratitude.

*Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.

*Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger
constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood,
garnish'd and deck'd in modest compliment,
not working with the eye without the ear,
and but in purged judgement trusting neither?
Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem.

*Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperses to naught.

*God bless thee; and put meekness in thy mind, love, charity, obedience, and true duty!

*He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.

*His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!

*How poor are they who have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees.

*How use doth breed a habit in a man.

*I am not bound to please thee with my answers.

*I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart: but the saying is true 'The empty vessel makes the greatest sound'.

*I feel within me a peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.

*I hate ingratitude more in a man
than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness,
or any taint of vice whose strong corruption
inhabits our frail blood.

*I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.

*I pray thee cease thy counsel,
Which falls into mine ears as profitless
as water in a sieve.

*I pray you bear me henceforth from the noise and rumour of the field, where I may think the remnant of my thoughts in peace, and part of this body and my soul with contemplation and devout desires.

*I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

*Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.

*In a false quarrel there is no true valour.

*In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility.

*In time we hate that which we often fear.

Travel literature

Travel literature is travel writing considered to have value as literature. Travel literature typically records the people, events, sights and feelings of an author who is touring a foreign place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary.
To be called literature the work must have a coherent narrative, or insights and value, beyond a mere logging of dates and events, such as diary or ship's log. Literature that recounts adventure, exploration and conquest is often grouped under travel literature, but it also has its own genre outdoor literature; these genres will often overlap with no definite boundaries.

One of the earliest known records of taking pleasure in travel, of travelling for the sake of travel and writing about it, is Petrarch's (1304–1374) ascent of Mount Ventoux in 1336. He states that he went to the mountaintop for the pleasure of seeing the top of the famous height. His companions who stayed at the bottom he called frigida incuriositas ("a cold lack of curiosity"). He then wrote about his climb, making allegorical comparisons between climbing the mountain and his own moral progress in life.
Michault Taillement, a poet for the Duke of Burgundy, travelled through the Jura Mountains in 1430 and left us with his personal reflections, his horrified reaction to the sheer rock faces, and the terrifying thunderous cascades of mountain streams. Antoine de la Sale (c. 1388–c. 1462), author of Petit Jehan de Saintre, climbed to the crater of a volcano in the Lipari Islands in 1407, leaving us with his impressions. "Councils of mad youth" were his stated reasons for going. In the mid 15th century, Gilles le Bouvier, in his Livre de la description des pays, gave us his reason to travel and write:
Because many people of diverse nations and countries delight and take pleasure, as I have done in times past, in seeing the world and things therein, and also because many wish to know without going there, and others wish to see, go, and travel, I have begun this little book.
In 1589, Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552–1616) published Voyages, a foundational text of the travel literature genre.
Other later examples of travel literature include accounts of the Grand Tour. Aristocrats, clergy, and others with money and leisure time travelled Europe to learn about the art and architecture of its past. One tourism literature pioneer was Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).

Travel literature also became popular during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) of medieval China.[1] The genre was called 'travel record literature' (youji wenxue), and was often written in narrative, prose, essay, and diary style.[2] Travel literature authors such as Fan Chengda (1126–1193) and Xu Xiake (1587–1641) incorporated a wealth of geographical and topographical information into their writing, while the 'daytrip essay' Record of Stone Bell Mountain by the noted poet and statesman Su Shi (1037–1101) presented a philosophical and moral argument as its central purpose.[3]
In the 18th century, travel literature was commonly known as the book of travels, which mainly consisted of maritime diaries.[4] In 18th century England, almost every famous writer worked in the travel literature form.[5] Captain James Cook's diaries (1784) were the equivalent of today's best sellers.

Langston Hughes February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967

Poet and novelist Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). His father divorced his mother and moved to Mexico when Hughes was just a baby. He was raised by his mother and grandmother, but after high school he went to Mexico to get to know his father for the first time. He was disgusted when he found that his father was obsessed with money and more racist than most white men Hughes had ever known.

He went to Columbia University for a year, but then he decided that he wanted to learn from the world rather than books. He quit college, hopped a boat to Africa, and as soon as the boat left New York Harbor, he threw all his college books overboard. He took odd jobs on ships and made his way from Africa to France, Holland, Italy, and finally back to the United States.

He got a job working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel, and one day he left three poems he had written next to the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsey. Lindsey loved them and read them to an audience the very next day. Within a few years, Hughes had published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926).

He got involved in the Harlem Renaissance and started to write poetry influenced by the music he heard in jazz and blues clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street... [songs that] had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."

Hughes was one of the first African-American poets to embrace the language of lower-class black Americans. In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), he said, "[I want to write for] the people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."

In his poem "Laughers," he made a list of what he called "my people": "Dish-washers, / Elevator boys, / Ladies' maids, / Crap-shooters, / Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of Babies, / Loaders of Ships, /Rounders,/ Number writers, / Comedians in Vaudeville / And band-men in circuses - / Dream-singers all."


*Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die, Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly, Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams go, Life is a barren field, Frozen with snow.

*Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

*I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

*When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

*What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up - like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore - And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over - like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags - like a heavy lead.

*An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

*I will not take "but" for an answer.

*Negroes - Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day - They change their mind.

“Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

*I swear to the Lord I still can't see why Democracy means everybody but me.

*It's such a Bore Being always Poor.

*To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

*We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives . . . Censorship for us begins at the color line.

*What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? . . . Or does it explode?

*Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

*Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.

*But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America—and change soon. We must help that change to come.

*I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.

Poem: "Jet Lag" by Eve Robillard, from when gertrude married alice. © Parallel Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission.

Jet Lag

He flies over the ocean to see his girl, his Sorbonne
girl, his ginger-skinned girl waiting for him in the City

of Light. Everywhere river and almost-spring gardens,
everywhere bridges and rainy statues. Streets going

nowhere, streets going on all night. I love you my mona
my lisa, my cabbage, my gargoyle, Degas' little dancer

in dawn's ragged gown. But on the third day she
picks up her books, tells him she needs to study:

she adores this town, she's not coming home in May, she's
going to stay all summer. Lowers her morning-calm eyes.

He's all right in the cab, all right on the plane droning
him home in only three hours American-key in his lock now

his tick-tock apartment, shiver his shadow, his need
to sleep. Then with a tiredness washing over and

over him and through his raveling bones
he begins to know.

Paul Theroux, 1941 -

Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, "I had thought of responsibilities I did not want—marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the army too brutal." He said the Peace Corps was a kind of "Howard Johnson's on the main drag to maturity."

The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975).

*Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

*Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

*Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

*The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume

*It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

*Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

*You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

*The train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.

*I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

*It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

*Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

*The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

*Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

*Riding the Iron Rooster.

*The kind of travel I do is a reaction to that. Instead of going to meet gorillas or Bhutan, I prefer to go [my own way] and do things the wealthy wouldn't dare to do.

*Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.

*The drug tour he had hoped would be unique, his own, ... was apparently a widely known trip down a well-traveled path, in the sort of full-color brochure that also described gorilla encounters in Africa and white-water rafting on the Ganges and treks to the Everest base camp and birding in Mongolia.

*There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

*The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

*As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of Money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of sex and money.

Lewis Carroll, 1832 - 1898

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson near Daresbury, Cheshire, England (1832). He is best known as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1872), and for the characters the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the White Rabbit, and many others. Carroll was also a gifted mathematician and photographer. His photographs of children are still considered remarkable to this day.

Carroll read Pilgrim's Progress as a young boy, in part to prepare for a life in the ministry. But he suffered an attack of whooping cough at age 17, a late age to get that illness, and as a result he developed a stammer to go along with his natural shyness. After recovering from his illness, Carroll decided that life as a minister would be too demanding.

Instead, Carroll lectured in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, where he had also attended university. Carroll found the work dull and considered most of his students stupid, but he wrote seriously during this time. In 1855, he said, "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication, but I do not despair of doing so some day." The next year he published under the famous pseudonym "Lewis Carroll" for the first time, when his poem "Solitude" appeared in a magazine called Train. The pseudonym is a play on Carroll's real name.

Carroll always felt at ease around children. It has been rumored that his stammer would disappear while he talked with children. Nobody can say for certain if this is true, but Carroll was well known as a storyteller, and he liked telling his stories to children. He first came up with the idea for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by telling stories to the children of the dean of Christ Church, who had a daughter named Alice.

Carroll enjoyed massive success from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and his pseudonym grew into an alter ego that became famous in its own right. Even today, more people know the legends surrounding Lewis Carroll better than they know the biography of the real man, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The stories of Alice and her adventures in the strange wonderland have remained popular to this day. Many readers speculate on the underlying meaning of the tales, but Carroll himself said he only intended the tales as carefree fantasy and nothing more.

Lewis Carroll said, "If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10 years, without hard labour, and with the use of books and writing materials, it would be simply delightful!" And, "If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things."

_______________________

*If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

*But I don't want to go among mad people," said Alice. "Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here.

*Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

*I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then.

*When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

*The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.

*Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

*One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.

*Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

*You could not see a cloud, because / No cloud was in the sky: / No birds were flying overhead - / There were no birds to fly.

________________________________

Dreamland


When midnight mists are creeping,
And all the land is sleeping,
Around me tread the mighty dead,
And slowly pass away.

Lo, warriors, saints, and sages,
From out the vanished ages,
With solemn pace and reverend face
Appear and pass away.

The blaze of noonday splendour,
The twilight soft and tender,
May charm the eye: yet they shall die,
Shall die and pass away.

But here, in Dreamland's centre,
No spoiler's hand may enter,
These visions fair, this radiance rare,
Shall never pass away.

I see the shadows falling,
The forms of old recalling;
Around me tread the mighty dead,
And slowly pass away.

Cid Corman, 1924 - 2004

Cid (Sidney) Corman (June 29, 1924 – March 12, 2004) was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.



Someone I cared for

Someone I cared for
put it to me: Who
do you think you are?

I went down the list
of all the many
possibilities

carefully — did it
twice — but couldn't find
a plausible one.

That was when I knew
for the first time who
in fact I wasn't.

Wallace Stegner, 1909 - 1993

Novelist and teacher Wallace Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa (1909). His father was a schemer who was constantly moving the family from place to place, hoping to strike it rich in one of the Western boomtowns. He watched as his father tried and failed to plant a farm in North Dakota, tried and failed to run a lunchroom in the backwoods of Washington state, sold bootleg liquor in Great Falls, Montana, poured the family's savings into an invention that was supposed to detect gold in the ground, and finally bought a piece of redwood forest in California, only to cut it all down and sell it for firewood. By the time Stegner was 20, he had lived in more than 20 different houses, including, at one point, a derailed dining car. But though he had a tough childhood, Stegner grew to love the great open wilderness of the American West.

Stegner managed to get into the University of Utah by the time he was 16, and he went on to get a Ph.D. in English literature. But while he was working on his dissertation, his brother died of a sudden attack of pneumonia. Then, his mother was killed by cancer. And finally, his father committed suicide. By the end of the 1930s, Stegner had lost his entire immediate family.

He'd already begun writing fiction, but he wanted to write a new kind of novel about the American West. At that time, the only novels being published about the West were full of cowboys and heroic pioneers. Stegner said, "I wanted to write about what happens to the pioneer virtues and the pioneer type of family when the frontiers are gone and the opportunities all used up. "The result was his first big success, his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), loosely based on the experiences of his own family. It tells the story of a man named Bo Mason and his wife, Elsa, who travel over the American West, trying to make it rich.

Stegner went on to write dozens of novels about the West, including Angle of Repose (1971) and The Spectator Bird (1976). But he also started one of the most influential creative writing programs in the country, at Stanford University, where his students included Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, and Scott Turow.

*Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

*A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.

*Hard writing makes easy reading.

*She saw objectives, not obstacles.

*It is something-it can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.”

*One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.

*have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

Much Ado About Nothing First published in 1600

The Globe Theater was burned to the ground. For more than 10 years, it had been the most popular theater in London, and it was the theater where many of Shakespeare's greatest plays had their premiere.

It had been built in 1599 by Shakespeare's own acting company Lord Chamberlain's Men. Shakespeare used his own money to pay for 12.5 percent of the cost. It was the first theater ever built for a specific acting company, and the first to be financed by that same acting company. Among the plays that debuted there were As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Macbeth.

It was a theater in the round, with the audience in a circle around a platform for the actors. It was probably designed this way because most of the actors in Shakespeare's company got their start acting in the street, surrounded by a crowd. The plays were performed in the afternoons to take advantage of natural light. The roof of the theater was open to the elements, and most of the audience didn't even have seats. They just stood on the ground for the entire performance, which usually lasted about 4 hours.

And yet it was the most popular form of entertainment in the city. The theater held about 3,000 people, and it was usually full. At the time, London had a population of about 200,000. So whenever one of Shakespeare's plays was performed, 1 out of every 65 people in the city was at the Globe.

There were probably few props and very little in the way of scenery. But by the end of his career Shakespeare was apparently beginning to experiment with more dramatic effects onstage. On this day in 1613, a cannon was fired during a performance of Henry VIII to mark the King's entrance, the thatched roof caught fire, and the whole theater was lost in an hour.

In 1996, a replica of the Globe Theater was completed in London, and plays are performed there exactly the same way they would have been performed by Shakespeare's company. The performances take place in the afternoon daylight, there are no microphones, and few props. A large portion of the audience stands in the yard to watch the play, and the roof is open to the weather. About 700,000 people visit it every year. The actors say that the audience always pays better attention to the play when it's raining.

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

Sonnet 129

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

_______

ROMEO [To JULIET.]
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

[Kisses her.]

_____________________

Sonnet XXX.

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Poet E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894), who became interested in communism as a young man and traveled to Russia to see it firsthand. He was horrified to find the theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to even talk to each other in public. Everyone was miserable. Cummings went home and wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante's Inferno.

His view of communism was not popular in the literary world at the time, and magazines suddenly began refusing to publish his work. For the next two decades, he had a hard time publishing his books, and he got terrible reviews when he did. Critics thought his exotic arrangements of words on the page were silly, and they said he wrote like an adolescent. Then, in 1952, his friend Archibald MacLeish got Cummings a temporary post at Harvard, giving a series of lectures. Instead of standing behind the lectern, Cummings sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him. The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. He began traveling and giving readings at universities across the country, even though he suffered from terrible back pain, and had to wear a metal brace that he called an "iron maiden." He loved performing and loved the applause, and the last 10 years of his life were the happiest.

E. E. Cummings said, "If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little — somebody who is obsessed by Making."

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

-- Robert Frost

I had no time to hate

I HAD no time to hate, because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so ample I
Could finish enmity.

Nor had I time to love; but since
Some industry must be,
The little toil of love, I thought,
Was large enough for me.

Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856–February 3, 1924)

The 28th president of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia (1856). He was one of the few American presidents who came to office after a career in academia. He'd started out as a professor of history and political science at Princeton University, and in 1902, he was appointed president of Princeton. But he ran into a series of disagreements with the Board of Trustees over his ambitious plans to remake the university. He was on the verge of getting fired in 1910, when he received an offer to run for governor of New Jersey. He took the offer, and wound up winning the election by a landslide.

At first, he found that he didn't much enjoy politics. But his talent for oratory and his sweeping reforms of New Jersey government caught the attention of the national Democratic Party. In 1912, he was nominated to run for president after barely two years of government experience. And thanks to the fact that Teddy Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate, the Republican vote was divided, and Wilson won.

Wilson had been a member of the American Peace society and he leaned toward pacifism. As president, he advocated arms reduction and international arbitration of disputes between nations. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Wilson immediately declared that the United States would remain neutral in the conflict, and he repeatedly tried to bring the warring nations to a negotiating table.

In 1917, Wilson drew up a plan for establishing world peace. He believed that if the nations of the world were ever going to get along, they had to form an international organization in which they could work out their disputes. He called this international organization The League of Nations. But nine days later, German submarines began attacking American naval ships. Even though he'd won a second term on the promise to keep America out of the war, Wilson decided that the United States could no longer remain neutral. He justified entering the war by saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy."

It was the first time that the U.S. had chosen to intervene in world affairs outside of the Western hemisphere. By the end of the war, the United States had emerged as one of the most powerful nations in the world. Wilson went to the peace conference in Paris in 1919 with the idea of selling his League of Nations to Europe as a way to prevent any such war from ever occurring again.

But his plan was a huge failure. Before he arrived in Paris, he was a widely respected world leader. But once the Europeans met him, they couldn't stand him. The British prime minister said that Wilson behaved like a heathen come to rescue the missionaries. The French prime minister said that talking to him was like talking to Jesus Christ. He was just too idealistic, and he wasn't prepared for the selfishness of the world leaders who wanted to turn the peace negotiations into a land grab.

The one thing Wilson got the European leaders to agree to was the inclusion of a League of Nations as part of the treaty. But when he returned to the United States, he couldn't even convince his own Congress to approve the treaty. Some senators offered ways of compromising the plan, but Wilson refused to compromise. He went on a cross-country speaking tour to appeal directly to the people, but during the tour, he suffered a massive stroke. He partially recovered from the stroke; he never again functioned fully as president.

Woodrow Wilson said, "If you want to make enemies, try to change something."


*...it is as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.

*A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.

*America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny

*I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

*Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-

*No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.

*The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.

*The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

*You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.

*The world must be made safe for democracy.

*Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

*Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.

*No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.

*There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight; there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

*The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

Raymond Carver

Short story writer Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon (1938). He's known for writing pared-down, realistic stories about working-class people, collected in books like What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Will You Be Quiet, Please? (1976).

He became seriously interested in writing in 1959 while he was taking a fiction-writing class from the novelist John Gardner at Chico State College. Gardner would pick apart Carver's stories line by line. He would cross out words and sentences and tell Carver that he was not allowed to keep them in the story; and he would circle other sections and allow Carver to come up with arguments for why they should be allowed to stay. Carver later said that for the rest of his life he could feel Gardner looking over his shoulder whenever he wrote a story.

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.