The Writer's Almanac from Saturday, January 27, 2001
The Writer's Almanac from Saturday, January 27, 2001
"The Mock Turtle's Song," by Lewis Carroll.
It's the birthday of the man who wrote Show Boat (1927)—composer Jerome Kern, born in New York City (1885).
It's the birthday of one of the founders of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, born in London (1850).
It's the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, born in Cheshire, England (1832). He was a painfully shy mathematician and church deacon who kept fastidious charts showing what his guests had eaten when they'd dined with him and what chair they'd sat in. He even summarized and filed all of his correspondence in a catalogue system containing 98,000 cross references. Afflicted by a stammer, he was more comfortable with children than with adults, especially with the three young daughters of his college dean. While taking them on a rowboat outing in July of 1862, he spun a tale about a girl named Alice, who fell down a rabbit-hole into an unexpected underground world. The middle daughter, whose name was Alice, begged him to write the story down for her, and so he obligingly scrawled out what became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1863), followed several years later by a sequel called Through the Looking-Glass (1871).He thought that young children should be allowed to read picture books in church during the sermon, so that church would be a bright and happy memory, and so they wouldn't turn against religion later in life.
It's the birthday of the man who created the Periodic Table of Elements—Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, born in Tobolsk, Siberia (1834).When he was 35 years old, Mendeleev organized the chemical elements into a table in order of increasing atomic number.
It's the birthday of pianist and composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg, Austria (1756).His father, Leopold Mozart, was a noted composer, and so by the time Wolfgang was six he was performing on the harpsichord before the imperial court of Vienna. By the time Mozart died at the age of 35, he had written nearly 50 symphonies, 20 operas and 23 piano concertos.
On this day in 1302, Dante Alighieri was expelled from Florence for his political activities. For the next 20 years he moved from place to place—Verona, Ravenna—as political currents dictated. While in exile he wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, which established his native Tuscan dialect as the literary language of Italy.
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Ah Dante! The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Some things do stay true beyond years. The hard part is finding which ones they are, as Google relates to us: "The purpose of Dante's Divine Comedy was to show people the horrors their souls would go through if they did not obey God's laws and did not live righteously." Amen.....