The Writer's Almanac from Thursday, August 1, 2013
The Writer's Almanac from Thursday, August 1, 2013
"Still Life" by Carl Dennis, from Ranking the Wishes. © Penguin Poets, 1997.
ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013
It's the birthday of Herman Melville, born in New York City, (1819). When he was 20, he worked as a cabin boy on a ship that went to Liverpool and back, the first of his many voyages. In 1841, he joined the crew of the whaler Acushnet. Inspired by his adventures at sea, Melville returned to New York and settled down to write about his travels.
After Melville got married, had four children, and moved to a farm in Massachusetts, he became friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne and went to work on Moby-Dick. Hawthorne encouraged him to make the novel an allegory, not just another adventure story. Melville became consumed with writing Moby-Dick. When he finished the novel he wrote to Hawthorne (to whom he also dedicated the book), "I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb." He thought it was his best book yet.
But when Moby-Dick came out in 1851, the public did not agree. It was too psychological. His American publisher only printed a few thousand copies, and most of those never even sold. After his next novel, Pierre (1852), got terrible reviews, publishers stopped wanting to publish Melville's work. The manuscript of his final work, Billy Budd, was found in his desk after he died, by which time he had become so obscure that The New York Times called him "Henry Melville" in his obituary.
It's the birthday of the first professional woman astronomer, Maria Mitchell, born in Nantucket, Massachusetts (1818). She was the third child of 10 born into a New England Quaker family. She was taught a bit by her father but largely self-educated. Her parents encouraged their daughters as well as their sons to excel, and she became a noted scientist, which was very rare for a woman back then. She was the first to discover a comet with the use of a telescope, in 1847, and was the first woman admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She taught astronomy at Vassar and had a crater on the moon named for her.
She said, "Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God."
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Thank you for including the Maria Mitchell quote. It exemplifies the mind of those scientists who are also believers and who joyfully pursue their inquiries even to the present day.
Whenever my husband meets someone, he tells them that we lived in the town (Acushnet) named after the whaling ship that Herman Melville took a trip on before he wrote their favorite novel. He also tells them that we were married in 1998 on the 1/2 scale whaling ship in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. We were supposed to have been married in the Seamen’s Bethel, the nearby small chapel which was featured in the Moby-Dick movie starring Gregory Peck, but it was January and the plumbing was frozen, so we were relocated to the whaling ship. Most of the people say that they didn’t like the book, or that they used Cliff Notes. We “had to” read it in 8th grade English but I only got about halfway through it and never felt inclined to try to read it again.