Still Let Me Love
’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!~Lord Byron, from On This The Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year
George Gordon, later to be known as Lord Byron was born on this day, January 22nd in 1788. He composed a poem on his 36th birthday which was to become a eulogy: He died only a few weeks later on April 19th. Lord Bryon shares a strange kinship with Marilyn Monroe who also died at 36. Like Marilyn, his mesmerizing face, riotous living, many love affairs, and tragic death has made him a romantic, fascinating figure. His mystique was so iconic that even today, an alluringly dark, mysterious, and moody man is said to be Byronic.
George Orwell died on this day, January 21st in 1950. He wrote his masterwork 1984 in 1948 (yes – he merely flipped the last two years as a nod to “where things are headed.”) The book enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in recent years as the current political environment in the United States and other Western countries seemed to flirt more and more with totalitarianism. Many see similarities to Orwell’s view of a government-controlled by “Big Brother.”
Racism is not new, nor will it be eradicated in this age. The inherent belief that one race is superior to another is rooted in the worse kind of idolatry. It’s all a world of double standards, and they are a fearful thing. They allow you to hold diametrically aligned but contrasting views in the cradle of your mind with no moral angst whatsoever. It takes children a while to get the hang of it, but not long. The problem, of course, is that we all are guilty and remedy requires a hard lonesome fight against the resolute crowd.
Edgar Allan Poe was born on this day, January 19th in 1809. He is a master of macabre, but no tale is more unsettling than William Wilson. It is the story of a man haunted since his youth by a double who shares his name, his size, his features, and even his birthday. Intimate rivals as schoolboys, the two Wilsons part ways, but the narrator finds, as he leads a life of cruelty and extravagant debauchery across Europe, that his double appears again and again at his side to remind him of his nature in low, insinuating whispers. When, finally, the narrator is driven to murder his twin, he finds that he has murdered himself. In a further blurring of identity, the Wilsons share their birthday with their creator, Edgar Allan Poe.
Ernest Hemingway defined courage as “grace under pressure”, but I don’t think that goes far enough. It’s insufficient to achieve zen-like tranquility of inner equilibrium in the midst of outer chaos. For that, a lobotomy will do just fine. Being able to stay calm only gets you so far.
It has never been easy to be a teenager. Crossing the border from childhood to adulthood comes with an assortment of demons and when you are thirteen-year-old Michelangelo, the experience comes out in paint. That’s right, he was thirteen when he painted The Torment of Saint Anthony.
Susan Sontag was born on this day, January 16th in 1933. In her book The Aesthetics of Silence she said
On this day, January 15th in 1941, something of a miracle took place. Olivier Messiaen was a prisoner of war under Nazi Germany and was held in Stalag 8A at Görlitz in Silesia, about fifty miles east of Dresden. Here he suffered extremes of cold and hunger, but here also his musical imagination was fired, and a masterpiece born.
The master of wordplay, Lewis Carroll died on this day, January 14th in 1898. He introduced us to Wonderland and it seems we are now a bit lost in it. As with Carroll’s tale, communication, and our collective conversation is today handicapped by the discounting and rebranding of words. When “spiritual” is good but “religious” is bad, we might think it sick or dope, and we might be right. No wait, that’s wrong. What?