Friday, February 23

Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.

     It's the birthday, in 1633 in London, of Samuel Pepys. Pepys is considered the greatest diarist of all time. His diary is a very thorough combination of his personal life and what was happening in English politics in his day. His first entry talks about the movements of a rebel army in northern England, and also about his wife's period.
    Pepys was born into a middle class family. The family had good connections which allowed him to obtain an education at Cambridge and an appointment to the Naval Board.
     Pepys had witnessed the beheading of King Charles I in 1649. He was a supporter of Cromwell during the years of the Commonwealth, but switched to the Royalist party after Cromwell's death. He was on the ship that brought Charles II back to England from exile.
     Once on the Naval board, Pepys taught himself maritime science and played an important role in professionalizing the British Navy. Because of his position in government, scholars have mined Pepys' diary for an inside view of life at that time. Curiously, Pepys also wrote about the mundane affairs of his personal life, his new watch, his cat waking him at night, his disagreements with his wife. When writing about his illicit love affairs, he switched to French or Italian.
     He wrote over a million words in his diary, but quit after ten years. He thought writing by candlelight was injuring his eyes, but he lived another 34 years without going blind. I think he was just sick of it.

     It's also the birthday, in 1868, of W.E.B. DuBois. the American historian and civil-rights activist. DuBois was born into a tolerant, integrated town in western Massachusetts. His teachers recognized his talent and his church raised money to send him to the historically black Fisk University in Nashville. This was his first experience with southern racism. He did his graduate work in history at Harvard and was the first African-American to receive a doctorate from Harvard.
     He was a co-founder, in 1909, of the NAACP. He opposed the go-slow compromises of Booker T. Washington, and demanded full civil rights and increased political representation, and opportunities for advanced education. He fought against racism his entire life. "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line," he said.
      DuBois believed capitalism was a big part of the racism problem and he favored socialism. This got him in trouble during the McCarthy era and he and his colleagues were put on trial for refusing to register as foreign agents. The judge stopped the trial when Albert Einstein said he would appear as a character witness for DuBois. The government did confiscate his passport.
      When he got his passport back eight years later, he went to Ghana at age 93 to work on an encyclopedia of the African diaspora. When the U.S. government refused to renew his passport in 1963, he declared he would become a citizen of Ghana and died in that country at the age of 95.

     It is also the birthday of Jackie Helm Reynolds. Happy Birthday Jackie!!!

Jackie's Birthplace

Today's poem is by Ralph Waldo Emerson

                             The Snow Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian* wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,

 Maugre* the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.

*of or relating to Paros or the fine white marble for which it is renowned.

* in spite of