The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
"The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Public Domain. ( buy now)
It's the birthday of the man who said: "Deprivation often makes a writer." That's Ved Mehta ( books by this author), born in Lahore, India (now Pakistan) in 1934. When he was four years old, he contracted a form of meningitis that caused him to go blind. He said: "In India, one of the poorest countries the world has ever known, the lot of the blind was to beg with a walking stick in one hand and an alms bowl in the other. Hindus consider blindness a punishment for sins committed in a previous incarnation." But his father was a doctor who thought that his son should have the same opportunities as everyone else, so he sent him to schools that served blind people. One of these was a school for soldiers who had been recently blinded during World War II, and there, Mehta learned to type. With this new skill, he sent letters to every school he could find in England and the United States, and the Arkansas School for the Blind accepted him.
So he left India at the age of 15, and he ended up getting scholarships and attending Pomona, Oxford, and Harvard. While he was at Harvard, someone offered to introduce him to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker. Mehta wasn't really sure what The New Yorker was but he decided to have tea with Shawn, who ended up inviting the 25-year-old to write an article for the magazine. Mehta gave up his fellowship at Harvard to become a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he stayed for almost 35 years.
From the beginning, he was enamored of Shawn, and years later, after his mentor's death, he published Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker (1998), a memoir of his years there. In it, he wrote about Shawn: "I fell completely under the spell of his manner — kind, courtly, respectful, and patient. The editing process was arduous and time-consuming, since there was hardly a paragraph that was not touched. Yet he made our work, which could so easily have degenerated into a power play, intensely pleasurable. All the while, I felt that he was sensitizing me to the force and the importance of each word — to its weight, tone, and texture — and was teaching me new ways not only of writing but also of thinking, feeling, and speaking."
Ved Mehta is the author of many books, including Face to Face (1957), Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (1977), and most recently, All For Love (2002), a memoir of sorts about his love affairs with four different women.
He said, "I didn't want to be a blind writer. I wanted to be a writer who is blind."
It's the birthday of a writer who loved the suburbs, Phyllis McGinley (books by this author), born in Ontario, Oregon (1905). In "Suburbia, To Thee I Sing," she wrote: "Deluded people that we are, we do not realize how mediocre it all seems. We will eat our undistinguished meal, probably without even a cocktail to enliven it. We will drink our coffee at the table, not carry it into the living room. If a husband changes for dinner here it is into old trousers and more comfortable shoes. The children will then go through the childhood routine — complain about their homework, grumble about going to bed, and finally accomplish both ordeals. Perhaps later the Gerard Joneses will drop in. We will talk a great deal of unimportant chatter and compare notes on food prices; will discuss the headlines and disagree. We will all have one highball and the Joneses will leave early. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow the pattern will be repeated. This is Suburbia. But I think that someday people will look back on our Spruce Manor way of life with nostalgia and respect. In a world of terrible extremes it will stand out as the important medium. Suburbia, of thee I sing!"
It's the birthday of poet Nizar Qabbani ( books by this author), born in Damascus, Syria (1923). His mother, who was illiterate, sold her jewelry to raise money to publish his first anthology, Childhood of a Bosom (1948). Nizar went on to become the most popular Arab poet, publishing more than 20 books of poetry. Much of his poetry was influenced by the tragic deaths of two women he loved. When he was 15, his older sister committed suicide rather than be forced into marriage with a man she did not love, and he turned his attention to the situation of Arab women. He wrote romantic, sensual poems and poetry demonstrating the need for sexual equality and women's rights. Many years later, in 1981, his second wife, an Iraqi woman, died during the Lebanese Civil War when the Iraqi Embassy was bombed. Qabbani was grief-stricken and frustrated with the political and cultural climate of the Arab world, and he lived in Europe for the rest of his life.
Qabbani said, "Don't love deeply, till you make sure that the other part loves you with the same depth, because the depth of your love today, is the depth of your wound tomorrow."
The Alabama Freedom March began on this date in 1965. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King ( books by this author) and 3,200 demonstrators set off on a 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the disenfranchisement of black voters. They had tried to set off on this march twice before; the first time, state troopers and deputies attacked them with clubs, whips, and tear gas. The second time, they were turned back by a human barricade of state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. On March 10, the Justice Department filed suit in Montgomery to block the troopers from punishing the protestors. President Lyndon Johnson, in a special address, said: "Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome" (his 'We Shall Overcome' speech on March 15).
The judge ruled in favor of the marchers, but Alabama governor George Wallace complained that deploying the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers would be too expensive. He appealed to Johnson for help. Johnson signed an executive order to federalize the Alabama National Guard, and deployed them to protect Dr. King and the other civil rights protestors on their march.
The marchers traveled about 12 miles a day, and slept in the fields at night. By the time they reached Montgomery on March 25, their numbers had swelled to 25,000. King gave an address from the steps of the state capitol. He said: "The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man."
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — which prohibits racial discrimination in voting — in August, less than five months after the Selma march.
It's the birthday of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach born in Eisenach, Germany (1685). His many compositions, including the Brandenburg Concertos (1721) and Goldberg Variations (1741), are considered some of the finest music ever written. He once said, "I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music."
Bach came from a musical family. His father was a string player, town piper, and court trumpeter, and all of Bach's siblings played music. Bach learned Latin and sang in the school choir. When he was nine, he lost both of his parents and went to live with his older brother. His brother taught him how to play the clavichord and to write music, even though ledger paper of that time was costly. When a new organ was under construction at the Ohrdruf Church, Bach was given special permission to watch.
He had a beautiful singing voice, which meant he could go to school for free as long as he sang in the boys' choir. But his voice changed, so he quickly became an organ virtuoso. He was also something of a rogue, often leaving on foot for faraway towns to see new church organs. He earned a stipend teaching the boys' choir, but he didn't really like it, and once got into a fight with a bassoon player in the street. He was even chided for "making music with a stranger maid" in a town church.
Bach wrote both of his famous Passions while serving as the "Thomaskantor," or music director, of the boys choir in Leipzig. Passion music was typically written for Good Friday services. He was the Thomaskantor in Leipzig until his death in 1750.
His compositions were complicated, and sometimes unwieldy, requiring many more instruments than people were used to. During his lifetime, even though he received commissions and was able to make a living, he wasn't fully appreciated. At the time of his death, his sole estate was listed as "5 harpsichords, 2 tule-harpsichords, 3 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos, a viola da gamba, a lute, a spinet, and 52 'sacred books.'"
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