Hendrik Tollens (24 september 1780 -21 oktober 1856)
De Nederlandse schrijver en dichter Hendrik Tollens werd op 24 september 1780 te Rotterdam geboren. Zie ook mijn blog van 24 september 2006.
Voor mijn Hond
Alard is dood. Een traan ontsprong mijne oogen,
Toen hij de zijne sloot;
Ik schaam mij niet: ik ben bewogen:
Alard is dood.
Hij hing me aan 't lijf; hij kleefde me aan de kleeren
Hij kwispelde aan mijn zij';
Nog stervend sloeg hij menig keeren
Het brekend oog op mij.
Hoe dikwijls lag hij naast mij op de zoden
Aan gindschen eik, als ik, de stad
In 't vreedzaam avontuur ontvloden,
Te peinzen en te mijmren zat!
'k Wil aan dien eik voor hem een grafterp stichten
Hij heeft die eer verdiend.
Beschijnt hem minzaam, hemellichten!
Hij was mijn trouwste vriend.
De Amerikaanse schrijver F. Scott Fitzgerald werd geboren op 24 september 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Zie ook mijn blog van 24 september 2006.
Uit: The Great Gatsby
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought -- frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon -- for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament" -- it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No -- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
