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De Amerikaanse schrijver William Styron werd op 11 juni 1925 in Newport News in de staat Virginia geboren. Zie ook mijn blogs van 11 juni 2006, van 4 november 2006. en mijn blog van 11 juni 2007 en ook mijn blog van 11 juni 2008.
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Uit: Darkness Visible
I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain. This leads me to touch again on the elusive nature of such distress. That the word indescribable should present itself is no fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. For myself, the pain is most closely connected to drowning or suffocationbut even these images are off the mark. William James, who battled depression for many years, gave up the search for an adequate portrayal, implying it near-impossibility when he wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience: It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.
The pain persisted during my museum tour and reached crescendo in the next few hours when, back at the hotel, I fell onto the bed and lay gazing at the ceiling, nearly immobilized and in a trance of supreme discomfort. Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance. I can think of no more apposite word for this state of being, a condition of helpless stupor in which cognition was replaced by that positive and active anguish. And one of the most unendurable aspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep. It had been my custom of a near-lifetime, to settle myself into a soothing nap in the late afternoon, but the disruption of normal sleep patterns is a notoriously devastating feature of depression; to the injurious sleeplessness with which I had been afflicted each night was added the insult of this afternoon insomnia, diminutive by comparison but all the more horrendous because it struck during the hours of the most intense misery.
William Styron (11 juni 1925 1 november 2006)
De Britse dichteres en schrijfster Renée Vivien (eig. Pauline Mary Tarn) werd geboren op 11 juni 1877 in Londen. Zie ook mijn blog van 11 juni 2007 en ook mijn blog van 11 juni 2008.
Prolong the Night
Prolong the night, Goddess who sets us aflame!
Hold back from us the golden-sandalled dawn!
Already on the sea the first faint gleam
Of day is coming on.
Sleeping under your veils, protect us yet,
Having forgotten the cruelty day may give!
The wine of darkness, wine of the stars let
Overwhelm us with love!
Since no one knows what dawn will come,
Bearing the dismal future with its sorrows
In its hands, we tremble at full day, our dream
Fears all tomorrows.
Oh! keeping our hands on our still-closed eyes,
Let us vainly recall the joys that take flight!
Goddess who delights in the ruin of the rose,
Prolong the night!
Renée Vivien (11 juni 1877 10 november 1909)
De Franse schrijver Jean-Pierre Chabrol werd geboren op 11 juni 1925 in Chamborigaud. Hij groeide op in het hart van de Cévennes en kreeg zijn opleiding in Alès. In 1944 sloot hij zich aan bij het Franse verzet. Hij werkte als journalist en tekenaar voor lHumanité. Louis Aragon spoorde hem aan om zijn eerste roman te schrijven, La dernière cartouche. Hij raakte bevriend met mensen als Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré, Jacques Brel, Pierre Mac Orlan, werkte veel mee aan radio en televisieprogrammás en maakte talrijke reizen.
Uit: Le crève Cévenne
Cest long de mourir. Cest insupportable, une langueur ! Y aurait de quoi se flinguer un bon coup. Surtout quand il ne sagit pas que de sa propre mort, quand se mourir soi-même ne suffit plus, quand il faut bien, se mourant, mourir aussi son pays. Crever sa mort dans la mort de sa terre. On ne peut que rester le soir au coin de sa cheminée, quand on en a encore une, à regarder flamber les dernières bougnes des derniers mûriers. Mais il y a pire, mais il est des soirs, des nuits, lhiver surtout, par des temps à ne pas mettre un assureur dehors, où personne ne passe, où personne ne vient saccroupir dans lautre coin, outre-flammes. Alors on se résout à sortir, à chercher un toit, un autre feu, un autre coin, un autre agonisant, un mourant veinard qui voit, lui guilleret, quelquun venir mourir avec lui dans la crève du vieux pays.
Les feuilles mortes ont un tel poids quelles font crier le sol. À ne plus passer sous les arbres. Les voitures ont de bons freins. La rue-route du village, lartère unique, est une immensité de frissonnantes grisailles. À cette heure, en ce lieu, un cri denfant paraît déplacé, choquant même, cest une atteinte aux bonnes murs.
Le vieux Socrate est couché, sans connaissance depuis quatre semaines. Son cousin Platon en est à sa troisième attaque, je lentends gémir derrière les volets de la fenêtre à gauche de ce cadran solaire qui porte en exergue, sous les heures : « Chacune dentre elles blesse, la dernière tue ».
Jean-Pierre Chabrol (11 juni 1925 1 december 2001)
De Engelse dichter en schrijver Ben Jonson werd geboren rond 11 juni 1572 in Westminster, Londen. Zie ook mijn blog van 11 juni 2006 en ook mijn blog van 11 juni 2007 en ook mijn blog van 11 juni 2008.
The Hour-Glass
O but consider this small dust, here running in the glass,
By atoms moved.
Could you believe that this the body was
Of one that loved?
And in his mistress' flame playing like a fly,
Turned to cinders by her eye?
Yes, and in death as life unblest,
To have't expressed,
Even ashes of lovers find no rest.
On My First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy,
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy;
Seven years th' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, I could lose all father now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry;
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
Ben Jonson (ca. 11 juni 1572 6 augustus 1637)
De Zuidafrikaanse schrijver Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard werd geboren op 11 juni 1932 in Middelburg, Kaapprovincie. Zie ook mijn blog van 11 juni 2007 en ook mijn blog van 11 juni 2008.
Uit: On Tsotsi (Interview in The Morning After, 2006)
I wrote Tsotsi at the same time that I was writing the first of my plays to really receive recognition within South Africa, and then ultimately outside of South Africa: The Blood Knot. It went to London where good old Ken Tynan killed it stone dead. It launched my career, really, [it was a] watershed play.
I felt I had arrived, then, at a kind of crossroads. I had to choose disciplines. Of course theyre such very, very different disciplines. To this day, I still dont think that I really know how to write a novel. I really mean that. I know I took the plunge [at the] deep end with Tsotsi.
I think I just naturally gravitated -- by virtue of my chemistry as a man, my metabolism as a writer -- towards theatre. And that snuffed out the possibility of being a prose writer, a novelist. I dont think I could do the two in tandem. I dont know if you really can... Can you think of any successful novelist who is also a good playwright --
Athol Fugard (Middelburg (ZA), 11 juni 1932)
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