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De Amerikaanse dichter en schrijver John Robinson Jeffers werd geboren op 10 januari 1887 in Allegheny, nu Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Zie ook mijn blog van 10 januari 2009.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Promise Of Peace
The heads of strong old age are beautiful
Beyond all grace of youth. They have strange quiet,
Integrity, health, soundness, to the full
They've dealt with life and been tempered by it.
A young man must not sleep; his years are war,
Civil and foreign but the former's worse;
But the old can breathe in safety now that they are
Forgetting what youth meant, the being perverse,
Running the fool's gauntlet and being cut
By the whips of the five senses. As for me,
If I should wish to live long it were but
To trade those fevers for tranquillity,
Thinking though that's entire and sweet in the grave
How shall the dead taste the deep treasure they have?
Sign-Post
Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.
Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
Make your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyes
Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;
Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length
You will look back along the star's rays and see that even
The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.
Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength
And sickness; but now you are free, even to be human,
But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.
Robinson Jeffers (10 januari 1887 20 januari 1962)
De Russische schrijver Alexei Tolstoy werd geboren op 10 januari 1883 in Sosnovka. Zie ook mijn blog van 10 januari 2009.
Uit: Ordeal
Dasha pushed her way up to the platform. A tall young'fellow, turning his head, opened his mouth in a broad smile, his teeth showing white against his begrimed face; nodding towards a bench, he stretched out his hand, and Dasha climbed up beside him to the lathe beneath the window. The faces in the vast crowd - several thousand strong - were morose, the brows lined, the lips compressed. She saw such faces every day in the streets and trams, weary Russian faces, with forbidding eyes. Dasha remembered walking about the islands in Petersburg one Sunday, before the war, when her escorts - two barristers - had turned the conversation upon just faces. "Take the Paris crowd, Darya Dmitrievna - gay, good-humoured, bubbling with fun... And here you see nothing but scowling countenances. Look at these two workers coming towards us! Shall I go up to them, and try and joke with them? They wouldn't understand, they'd be offended. Russians are so ridiculously slow on the uptake, so heavy in hand..." And now these humourless folk stood there, agitated, sombre, tense and determined. The same faces, but dark with hunger now, the same eyes, but the expression fiery, impatient.D
Dasha forgot what she was there for. The impressions of the life into which she had plunged from her lonely window in Krasniye Zori Street, carried her away like a storm bird, and she abandoned herself to them with pristine innocence. She was not really stupid but, like many other people, she had been left to herself, with only her own tiny store of experience to guide her. But she thirsted for truth-she thirsted for it as an individual, as a woman, as a member of the human race.
A new speaker had ascended the platform, a short man in a grey jacket, his waistcoat showing horizontal wrinkles. His bald, bumpy head was bent over the notes on the table before him. "Comrades!" he began, and Dasha noticed that he spoke with a slight burr, and that he looked worried, screwing up his eyes as if the light was in them. His hands rested on the table, on a sheaf of notes. When he said that his subject today would be the acute crisis which was bearing down upon the whole of Europe and on Russia heaviest of all, and that his subject was famine, three thousand people held their breath beneath the smoke-blackened roof.
Alexei Tolstoy (10 januari 1883 23 februari 1945)
De Nederlandse dichter en schrijver Jan Eekhout werd geboren op 10 januari 1900 in Sluis. Zie ook mijn blog van 10 januari 2007 en ook mijn blog van 10 januari 2009.
De Waanzinnige
'k Heb hard om God gebeden, en Hij kwam,
drong plots zich driftig in mijn felle zinnen
als wilde Hij in mij opnieuw beginnen
Zichzelf, nu het al losbrak uit den ban
van een zoo groot, roofzuchtig haast, beminnen
Sindsdien laait onophoudelijk in mij van
Zijn vreemd Bestaan de folterende vlam,
doch kan Hij mij, noch ik Hem overwinnen.
Een was die zag hoe Hij in mij ging wijken,
en daarom bracht men God en mij tezamen
in dit grafnauw en beendernaakt vertrek.
Hier zullen vechten wij tot wij bezwijken,
gillend verward dooreen elkanders namen,
scheldend elkander schaamteloos voor gek.
Jan H. Eekhout (10 januari 1900 6 maart 1978)
De Ierse dichter en criticus Aubrey Thomas de Vere werd geboren in Adare, County Limerick, op 10 januari 1814. Aubrey Thomas de Vere studeerde aan het Trinity College in Dublin. Op 28-jarige leeftijd publiceerde hij The Waldenses, een jaar later gevolgd door The Search after Proserpine. Vanaf dat moment hield hij zich tot zijn dood in 1902 bezig met poëzie en literaire en politieke essays. Als jonge dichter werd hij sterk beïnvloed door de Engelse romantische dichters William Wordsworth en Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Hij bracht lange tijd door in Engeland, waar hij bevriend raakte met Alfred Tennyson en Robert Browning. Zijn hart lag echter in Ierland. In 1851 werd hij rooms-katholiek.
The Children Band
ALL holy influences dwell within
The breast of Childhood: instincts fresh from God
Inspire it, ere the heart beneath the rod
Of grief hath bled, or caught the plague of sin.
How mighty was that fervour which could win
Its way to infant souls!--and was the sod
Of Palestine by infant Croises trod?
Like Joseph went they forth, or Benjamin,
In all their touching beauty to redeem?
And did their soft lips kiss the Sepulchre?
Alas! the lovely pageant as a dream
Faded! They sank not through ignoble fear;
They felt not Moslem steel. By mountain, stream,
In sands, in fens, they died--no mother near!
Aubrey Thomas de Vere (10 januari 1814 - 20 januari 1902)
Portret door Julia Margaret Cameron
Zie voor onderstaande schrijver ook mijn blog van 10 januari 2009.
De Duitstalige, uit Namibië stammende, schrijver Giselher Werner Hoffmann werd geboren op 10 januari 1958 in Windhoek.
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