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"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
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Books for Christmas, what about you? I get the autobiographies/diaries of three quite different characters - Alan Alda, Michael Palin, Alan Bennett - which makes it odd reading them one after the other (although there are some points of contact, Alda and Bennett both surviving life threatening bowel illnesses, Bennett and Palin lunching).
It also makes me regret, again, not having consistently kept a detailed and thoughtful and self-analytical diary throughout my life. I have at times (for example while editing the Encyclopaedia), but at other times, like now, I tend to keep the entries short and of little interest. At least in part it is because, unlike Palin and Bennett, little of what I do each day seems likely to interest anyone else, particularly in the future. But it is also partly because I cannot now imagine a climatically changed future in which the diaries of anyone are going to be of much interest.
But I guess the great gaps may annoy my grandsons or great grandsons as they look back trying to understand what the hell we all thought we were doing as the world warmed up. Just as I am frustrated by my grandfather's 1943 diary (and the lack of any others for the rest of the war or earlier in his life) in which the odd sentence, revealing little, at intervals of a few weeks over 6 months, is all I have.
It also occurs to me that the books I get for Christmas (and I doubt there has been a Christmas or birthday since I was 2 year's old when books haven't been a major part of the presents) would form an interesting guide both to my own tastes and development over 60 years, and to the literary world they were derived from. But of course I didn't record each year, any more than I conscientiously kept a diary, what books I got for Christmas and birthday.
On the other hand, at least in the early years, people used to write in the books the year and what they were for, though this tradition seems now to have largely gone, at least in our family. Still I could go back and see what I was reading at age 12, and 4, and further back to what my mother was reading, and what my grandfather was given as a present at the age of ten, and what my great grandfather was given as a New Year present in 1880.
And this in turn leads me (somewhat inspired, and shamed, by Alan Bennett) to start putting some of my family history (much of it written, but the manuscript 'Forgotten, as a dream', already rejected by one publisher) into this blog, as interesting events and characters, some, at least, illustrated as in the B&W photos which I have already begun posting. Keep you posted!
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"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
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