Tonight ...

...They turn away now,

Bow heads through snow falling on

Tomorrow's footsteps.

.... and authors writing to authors

It is certain that from her teens Louisa May Alcott had to earn money to help support her family but she had always written stories and kept a journal, so the drive to write must have come first. Quoted in the The Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography is the story that when looking through Emerson's library as a girl and coming across Goethe's 'Correspondence with a Child", she began to write letters to Emerson. She didn't give them to him but years later confessed to him, and to his amusement, of her youthful adoration. She wrote that he did more for her " - as for many another - than he knew, by the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, the example of a great, good man."

Tonight, the day after Obama received his Nobel Peace prize, Mark Lawson on Radio 4's Front Row was talking about playwright Harold Pinter, conscientious objector and political activist, and recipient of the 2005 Nobel Literature prize who died almost exactly a year ago. Just discovered amongst his library of 2,000 books is a novel by Samuel Beckett which Pinter 'liberated' from a library in 1950 because he found it so moving he couldn't part with it. Beckett became a major influence on Pinter's work and the two men sent each other drafts of the manuscripts of the plays they were working on for comments. Prolific letter writers, they corresponded with each other regularly, 'perceptively and affectionately' according to Pinter's archivist - and sometimes about their shared passion for cricket!

Writing and authors............

That is really interesting about Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott.


It's alluded to, in various forms that writers of the earlier age were tied together in some way, knew of one another and conversed by mail or came into each others presence and company at various venues or places and exchanged conversation and/or acknowledged recognition of each others work. Did they just talk shop or did they also investigate each others interests? One has to wonder, because can there be other interests than writing? There must be, but writing for many who love it is like a life blood, it feeds not only the skeleton, but all the tissue attached to it. Thoreau was a naturalist, and yet I'm uncertain if he was a herbalist and yet both these interests dovetail with writing. Different people, different ideas and different visions and reasons for writing or anything else they undertook. Was it mainly for money, or was the writing to appease the drive that so many writers appear to understand? To record thoughts and ideas, in print in those days.


In this day and age writers can meet and congregate on the Internet. They can brainstorm ideas and describe visions while actually doing what they love, writing. Writing, for anyone who enjoys it, is always thoughtful conversation. We live we learn, we share the experience and remove some of the exaggeration, the Chinese whispers effect, by referring people to the source if it's written text. That's not quite as easy with the spoken word, though older cultures have managed it they say, and yet when we hear the tales of older cultures, are they or have they have been “embellished” over millennium, and that's why they are so strange? It would not have been so had the word been written, even if the language was obscure, forgotten, it would have had a problem with interpretation, but we imagine the deviation would not have been very large. Dare we think that? The bible was written down, or parts of it were written down, and yet translation and interpretation is constantly being questioned, Thoreau's work is being used as a record of the plants that grew around Walden Pond when he was living there. Writing is a many faceted jewel.

Thoreau's Flute

Did you know that Henry David Thoreau had a flute?

You recall the very first quotation, the one which resonated with me because of a childhood love for the books of Louisa May Alcott - "I am not afraid of storms, because I am learning to sail my ship." Almost immediately you introduced me to Henry David Thoreau. Today, with a poorly eleven-year old snuggled on the sofa in front of the fire, I watched a film version of Little Women which referred to her home in Concorde. Remembering that this was where Thoreau and Emerson lived I googled and found out that they were very friendly with Louisa's father, a prominent transcendentalist. Louisa received lessons from Henry Thoreau on the natural history of the area, often following him with other children on his walks. Many years later and after his death she wrote a poem in tribute to him - "Thoreau's Flute". They are buried a few metres from each other in Authors' Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. A few years ago a children's book, with woodcut illustrations, was written by Julie Dunlap, " Louisa May and Mr. Thoreau's Flute.

How some of those older writers still live on.

...... and Trying it Too

A major UK study reports today on soaring levels of individual isolation and stress which I doubt if Christmas will ease. Cold and very wet here again today and no Christmas decorations up yet but greeting cards beginning to arrive and mincemeat to be made tomorrow.

Yes, so much happening. 56 newspapers from 45 countries shared a joint editorial today headed "Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation."

Can we hope that by the time Christmas arrives we will be thankful that at the Copenhagen Conference consensus was reached and some kind of commitment made that could really make a difference? That would be something to celebrate as well as encouragement to try a little harder ourselves to work for the future. It is hard to believe that it will be anything other than talk and posturing but those politicians are there because we demanded that they be so. There was even a hint this morning that the Obama administration may have found a way of escaping the straight jacket Congress has it in. I'd love to think Martin Luther King was right when he said - "Let us realise the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Trying this out..............

Trying this out to see how it might work.

Interestingly there is a great deal happening this close to Christmas and yet there is time to try out a few more things, like personal Christmas presents before Christmas ever arrives. Christmas only being a state of mind of course, and some of us celebrating it all year round and not feeling in the least guilty.

I suppose if we thought that celebrating Christmas was to get really seriously drunk, then celebrating it all year could be seen as a worry, but if that's not the case, we're pretty lucky.

The decorations are up, the world turns us closer and closer to the time when everyone will be happy. Or will they? It has been said that there are more suicides at Christmas than at any other time of the year? That's not so strange, because some people are not all that happy with the people who have the same or similar DNA and others are lonely and on the streets. The yin and yang of life.