Amber pages:
Strange day, for this blogger anyway: dates in the history books that, do they, do they really merit inclusion?
William Caxton, the first English printer, was born today in 1422; but what matters is what he printed, and for that I already have a piece on March 8, and a mention on March 15.
The death, today in 1881, of Edward John Trelawny, English traveller and author; the man who should have been steering Shelley's boat but alas he forgot his license; the man who put his hand into the fire of cremation and took out what probably was not Shelley's heart; the man who went with Byron to Missolonghi, and abandoned him there; the man who... but I have written about this negligible nobody in my life of Byron, "A Small Drop of Ink", and in my travel piece "Running Wild in Charleston" in "Travels In Familiar Lands", so no need for a piece about him here.
Then what about Fidel Castro, Cuban leader, born today in 1927? But I already have pieces about the 1959 revolution (here), and his Presidency (here), and he crops up so often on so many pages.
And then, today in 1961, the Soviets began building the Berlin Wall... but the date that interests me is November 9, 1989, the day the Wall was sledgehammered into oblivion, and the charlies at the checkpoint free to make their own ways through (still just amber on that page; in the interim, click here)
Which leaves: major headline, today in 1831: "Blue sun observed throughout the South" - of the USA I presume; by somebody hallucinating, I presume; or a good prank-story for a slow news-day; or maybe YHVH providing a tour-guide in the Mosaic desert, or maybe ...
... or maybe it's actually, genuinely, a scientific phenomenon that occurs, quite often indeed. Volcanic dust, or it could be the smoke from forest fires, sometimes the sand of a desert storm, or just dense industrial pollution, that density scattering out the longer wavelengths of visible light, making the sun appear blue (actually it's exactly the same phenomenon that makes the sky appear blue, but in this case it depends on the size of the dust particles).
Which leaves only one item on this page that is even likely to be taken out of amber, into green. And when will that happen? When the moon does what the sun did, and turns blue.
*
But then five years after publishing this page, a date that truly does merit inclusion, found among the researches for Woman-Blindness:
1789: the first edition of "Journal d'État et du Citoyen, founded by Louise-Félicité Guynement de Kéralio-Robert.
1789 is always likely to suggest something worth recording, especially in France, as this was. Louise-Félicité Guynement de
Kéralio-Robert (1757-1821): author and translator; born into minor
Breton nobility, she was elected at the "Société Bretonne Patriotique de
Rennes" and at the "Académie d'Arras" (1787), where she met Maximilien Robespierre; then left for
Paris where she met and married Pierre François Joseph Robert, who was to become one of the
founders of the political society known as the "Club des Cordeliers". Between
1784 and '89 she edited a collection of literary works by French women, but then came the Revolution, and she and her husband fully involved, with Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins among their acquaintances; so involved indeed that the journal became her major contribution, recording the progress towards Enlightenment until... until sadly the darkness redescended, first through Robespierre, then through Napoléon. Later, when the Bourbons were restored to power,
she and her husband had to flee France (Robert had voted in favour of Louis XVI's execution) and live in exile in
Brussels, where they died.
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