Amber pages
Francois-René de Chateaubriand, French novelist and politician born, today in 1768.
I have commented before, that writing these pages provides me with a splendid excuse to find out more about people whose names I recognise, but know nothing, or virtually nothing about them. Then there are the reverse of these, people who I once did know something about, but then forgot it, or them.
So Anton Bruckner, Austrian composer, born today in 1824, whose music I used to listen to, on CD, years ago, before I took my CD collection to the GoodWill store with the CD player, because who needs them when you have the Internet. Except that it turns out that you did need them, because seeing them on your shelf reminds you to play them, but on the Internet you have to think of them, and hunt for them, and then you save it in your history file, only to find out next time that the websource has deleted it because of a copyright dispute, or somesuch reason for it no longer being there. So I went for years without playing Bruckner, or maybe the 9th because it tends to come up on recommendation lists...
And then there are the completely unforgettable, even if they leave your immediate consciousness for years and years. Mary Renault, for example, historical novelist, born today in 1905. I read everything I could find by her when I was crippled for a year in the late 1990s, the discs at the base of my spine having collapsed and trapped the nerves and paralysed me till they could work out what had happened and what to do about it. Weeks turned into months of lying there, bored but for the books, translating Dante in a notebook, learning how to write historical novels from Robert Graves' Claudius novels, and Mary Renault's various, the "Alexander" trilogy especially, and "The Bull from the Sea".
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