De Engelse dichter en schrijver Alfred Douglas werd geboren in Ham Hill in Worcestershire op 22 oktober 1870. Zie ook alle tags voor Alfred Douglas op dit blog.
Sonnet On The Sonnet
TO see the moment holds a madrigal,
To find some cloistered place, some hermitage
For free devices, some deliberate cage
Wherein to keep wild thoughts like birds in thrall;
To eat sweet honey and to taste black gall,
To fight with form, to wrestle and to rage,
Till at the last upon the conquered page
The shadows of created Beauty fall.
This is the sonnet, this is all delight
Of every flower that blows in every Spring,
And all desire of every desert place;
This is the joy that fills a cloudy night
When bursting from her misty following,
A perfect moon wins to an empty space.
To Olive
I HAVE been profligate of happiness
And reckless of the world’s hostility,
The blessèd part has not been given to me
Gladly to suffer fools, I do confess
I have enticed and merited distress,
By this, that I have never bow’d the knee
Before the shrine of wise Hypocrisy,
Nor worn self-righteous anger like a dress.
Yet write you this, sweet one, when I am dead:
‘Love like a lamp sway’d over all his days
And all his life was like a lamp-lit chamber,
Where is no nook, no chink unvisited
By the soft affluence of golden rays,
And all the room is bathed in liquid amber.
Oscar Wilde en Alfred Douglas (Bosie)
De Britse schrijfster Doris Lessing werd geboren in Kermanshah, Perzië op 22 oktober 1919. Zie ook alle tags voor Doris Lessing op dit blog.
Uit: The Grass is Singing
“The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational head¬ing and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was al¬most satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been ex¬pected. When natives steal, murder, or rape, that is the feeling white people have.
And then they turned the page to something else.
But the people in the ‘district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warn-ing, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms, where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that mur¬der would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.
To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the dis¬trict telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Every¬one behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy.”
De Nederlandse dichter en schrijver Lévi Weemoedt werd geboren in Geldrop op 22 oktober 1948. Zie ook alle tags voor Lévi Weemoedtop dit blog.
Gezelligheid
Kom doe als Weemoedt: dans in het rond
de kamer door met kat en hond.
Vraag ook de hamster eens een keer,
spring met de goudvis op en neer.
Strooi eens wat licht in kier en scheuren
en laat de bladluis niet vertreuren.
Maak toch plezier en zing een lied:
het leven is zo eenzaam niet
als je eens denkt aan hen die varen
of bung’len aan een straatlanteren.
Een hele opluchting
Ik belde eens, na een wanhoopsnacht
vol angst en liefdespijn,
mijn beste vriend: waar of die dacht
dat mijn Jeanette kon zijn.
Ach! ik had me weer eens op hol gebracht
om niks. Om mijn ziek brein.
Want dáár klonk, slaperig, héél zacht,
Jeanette over de lijn.
Zie voor onderstaande schrijvers ook mijn blog van 22 oktober 2008.
De Schotse schrijfster Alison Louise Kennedy werd geboren op 22 oktober 1965 in Dundee.
De Russische schrijver en dichter Ivan Aleksejevitsj Boenin werd geboren in Voronezj op 22 oktober 1870.
De Franse dichter en schrijver Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle werd geboren op 22 oktober 1818 op het eiland Réunion.