2013 WEEK 31 7/28-8/3

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REAL-LIFE-FAQS




(FREQUENTLY-ASKED-QUESTIONS)



2013 WEEK 31 7/28-8/3



THANKS



HISTORY:



July 28 is the birthday of , born Jacqueline Bouvier in Southampton, New York (1929). Former First Lady of the United States (1961-1963) she was the eldest of two daughters, and wrote poems, essays - as well as edited at several publishers - throughout her adult life. She died May 19, 1994 at age 64. She had written:

"An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding."



"The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse."



"If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much."



July 29 is the birthday of novelist and dramatist Newton (1869). He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and he usually took as his subject the American Midwest and its people. He was sometimes satirical, sometimes melodramatic, and he was one of the most popular novelists of the early 20th century. Literary Digest named him "America's Greatest Living Writer" in 1922. He's best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), which Orson Welles turned into a film in 1942; Tarkington also won the Pulitzer for Alice Adams (1921), and he is one of only three novelists to win the prize more than once.

He wrote:

"There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink."



"Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred."



"There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where un-agrarian Eastern travelers, glancing from car windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without."



On July 30, 1857, was born to Norwegian immigrant parents who lived on a farm near Cato, Wisconsin. The family subsequently moved to a farm just outside of Nearstrand, Minnesota, where he and his eight siblings grew up. The Veblen family placed great emphasis on education, and young Thorstein shined throughout all of his education. Even with his later Yale degree, Veblen was unable to find a job, in part because of widespread prejudice toward Norwegian-Americans at the time (to be frank, though, his prickly personality and thick accent didn't help). He returned home to Minnesota, spending the next six years reading voraciously in economics, political theory, and science. His hard work paid off, and by the end of the century, he was teaching at the University of Chicago (it was there that he wrote two of his most celebrated books: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and Theory of the Business Enterprise (1904). He wrote:

"Invention is the mother of necessity."



"The dog, then, commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery."

"The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature."

"Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure."

"All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage."

On July 31, 1784, died at age 70 in Paris. The son of a printer, he originally prepared for a career as a Jesuit monk, but decided instead to pursue a secular career, first as a lawyer and then as a student of language, literature, mathematics, and philosophy. A quintessential "Renaissance Man," he served from 1745 to 1772 as the editor of the historic Encyclopedie, the most comprehensive compendium of knowledge up to that time. He was a towering figure in intellectual history--a novelist, playwright, satirist, and critic. He wrote with great power and precision, and many of his best observations captured deep human truths:

"Fanaticism is just one step away from barbarism."



"Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things."



"We swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us."



"I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to follow any idea, wise or mad, that may present itself.My ideas are my harlots."



"What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step toward truth."



On this day in 1944, Annelise Marie Frank, best known as , the adolescent author of the posthumously published Anne Frank: A Diary of a Young Girl, which chronicles her family's experiences while in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, wrote in her diary:

"As I've told you many times, I'm split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things [...] This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper, and finer.



"No one knows Anne's better side, and that's why most people can't stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that everyone's had enough of me to last a month. Actually, I'm what a romantic film is to a profound thinker -- a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten; not bad, but not particularly good either.



"I'm afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I'm afraid they'll mock me, think I'm ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously [...] If I force the good Anne into the spotlight for even fifteen minutes, she shuts up like a clam the moment she's called upon to speak, and let's Anne number one do the talking [...]



"I know exactly how I'd like to be, how I am...on the inside [...] I'm guided by the pure Anne on the inside, but outside I'm nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether [...]



"If I'm being completely honest, I'll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I'm trying very hard to change myself, but that I'm always up against a more powerful enemy [...]



"[...] if I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks I'm putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke [...] I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if ... there were no other people in the world.



This was Anne's final entry.

August 2 is the birthday of the Chilean novelist , born in Lima, Peru, in 1942. Her cousin was Salvador Allende, who later became the first elected socialist president of Chile. Isabel's father left when she was young, and her mother remarried another diplomat, so Isabel spent most of her childhood in Boliviaand Lebanon. A few years later, Salvador Allende became the first president of Chile, and during those years of the socialist government, Isabel Allende was a popular TV host. Her two shows weren't directly political, but they were about feminism and about challenging the machismo of Chilean culture.

Then on September 11, 1973, a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte overthrew the government, and Salvador Allende was assassinated. Isabel Allende was put on a wanted list, and she received death threats, so she fled with all her family to Venezuela, where she assumed she could stay for a couple of months and then return. Instead, she remained in exile for 17 years. Fluent in English as a second language, Allende was granted American citizenship in 2003, having lived in California with her American husband since 1989.

She is the author of 17 books -- novels, memoirs, and children's books-- including Eva Luna (1987), Portrait in Sepia (2000), City of the Beasts (2002), and The Sum of Our Days(2008).

Isabel wrote:

"I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it."



"Erotica is using a feather; pornography is using the whole chicken."



"You are the storyteller of your own life and you can create your own legend or not."



"Write what should not be forgotten."



UNCLE GLENN'S FUNERAL AND YOU



Thanks for the many kindnesses that you sent to us. I shared them with many folks and I was deeply grateful for our exchange of experiences regarding life and death.

First, the funeral itself was large - filled with folks who had lived and known each other for ninety days and up to ninety years - filled with sadness and great joy. The day before the funeral - as folks were exchanging stories and memories of the decades - a great idea took bloom: dozens and dozens of the men [both old and young] decided to celebrate at the funeral by wearing bowties, the very ties which Uncle Glenn always wore. The next day, as we prepared to begin the sacred rite, there were all these men in the hallways helping each other tie the bowties, as some laughed and some wept and it was breathtaking.



Secondly, what I loved about your comments was that so many of you included your own stories of uncles and aunts of childhood memories of visits and learnings and special occasions and celebrations and loss and discovery; with each one, I would pause as I read them, and literally "see" what you were describing. Oh, my, what a blessing.



At the cemetery - as the Army Honor Guard played taps and folded the flag as precisely as Glenn would have taught them seventy years ago - I reminded myself of Br. Toby's words, which I had repeated at the sacred rite: "All we really have to share



with each other is the stories of how we live."



WHAT WISDOM CAN YOU FIND THAT IS GREATER THAN KINDNESS?



JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU



BLESSINGS,



PADRE
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