Interesting Birthdays
I have a lot I could write about.
If only I felt comfortable writing about it. Too much drama in my personal life and too many scary situations in my business life to really feel comfortable talking about here. So, why am I posting? I just can’t help myself.
I got an e-mail from The Writer’s Almanac this morning, as I do every morning, and it had two interesting birthdays in it. First, there was this about Hans Christian Anderson:
It’s the birthday of Hans Christian Anderson, (books by this author) born in Odense, Denmark (1805). Although he was most famous for his fairy tales, he never thought of himself as a children’s writer. He wrote novels, plays, poetry, and travel essays, many of which were at least as successful as the fairy tales. Although Europeans and Americans loved his work, he was scorned in his own country during his lifetime; Søren Kierkegaard once published a scathing essay about him. He never married, and when he became ill late in life, he went to live with a family on the coast near Copenhagen. He had breakfast in his room one morning, and was found in bed a little while later, dead, holding a love letter someone had written to him 45 years earlier.
That was interesting in and of itself, to me, because I never think of the writers of fairy tales as being “normal” people who might have had lives that included pain. In particular, when I think of Hans Christian Anderson, I think of the movie that starred Danny Kaye. How could you associate that with unrequited love?
But, what was really interesting was the birthday note that follow later in the e-mail:
It’s the birthday of the Italian writer Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, born in Venice (1725). He spent the final years of his life as a librarian in a cold and drafty castle in Bohemia, and he set out to write his memoirs because, he said, it was “the sole remedy I believed I possessed to avoid going mad or dying of sorrow.” He left 4,000 pages of manuscript behind, some of which was later published under the title The Story of My Life.
What an interesting contrast. Two lovers. Two very different lives. Two very different kinds of love. I never would have thought of these two very different men ending up the way they did. Perhaps it is my own life that makes these stories resonat so with my own life right now. I do not know.
To be honest, I feel lonely. I’m thankful that I have my dog back, because she eases some of that pain. But, it’s different. So different. Am I lonely enough to write 4,000 pages about unrequited love and loneliness? No, probably not. But, it is a feeling I understand these days.
