Happy Birthday! August 31

Hermann Helmholtz Physicist 8-31-1876

Maria Montessori; Physician, Educator 8-31-1870

Alan Jay Lerner Lyricist, Composer 8-31-1918

Frank Robinson Baseball Player 8-31-1935

Itzak Perlman Violinist, Conductor 8-31-1945

August 31, 1897: Thomas Edison invents Kinetoscopes for motion pictures

August 31, 1950: Gil Hodges hits 4 homers in a game as Dodgers defeats Braves

August 31, 1983: Edwin Moses wins 400-Meters Hurdles for Olympics Gold

August 31, 1997: Princess Diana dies in Paris Car Crash (GB 1795a, 2-3-1998)

August 31, 1938: U.S. 632, 635: 1¢ Franklin & 2¢ Washington Postmarked August 31, 1938 Oakland, California

August 31, 1886: Germany 37: dark green 3 German reichspfennig Nice Bullseye Cancel

August 31, 1990: U.S. 2452: 5¢ Circus Wagon Postmarked Syracuse, NY, August 31, 1990 First Day Cover

Ralph W. Emerson (1803-1882)

Emerson on the True Scholar Yesterday at Phi Beta Kappa anniversary. Steady, steady. I am convinced that if a man will be a true scholar, he shall have perfect freedom. The young people & the mature hint at odium, & aversion of faces to be presently encountered in society. I say no: I fear it not. No scholar need fear it. For if it be true that he is merely an observer, a dispassionate reporter, no partisan, a singer merely for the love of music, his is a position of perfect immunity: to him no disgusts can attach; he is invulnerable. The vulgar think he would found a sect & would be installed & made much of. He knows better & much prefers his melons & his woods. Society has no bribe for me, neither in politics, nor church, nor college, nor city. My resources are far from exhausted. If they will not hear me lecture, I shall have leisure for my book which wants me. Beside, it is an universal maxim worthy of all acceptation that a man may have that allowance which he takes. Take the place & attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, & all men acquiesce. Who are these murmurers, these haters, these revilers? Men of no knowledge, & therefore no stability. The scholar on the contrary is sure of his point, is fast-rooted, & can securely predict the hour when all this roaring multitude shall roar for him. Analyze chiding opposition & it is made up of such timidities, uncertainties, & no opinions, that it is not worth dispersing. It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, August 31, 1838 Emerson's Discovery about Himself I can find my biography in every fable that I read. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, August 31, 1867 Emerson's Desire to Return to College at Age 69 I thought today, in these rare seaside woods, that if absolute leisure were offered me, I should run to the College or the Scientific school which offered best lectures on Geology, Chemistry, Minerals, Botany, & seek to make the alphabets of those sciences clear to me. How could leisure or labor be better employed. 'Tis never late to learn them, and every secret opened goes to authorize our aesthetics. Cato learned Greek at eighty years, but these are older bibles & oracles than Greek. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, August 31, 1872, Naushon

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)

Delacroix's Conversation on Artists In the evening, endless conversation with Chenavard, on the beach and all along the streets. He told me of the difficulty that Michelangelo often had in working, and cited a saying of his: Benedetto Varchi said to him “Signor Buonarroti, you have the brain of Jove”; he is supposed to have replied: “It needs the hammer of Vulcan to get anything out of it.” At a certain period he had burned great quantities of studies and of sketches so as not to leave traces of the labor that his works had cost him, when he turned them back and forth, as a man does in producing verse. He often carved from drawings; his sculpture bears witness to this procedure. He used to say that good sculpture was the kind that never looked like painting, and that good painting, on the contrary, was the kind that looked like sculpture. It was today that Chenavard talked to me again of his famous idea as to decadence. He pigeon-holes things too much. And he has the fault of not esteeming at their true value all the qualities that are to be esteemed. Although he says that the men of two hundred years ago are not on a level of those of three hundred years ago, and that the men of today are not on a level with those of fifty or a hundred years ago, I believe that Gros, David, Prud'hon, Géricault, and Charlet are men admirable in the way that Titian and Raphael were; I believe that I myself have painted certain passages that would not be disdained by those gentlemen, and that I have had certain conceptions that they did not have. — Eugene Delacroix, Journal, August 31, 1854

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Thoreau's Meditation on Evening Air, Sunset, and Flowers The evening air is such a bath for both mind and body. When I have walked all day in vain under the torrid sun, and the world has been all trivial— as well field and wood as highway— then at eve the sun goes down westward, and the wind goes down with it, and the dews begin to purify the air and make it transparent, and the lakes and rivers acquire a glassy stillness, reflecting the skies, the reflex of the day. I too am at the top of my condition for perceiving beauty. Thus, long after feeding, the diviner faculties begin to be fed, to feel their oats, their nutriment, and are not oppressed by the belly's load. It is abstinence from loading the belly anew until the brain and divine faculties have felt their vigor. Not till some hours does my food invigorate my brain— ascendeth into the brain. We practice at this hour an involuntary abstinence. We are comparatively chaste and temperate as Eve herself; the nutriment is just reaching the brain. Every sound is music now... What unanimity between the water and the sky!— one only a little denser element than the other. The grossest part of heaven. Think of a mirror on so large a scale! Standing on distant hills, you see the heavens reflected, the evening sky, in some low lake or river in the valley, as perfectly as in any mirror they could be. Does it not prove how intimate heaven is with earth? We commonly sacrifice to supper this serene and sacred hour. Our customs turn the hour of sunset to a trivial time, as at the meeting of two roads, one coming from the noon, the other leading to the night. It might be [well] if our repasts were taken out-of-doors, in view of the sunset and the rising stars; if there were two persons whose pulses beat together, if men cared for the beauty of the world; if men were social in a high and rare sense; if they associated on high levels; if we took in with our tea a draught of the transparent, dew-freighted evening air; if, with our bread and butter, we took a slice of the red western sky; if the smoking, steaming urn were the vapor on a thousand lakes and rivers and meads. The air of the valleys at this hour is the distilled essence of all those fragrances which during the day have been filling and have been dispersed in the atmosphere. The fine fragrances, perchance, which have floated in the upper atmospheres have settled to these low vales! I have no objection to giving the names of some naturalists, men of flowers, to plants, if by their lives they have identified themselves with them. There may be a few Kalmias. But it must be done very sparingly, or, rather, discriminatingly, and no man's name be used who has not been such a lover of flowers that the flowers themselves may be supposed thus to reciprocate his love. — Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 31, 1851 Thoreau on Cloud Shadows and Sunshine after a Storm while Sailing It is worth the while to have had a cloudy, even a stormy, day for an excursion, if only that you are out at the clearing up. The beauty of the landscape is the greater, not only by reason of the contrast with its recent lowering aspect, but because of the greater freshness and purity of the air and of vegetation, and of the repressed and so recruited spirits of the beholder. Sunshine is nothing to be observed or described, but when it is seen in patches on the hillsides, or suddenly bursts forth with splendor at the end of a storm. I derive pleasure now from the shadows of the clouds diversifying the sunshine on the hills, where lately all was shadow. The spirits of the cows at pasture on this very hillside appear excited. They are restless from a kind of joy, and are not content with feeding. The weedy shore is suddenly blotted out by this rise of waters... This is the most glorious part of this day, the serenest, warmest, brightest part, and the most suggestive. Evening is fairer than morning. It is chaste eve, for it has sustained the trials of the day, but to the morning such praise was inapplicable. It is incense-breathing. Morning is full of promise and vigor. Evening is pensive. The serenity is far more remarkable to those who are on the water. That part of the sky just above the horizon seen reflected, apparently, some rods off from the boat is as light a blue as the actual, but it goes on deepening as your eyes draws nearer to the boat, until, when you look directly down at the reflection of the zenith, it is lost in the blackness of the water. It passes through all degrees of dark blue, and the threatening aspect of a cloud is very much enhanced in the reflection. As I wish to be on the water at sunset, I let the boat float. I enjoy now the warmth of summer with some of the water prospect of spring. — Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 31, 1852

Birth Flower: Poppy Peace, sleep, imagination, beauty, courage, luxury Birthstone: Moonstone Intuition, balance, love, good fortune for healing Zodiac Sign: Virgo Harvest maiden with wheat, strong sense of service to help

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