October 4, 1914

Oct. 4, 1914

Brendan Gill, biographer, and longtime New Yorker staff writer, was born on October 4, 1914. He wrote a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the article, "The Faces of Joseph Campbell" (for the New York Review of Books), both considered iconoclastic. He also wrote a biography of Charles Lindbergh in which Gill discusses Lindbergh's experiences of what he (Lindbergh) calls: "some secret opened to me beyond the ordinary consciousness of man. [Lindbergh goes on] Can I carry it with me beyond the flight, into normal life again? Or is it forbidden knowledge."

About this Gill resorts to a cat metaphor; the puzzles Lindbergh's account presents are a "cat's cradle of hinted-at profundities."

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August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she accepted the post of Principal of N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely argument in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world. A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper. We have this picture of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne

August 22, 1806

Jean Honoré Fragonard (April 4 1732 to August 22, 1 806) the famous French painter, whose art illustrated the lives of a gilded class, included cats occasionally in his scenes. We have some biographical context from the National Gallery of Art : 'Fragonard was one of the most prolific of the eighteenth-century painters and draftsmen. Born ... in Grasse in southern France, he moved with his family at an early age to Paris. He first took a position as a clerk, but having demonstrated an interest in art, he worked in the studio of the still life and genre painter Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699 - 1779). After spending a short time with Chardin, from whom he probably learned merely the bare rudiments of his craft, he entered the studio of François Boucher ....1703 - 1770). Under Boucher’s tutelage Fragonard’s talent developed rapidly, and he was soon painting decorative pictures and pastoral subjects very close to his master’s style....Although Fragonard apparently never took cour

November 21, 1852

A comparative view of the social life of England and France from the Restoration of Charles the Second to the French Revolution (1828) was a history written by Mary Berry, (March 16 1763 to November 21 1852). Berry was a friend of Thomas Macaulay, and other intellectual luminaries, of the late 18th century. This volume enhanced her fame, but she was already known for her editing of Horace Walpole's correspondence, and other books also. I am gong to briefly quote from the preface because it gives a good sense of an ahistorical past which governed the imaginations of writers until about this period. You can see her need to defend her history because if things really changed, that might cast doubt on the fundamentals of the 18th century world. (If things did NOT change the reason to write history is different or non-existent). Nowadays we are accustomed to the view that fundamental worldviews can shift in an historical time, but our view was itself an historical development. So thi

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