Skip to main content

March 31, 2009



March 31, 1920 to September 24, 2014 are the dates for Deborah Mitford Cavendish, a Duchess of Devonshire. She was the last one of the Mitford sisters, that frilly edge of 20th century history. She was listed as an author on a number of books, including, The Garden of Chatsworth. In this book the Duchess quoted an architect on the kinds of wildflowers growing at Chatsworth, and here is an edited version of this list:

....
dog violet
ox-eye daisy
mouse-eared hawk weed
cat's ear
bird's foot trefoil
harebell
....

Somebody else said (didn't they?) that lists can be poetry. This list sounds like a poetic menagerie.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

May 27, 1564

  May 27, 1564 John Calvin, a Protestant theologian who argued for predestination, was fond of his wife's cat,"Henriette." His wife and his wife's cat died in the same month, and according to J. Stephen Lang, author of 1,001 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Cats, Calvin did not get another wife or another cat. John Calvin died on May 27, 1564.
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 8, 2006

 Raja Rao, the Indian writer credited for his authentic portrayal of Indian values in English publications died on July 8, 2006. From his obituary in The Guardian this description of two books Rao wrote. "Aiming at an ultimately positive encounter between east and west, Rao's metaphysical novel,  The Serpent and the Rope  (1960), displays an intellectuality that goes beyond the textual, through its metaphysical associations and a spiritual dimension that tells us much about the Indian and European worlds. His protagonist, Ramaswamy, entertains his friends with philosophical discussions ranging over an impressive set of themes - including Buddhism, theology, monasticism and world politics - while at the same time he charmingly invites the reader to envisage reality from his Hindu viewpoint, offering the key of distinguishing the projected reality of the serpent from the existing reality of the rope, an image derived from Shankara. ...[In a subsequent book,] Rao manages to ...
Post a Comment
Read more