Happy birthday blog!

It's your very first birthday - whoop whoop! To celebrate, Blog, you get.... a facelift! I know * sigh * they start so young these days.

Did a little digging around to see what other auspicious literary occasions occurred on 18 October and this is what I found:

1831: William Blake's wife Catherine died at their house in Fitzroy Square, four years after his death. She reportedly 'called continuously to her William, as if he were in the next room, to say she was coming to him and would not be long now'...

1855: Franz Liszt's Prometheus premiered. Yes it's music but he composed it as a 'symphonic poem' - a piece of orchestral music in which the content of a poem is evoked - based on the Greek myth Prometheus.

1859: Henri Bergson was born, French philosopher and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1927) for The Creative Evolution. Bergson must have had an eye for literary genes, he married a cousin of Marcel Proust.

1869: Henrik Ibsen's De Ungers Forbund (The League of Youth) premiered in Christiania, the city now known as Oslo. The story of a young political idealist who mounts an election campaign in a small Norwegian town became one of Norway's most popular comedic 19th century plays.

1910: E.M. Forster published Howard's End, the classic tale of class conflicts in Edwardian England, considered along with Passage to India to be his finest work.

1967: Walt Disney releases the animated film based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.

So for a birthday wish, a few lines from Blake, who believed that a bigger force than himself worked through him. He held the pen, the graver or the brush. He was its agent, never its master, the possessed rather than the possessor... 

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sun rise.

  - William Blake

Picture courtesy of artist Madeleine Stamer at Little Birdsville.