“We must love one another or die.”

September 1, 1939 is now known as the day when World War II started.

On that day, Germany’s Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler ordered his military forces to invade neighboring Poland.

He claimed it was an act of self defense, necessary to protect German citizens and the territorial rights of Germany.

“Germans in Poland are persecuted with a bloody terror and are driven from their homes,” Hitler claimed, in a proclamation he issued that day. “The series of border violations, which are unbearable to a great power, prove that the Poles no longer are willing to respect the German frontier. In order to put an end to this frantic activity no other means is left to me now than to meet force with force.”

Nobody could know at the time that it was the beginning of what would become a horrific worldwide conflict in which 60 million people would die.

But many people who heard the ominous news recognized it as the start of something very bad.

One of them was British author and poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973).

It led him to write a poem reflecting his thoughts upon hearing the news that day.

He initially titled it “September: 1939.”

But the title was changed to “September 1, 1939” when it was first published in New Republic magazine on October 18, 1939.

One line in the poem became an oft-cited quotation: “We must love one another or die.”

It comes at the end of the next to last verse:

       “All I have is a voice
        To undo the folded lie,
        The romantic lie in the brain
        Of the sensual man-in-the-street
        And the lie of Authority
        Whose buildings grope the sky:
        There is no such thing as the State
        And no one exists alone;
        Hunger allows no choice
        To the citizen or the police;
        We must love one another or die.”

“September 1, 1939” is an eloquent condemnation of totalitarian governments and war; a plea for human empathy and peace.

Soon after being published, it became famous.

But Auden himself soon decided it was sappy and self-indulgent, calling it “the most dishonest poem I have ever written.”

In 1945, when a major collection of Auden’s was published, he insisted on cutting the entire stanza that ended with the “love one another” line. And, in the 1950s, he started refusing to let the poem be printed at all.

He did give special permission to include it in the 1955 edition of The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse. But he had the famous line changed, inserting the word and in place of or, so it read “We must love one another and die.”

He later said that the original line was “a damned lie! We must die anyway.”

Nonetheless, it was his original line that remained famous.

It was later recycled — infamously — during the 1964 presidential campaign, in Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1964 TV attack ad against Barry Goldwater, called the “Daisy ad.”

That pioneering negative ad was designed to scare the bejeesus out of voters by painting Goldwater as a dangerous warmonger who would be likely to start a nuclear war if he became president.

In it, a pretty little girl is shown in a field picking petals off a daisy and counting.

Suddenly, an announcer is heard giving a missile-style countdown, followed by shots of a nuclear bomb explosion and mushroom cloud and the voice of Lyndon Johnson saying: “These are the stakes — to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

At the end of the spot, the announcer says ominously: “Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

The Daisy ad debuted on Labor Day evening, September 7, 1964, during NBC-TV’s showing of the movie David and Bathsheba.

It was so shocking and so negative for the time that it created a huge hubbub in the press and was only aired during the campaign that one time.

However, the point of the spot and the debate it helped stoke over whether Goldwater could be trusted to have his finger on the nuclear trigger benefited Johnson, who won the election in a landslide on November 3, 1964.

Auden was not a fan of Johnson, Goldwater or politicians in general. The political use of a version of his words “We must love one another or die” probably made him dislike the line even more.

Yet it remains his best-known bit of verse. And, the TV ad in which Lyndon Johnson spoke a version of it remains one of the most famous political commercials of all time.

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“For every creature of God is good.”

Under a federal law passed by Congress in 1942, the date for Thanksgiving in the United States varies from year to year. It’s the fourth Thursday of the month.

But the anniversary of the first official Thanksgiving set by federal decree in our country is November 26th.

In 1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation that made November 26, 1789 the first Thanksgiving Day designated as such by our national government.

As Thanksgiving Day approaches nowadays, I often think of one of our family dogs who died unexpectedly before Thanksgiving in 2009, from a genetic autoimmune problem that could not be fixed.

Her name was Boojie.

She was a beautiful, sweet-natured Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier.

My wife and I loved her dearly and her passing left a hole in our hearts that lasted a long time. (Since partially filled by another beautiful Wheaten Terrier we named Barbie Boo.)

I am not a religious person. But I do believe that we all can have feelings that might be called “spiritual” or “religious.”

The bonds I’ve had with dogs like Boojie and other animals come closest to giving me such feelings.

The word thanksgiving was popularized in English by the Bible, in which it is used many times. My favorite Bible verse using this word is in Timothy 4:4, which says (in the King James version):

       “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.”

On this November 26th, I dedicate my post and that quotation to Boojie.

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The bridge between the living and the dead . . .

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is the second novel by the great American writer Thornton Wilder (1897- 1975).

The first edition of the book was published by the Albert & Charles Boni company on November 3, 1927.

It’s set in Peru in the year 1714.

Early in the novel, on July 20, 1714, five people crossing an old bridge are killed when the bridge suddenly collapses.

A Franciscan monk named Brother Juniper happens to witness this tragedy. He wonders “Why did this happen to those five?” 

There must be some reason, he thinks:

If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Brother Juniper spends years compiling facts that might somehow answer his questions.

He talks to family members and friends of the victims, who came from various backgrounds and levels of society. He records what he learns and thinks in a series notebooks.

Ultimately, he spends six years “knocking at all the doors in Lima, asking thousands of questions,
filling scores of notebooks.” These are collected into one huge book.

The middle chapters of the novel tell us about the lives of the five people who were killed when the bridge collapsed.

They include:

     - Doña María, a wealthy noblewoman who is estranged from her daughter Clara;

     - Pepita a young woman who was raised in an orphanage run by the Abbess Madre María del Pilar and then essentially adopted by Doña María, partly to fill the void left when Clara left Peru and went to Spain;

     - Esteban, a young man haunted by the death of his twin brother Manuel;

     - "Uncle" Pio, the former manager of the famous actress Camila Perichole, whose career ended when she was disfigured by smallpox; and,

     - Jaime, Camila’s son, who was traveling with Pio because Camila asked him to take care of the boy.

In the final part of the novel, we learn that Brother Juniper’s book was brought to the attention of Catholic Church officials and they convicted him of heresy for seeming to question or try to justify the mysterious ways of God.

They burn the book – along with Brother Juniper.

In the final pages of the novel, we learn that Camila has come to Lima to help the Abbess take care of sick people at her convent. By coincidence, Doña María’s daughter Clara has come to visit the Abbess.

Clara looks around at the desperately poor and sick people there. Then she ponders the lives of the five who died when the Bridge of San Luis Rey collapsed. She thinks:

“Even now…almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love.”

Finally, Clara comes to an oft-quoted conclusion; the famous quote that is the last line of the novel:

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

As a snotty young high school kid in the 1960s, I wasn’t really moved by The Bridge of San Luis Rey or its famous quotation.

Today, as an older and hopefully wiser married man, father and grandfather, I am.

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“Each man kills the thing he loves.” (Sometimes with a straight razor.)

On February 13, 1898, the first edition of Oscar Wilde’s now famous poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published in London by publisher Leonard Smithers.

Those initial copies of the slim volume of poesy did not mention Wilde’s name. The author was given as “C.3.3.,” a reference to Wilde’s cell number while he was in the Reading prison from 1895 to 1897, serving a two year sentence for being a homosexual.

C.3.3. was prison shorthand for Block C, third floor, third cell.

Because of his highly-publicized conviction for “sodomy,” Smithers and Wilde decided to omit the poet’s real name on the first edition of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” fearing it might hurt sales.

After the first small run sold out and several subsequent editions also sold well, Wilde’s name finally appeared on the seventh edition.

The most famous and quoted line from the poem is “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”

But “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is not some sappy love ode. It is a dark rumination on murder, the harshness of prison life and the execution of a fellow prisoner of Wilde’s, referred to as “C.T.W.” in the poem.

C.T.W. was Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a former trooper in Her Majesty's Royal Horse Guards in London.

Wooldridge and his young wife Nellie, whose full maiden name was Laura Ellen Glendell, had a short, unhappy marriage. He suspected her of infidelity and abused her. She decided to live apart from him in Windsor.

In March of 1896, trooper Wooldridge begged Nellie to meet him at his barracks in London to discuss reconciliation.

She supposedly agreed, but didn’t show up. So he took a train to Windsor.

On on March 29, 1896, Charlie went to Nellie’s home and cut her throat with the straight razor he’d brought along.

He was quickly arrested, convicted of murder, then sent to the Reading Gaol, which is where Wilde met him.

Wilde apparently liked Charlie and viewed him as a tragic figure deserving of sympathy. But it was a short relationship. On July 7, 1896 Wooldridge was executed by hanging at age 30.

After Wilde was released from prison, he wrote “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

It starts with a dedication that says: “In Memoriam, C. T. W. Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards.”

Here, is a key part of the poem that reflects Wilde’s sympathetic view of Wooldridge:

“He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty space.”

The poem goes on in that way for quite a while. In fact, it’s much longer. But the excerpt above is enough to understand the main point Wilde was trying to make.

I get it. And I recognize the brutal nature of what was considered to be “justice” in the Victorian era. I especially sympathize with Wilde over the absurdly harsh treatment he received simply for being gay.

But I find it hard to feel sorry for Charles Wooldridge.

And, I am hereby dedicating this post on This Day in Quotes to poor Nellie.

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