Born in 1928 – Philip K. Dick, American philosopher and author.
“We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, ‘What is real?’ Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.”
Born in 1916: 1916 – Howard Finster, American minister and painter.
Born in 1893 – Lillian Gish, American actress.
Above: Gish in the 1955 film, Night of the Hunter.
Born in 1916 – Walker Percy, American novelist and essayist.
“You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
It’s so easy to laugh
It’s so easy to hate
It takes strength to be gentle and kind.
Born in 1827 – Jules Breton, French painter.
Above: Breton’s The End of the Working Day, 1887
Born in 1945 – Annie Dillard, American writer.
“Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.”
“I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof. The young oaks growing just outside my windows wave in the light, so that concentrating, lost in the past, I see the pale leaves wag and think as my blood leaps: Is someone coming?”
― from An American Childhood
Born in 1943 – Mike Leigh, English director and screenwriter.
Above: David Thewlis as Johnny in Leigh’s 1993 film, Naked.
A bit of Johnny’s dialogue: “Do you think that the amoeba ever dreamed that it would evolve into the frog?Of course it didn’t. And when that first frog shimmied out of the water and employed its vocal cords…in order to attract a mate or to retard a predator…do you think that that frog ever imagined that that incipient croak would evolve into all the languages of the world, into all the literature of the world? Of course it fucking didn’t. And just as that froggy could never possibly have conceived of Shakespeare so we can never possibly imagine our destiny.”
Previously: Leigh
Born in 1934 – Bill Russell, American basketball player and coach.
“The idea is not to block every shot. The idea is to make your opponent believe that you might block every shot.”
Number 5 