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Born in 1904 – Salvador Dalí, Spanish painter. 

Above: “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln–Homage to Rothko” (1976)

Born in 1906 – Roberto Rossellini, Italian director and screenwriter.

Above: Still image from Rossellini’s 1950 film, The Flowers of St. Francis.

It’s the Feast of St. George in the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

Saint George, with courage you stood up to those in power, to tell them that what they were doing was wrong. Pray that we, too, may have the courage to stand up for what is right, with God’s help.

Above: St. George, by an unknown Ethiopian artist.

Born in 1818 – Karl Marx, German philosopher and sociologist.

In 1856 he said: 

“In our days, everything seems pregnant with its opposite: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.

thenumeral5:

Born in 1796 – Horace Mann, American educator, reformer, and politician.

“After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school–whether he be the child of noble or of peasant–the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.“ 

– from Life and Works of Horace Mann: Vol. III

Born in 1921 – Satyajit Ray, Indian director, producer, and screenwriter.

Above: Still from Ray’s 1955 film, Pather Panchali.

It’s the feast day of St. Joseph the Worker.

Above:  St. Joseph and the Child Jesus by John Collier.

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Born in 1945 – Annie Dillard, American author and poet.

“After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”
                                                      ― from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Born in 1942 – Jim Keltner, American drummer.

In 1986, a nuclear reactor accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union.

Above: A hospital building in the abandoned city of Pripyat, Ukraine–three kilometers from the Chernobyl plant.