A birthday

Today, September 24, was the birthday -- in 1896 -- of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In his memory then, I'll simply reproduce here the opening of The Great Gatsby.

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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Mahalia Jackson

It was on this day, October 26, 1911, that Mahalia Jackson was born.

She lived until 1972.

For much of the time in between those two years she was known as the Queen of gospel music.

Jackson was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame 1978, given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1988, and honored by the US postal service with her image on a stamp in 1998.

Since it is now 2008, and one wouldn't want the string of posthumous honors in years ending with the year "8" to snap, she now has the distinction of a Pragmatism Refreshed salute.

You can learn more about her here.

I admire a quotation sometimes attributed to her: "It's easy to be independent when you've got money. But to be independent when you haven't got a thing -- that's the Lord's test."

God bless.