LITMIR.BIZ

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handle or extend a hand of friendship, to care only about number one or jump in the water and rescue the perishing, to spoil the land or plant an orchard that we will not live long enough to harvest. Milton wrote: “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.

      February 11

      Robert wrote to Elizabeth in January of 1845 to praise her poetry: “I love your verses with all my heart.”

      Elizabeth Barrett, one of England’s most prominent poets, was an invalid. In her mid-teens she had been struck down by a mysterious illness that rendered her reclusive and bedridden. A cousin of Elizabeth, John Kenyon, arranged for Robert Browning, six years her junior, to visit in her room. There began one of the most famous love stories immortalized in writing.

      In one of Robert’s early visits, Elizabeth was able to lift her head off the pillow for the first time in a long time. Between visits, they exchanged nearly six hundred letters. Robert kept her room populated with flowers. Elizabeth eventually became able to sit up in bed. Twenty months after their first meeting, they eloped, permanently leaving the polluted air of London for the warmer, cleaner, therapeutic air of Italy.

      Elizabeth never saw her father again. He disinherited her, as he did all of his eleven children who married. Letters from Elizabeth to her father were returned unopened. Elizabeth’s health improved remarkably in Italy. At age forty-three, she was able to give birth to a son. The family of three lived happily there for fifteen years. Elizabeth died in Robert’s arms.37

      Out of that relationship came some of history’s greatest expressions of romantic love. One of her “Sonnets from the Portuguese” begins: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. / I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach.”

      The poem ends: “I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death.”38

      I hope you aspire to make this a romantic Valentine’s Day.

      February 12

      “When you win, brag gently. When you lose, weep softly”— James Clyburn

      When I first read those words, I remembered what legendary Notre Dame Coach Lou Holtz said about football: “You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.”

      Why not get cocky over a big victory, or dejected over a big defeat? Because one day does not a lifetime make. No one event, short of death, is the final word. We are all unfinished symphonies. All things are in flux. Scarlett O’Hara got it right in the final line of Gone with the Wind: “Tomorrow is another day.”

      So who is James Clyburn? When he was only twelve, Clyburn helped organize civil rights marches. In college, he helped organize demonstrations. In 1970, when he won a primary race for the South Carolina House of Representatives, his wife Emily left him a little note in the sink that read: “When you win, brag gently. When you lose, weep softly.” He put her wisdom on his mirror. It came in handy several months later when he lost in the general election.

      Clyburn also lost, twice, running for South Carolina secretary of state. Finally, in 1992 he ran to represent South Carolina’s Sixth Congressional District and won. Today he is the highest-ranking African-American in Congress. When interviewed by StoryCorps, he gave this interpretation of his long journey: “We have a state seal in South Carolina. The Latin phrase on the seal says dum spiro spero — ‘While I breathe, I hope.’ And I’ve always felt that there’s hope. And so I have never given up.”39

      Since 1976, America’s bicentennial, February has been designated by every American president as Black History Month. Actor Morgan Freeman demurred then, saying: “I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history.”

      James Clyburn’s story is one all-American story of equanimity, persistence, and hope.

      February 13

      Two things I know for sure this Valentine’s Day. When you are up, nothing beats having someone special to celebrate it with you; when you are down, nothing is finer than having someone special to hold your hand and halve your misery.

      Several Saturdays ago my wife, who probably never took a sick day in her life, was taken down by a mighty bug. Saturday afternoon she lay on the sofa bundled up, chilling, and virtually immobilized, moaning, “What a wasted day” and “I don’t have time for this.”

      I did what any red-blooded, thoroughly-modern husband would do. I grabbed the remote and started flicking. We ended up spending the next six hours watching parts or all of the best romantic movies—some call them “chick flicks”—we could find on cable, including Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, 27 Dresses, and Hope Floats. It was an afternoon of pure, warm, unadulterated escapism.

      Flu symptoms did not disappear, but the victim got a six-hour reprieve and partially redeemed a lost day.

      The most memorable line we took from the movies that afternoon came at the happy ending of Hope Floats. It was Birdee’s summation: “Momma says that beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it’s the middle that counts the most. Just give hope a chance to float up, and it will.”

      It is the middle—the children and bills and disagreements, the mountains climbed and valleys traversed together—that counts most. Down in those valleys, counting on hope to float up makes even the nastiest parts of the journey bearable.

      There was nothing meritorious about my being there for my life companion the day she was struck down. I was but returning the favor. “Love,” James Thurber said, “is what you’ve been through with somebody.”

      February 14

      Why do people get married anyway?

      In the movie Shall We Dance? the character played by Susan Sarandon asks that rhetorical question over dinner and then gives her answer: “Because we need a witness to our lives.”

      She elaborates:

      There are billions of people on the planet. What does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything—the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things. All of it, all the time, every day. You’re saying, ‘Your life will not go unnoticed, because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed, because I will be your witness.’

      I came across a story that illustrated for me the truth of Sarandon’s words. It was about the Guinness’ Book of World Records marriage champs. He was one hundred and she was one year older. John and Amelia Roccio had been married eighty-two years. Asked by a reporter the secret of their marriage, the 101-year-old woman thought for a moment and answered: “He never put me down. He liked everything I did.”40 He served admirably—according to the one who knew him best—as her advocate.

      Drs. John and Julia Gottman, perhaps the world’s foremost marriage scientists, for thirty years scientifically and mathematically studied over three thousand married couples. They became expert enough that they could analyze a fifteen-minute slice of conversation between a couple and with over 90 percent accuracy predict whether that relationship would last another fifteen years. One of their most important findings was that in marriages that last, the ratio of positive to negative emotion expressed is at least five to one.41

      What we crave most—whether married or single—is someone to notice us. And care. And say so.

      February 15

      Religions are hardly united on how to regard the self. Jesus commanded his disciples both to love and deny self. Jesus himself once went without food for forty days. He urged his followers to take up a cross. St. Paul wrote: “I keep my body under control and make it my slave.”42

      Some religions lean to the left, majoring in self-actualization and love of neighbor; some lean to the right, advocating mortification of the

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