A Book of Days for 1931 (Christopher Morley)

Christopher Morley was a journalist and essayist who is probably mainly known for his passion for Sherlock Holmes, but it was a long and fruitful career (speaking of Ginger Rogers, he wrote Kitty Foyle, which gave her an Academy Award). In 1931, he published “A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure“, and I find in him a kindred spirit. He is a collector of quotes as I am, and he kept a commonplace book, as I do. He became fascinated by the calendar itself, and how certain quotes could speak to certain special dates and so he would obsessively arrange his quotes to match up with the calendar. Eventually, a friend of his in publishing got wind of this tendency of Morley’s and was so enraptured by it that he brought (as Morley called it) the “private almanac” into print.

I have a copy of it, swiped from an old bookcase upstairs in my parents’ house (Mum, Dad, if you miss it – just know that I have it) and I love it. It was published in 1931, and there is a quote a day. Now these are not quotes along the lines of “If you love something set it free” (because if they were, I would have to plunge the book into the fire and laugh as I watched it burn). These are quotes from a diverse group – from DH Lawrence to Emily Dickinson to William Hazlitt to fragments from etiquette books. Some are funny, some are touching. It’s a glimpse into an intellectual world far more rigorous than our own, and I find the whole thing quite bracing. I’m also pleased when we overlap (on the rare occasion that we do) – and Morley has chosen I quote that I love. Makes me feel like a smarty-pants, I’ll tell you that.

His quote for yesterday, November 1:

Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.

A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eyes –
Gone Mr. Bryant’s goldenrod,
And Mr. Thomson’s sheaves.

Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind.
Thy windy will to bear!

— EMILY DICKINSON, November

The quote for today, November 2 (to give you an idea of the eclectic nature of the whole thing, I’m in heaven):

Remember the nightingales which sing onely some moneths in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatch’d their egges, as if their mirth were turned into care for their young ones. Yet all the molestations of Marriage are abundantly recompensed with other comforts which God bestoweth on them who make a wise choice of a wife.

— THOMAS FULLER, The Holy State (1642)

November is my birthday month. It is my month altogether. Dibs on November.