A Book of Days for 1931: May 25

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, he wrote the novel Kitty Foyle, the film version of which gave Ginger Rogers 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 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 maniacally 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.

I have posted some of his daily entries before, but I stopped doing it late last fall, as I stopped doing so much else.

I happened to pick up the book today and glanced at today’s entry, and the associations it brought up for me came fast and furious. It’s about Sable Island, in the Atlantic Ocean – technically it’s part of Nova Scotia, but it’s far from pretty much anything. It’s also known as “The Graveyard of the Atlantic” due to the shoals surrounding it. It has a truly ominous reputation among fishermen, and rightly so. During “the perfect storm” of 1991, which I remember quite well, it is thought that the doomed Andrea Gail (the lobster boat never found) went down around Sable Island. If you look up pictures of that place, it is truly remarkable – a long thin curved strip of sand, like a fingernail … and there are all kinds of cool facts about it here, if you feel so inclined. I’ve always been interested in Sable Island, for many reasons – one of them being that a bunch of feral horses live on the island, and I’ve seen photos of these beasts and maybe it’s just me – but when I see stuff like that: feral gorgeous horses running across the sand of Sable Island- it makes me feel like the world is a pretty amazing place, full of wonders and weirdness, and there is just not time enough on the planet for me to learn it all. I come from a state where fishing is one of the most important industries, so Sable Island sort of emanates its power and fear-inducing radius downwards …

Anyway, so that’s what today’s “entry” made me think about.

Now that’s a “book of days” I can get behind.

MAY 25, 1931, MONDAY

The amount and variety of vegetation on this gigantic sand bar is extraordinary. Besides two kinds of grass, there are wild peas and other plants, affording subsistence to wild ponies and rabbits. There are no other animals o the island, excepting rats that have come ashore from wrecks.

Should vessels run ashore on Sable Island and be in danger, the crews are urged to remain by the ship until assistance can be rendered by the life-saving staff on shore. All attempts to leave in the ship’s own boats have resulted in loss of life, but in every case where assistance from the shore has been awaited, the crew has been saved.

— British Admiralty Sailing Directions, Sable Island