4 great writers born on July 26. Shaw, Machado, Huxley and Matute

There aren't many days on the calendar where you have to celebrate so many writers' birth anniversaries. But 26 July It is one. Today they share birthdays four great authors, an Irishman, an Englishman and two Spaniards, with more than brilliant and recognized careers. They are GGeorge Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley Antonio Machado and Ana María Matute. In his memory I select some own phrases and his works to remember them.

26 July

George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was born in Ireland en 1856. He is the only author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and the Oscar of the Film Academy for the best script for Pygmalion in 1938.

  • Life is not about finding yourself. Life tries to create yourself.
  • We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
  • Youth is wasted on the young.
  • Freedom means responsibility. That is why most men fear it.
  • The man does not stop playing because he gets old. He gets old because he stops playing.

Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado was born on July 26, 1875 en Sevilla. Of the most representative members of the call 98 Generation, his work is one of the most recognized and popular. Above a great legacy of imperishable verses, his works stand out Solitudes o Castile fields.

I have chosen this poem especially because it is part of my earliest poetic memory. In my grandfather's country house a parchment on a wooden frame. I would read it over and over and then look curiously at the elms in the garden outside, and I was glad that none of them were dry.

To a dry elm

To the old elm, split by lightning
and in its rotten half,
with the April rains and the May sun
some green leaves have come out.

The hundred-year-old elm on the hill
that licks the Duero! A yellowish moss
stains the whitish bark
to the rotten and dusty trunk.

It will not be, like the singing poplars
that guard the road and the shore,
inhabited by brown nightingales.

Army of ants in a row
it is climbing up it, and in its entrails
spiders weave their gray webs.

Before I knock you down, Duero elm,
with his ax the woodcutter, and the carpenter
I turn you into a bell's mane,
wagon lance or wagon yoke;
before red in the home, tomorrow,
burn from some miserable hut,
on the edge of a road;
before a whirlwind takes you down
and cut off the breath of the white mountains;
before the river pushes you to the sea
through valleys and ravines,
elm, I want to note in my portfolio
the grace of your green branch.
My heart waits
also, towards the light and towards life,
another miracle of spring.

Aldous Huxley

Huxley was born in 1894, in Surrey, in a family with an important intellectual tradition. He studied at Eton and, despite suffering a very young serious illness that left him blind for 18 months, he managed to recover, but instead of studying medicine he ended up graduating from English literature. He wrote a first book about his experience to regain vision, The art of seeing.

But undoubtedly his great and influential work known throughout the world is dystopia A happy world, written in 4 months in 1932. A futuristic and pessimistic view of the world, where it shows a society governed by psychological conditioning and where a substance called soma is used for totalitarian purposes.

  • Parliament, assuming you know what it was, passed a law prohibiting it. The files are preserved. There were speeches about freedom, about it. Freedom to be conscious and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.
  • Real happiness always appears scrawny compared to the compensations that misery offers. And, of course, stability is not nearly as spectacular as instability. And being satisfied with everything does not have the spell of a good fight against misfortune, nor the picturesqueness of combat against temptation or against a fatal passion or doubt. Happiness is never great.
  • Conditioning for death begins at eighteen months. Every child spends two mornings each week in a Hospital for the Dying. In these hospitals they find the best toys, and they are given chocolate ice cream on death days. Thus they learn to accept death as something completely ordinary.
  • It was decided to abolish the love of Nature, at least among the lower castes; abolish the love of Nature, but not the tendency to consume transportation. Because, of course, it was essential that they continue to want to go to the country, even if they hated it. The problem was to find a more powerful economic reason for consuming transportation than mere fondness for primroses and landscapes. And they found it.
  • But I don't want the comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want true risk, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Ana Maria Matute

Ana María Matute was born in 1926 and she is one of the most prestigious Spanish authors. It was member of the Royal Spanish Academy and wrote both novels for adults and children. Winner of many awards such as Nadal, Planet, the Critics or the National Literature.

  1. Childhood is the longest period of life.
  2. El Quijote It is the first book with which I have cried, with the death of Don Quixote, for all that it means: Letting madness disappear. That's terrible. The triumph of good sense.
  3. Writing for me is not a profession, not even a vocation. It is a way of being in the world, of being, you cannot do otherwise. You are a writer. Good or bad, that is another question.
  4. I have never let go of my childhood, and that pays dearly for it. Innocence is a luxury that one cannot afford and from which they want to slap you awake.
  5. Talking about what one is writing is like uncorking a bottle of a precious perfume: the aroma evaporates. You have to keep it closed and write, it's the best.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *

*

*

  1. Responsible for the data: Miguel Ángel Gatón
  2. Purpose of the data: Control SPAM, comment management.
  3. Legitimation: Your consent
  4. Communication of the data: The data will not be communicated to third parties except by legal obligation.
  5. Data storage: Database hosted by Occentus Networks (EU)
  6. Rights: At any time you can limit, recover and delete your information.