Amadeus

According to The Writer's Almanac today is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg, Austria in 1756.

It was the film, Amadeus, that brought his life, the time, and the music to life for me. It might be a good day to watch it again. Today we are still blessed by his brilliant mind and the music he wrote in his short 35 years; forty-nine symphonies, forty concertos, and a wide range of other works including operas. Mozart wrote: "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together make genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

I enjoy listening to The Writer's Almanac because I find Garrison Keillor voice soothing in our world of harsh voices. In addition to noting the historic events of the day, he reads verse.

It is also the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, a relative modern, being born in 1832. He found he did not stutter when he talked with children. Through his imagination we discovered Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. One day, while on a tour of Oxford, the tree limb outside of his office window was pointed out to us; the very limb on which sat the Cheshire cat in Alice's Adventures.

"He was good at charades, he sang, he told stories. Soon enough, jokes, puzzles, games, questions-and-answers, tricks with numbers and with words, and mental exercises became for him a means of everyday amusement and for his family and friends source of fun and diversion. He also played traditional games - chess, croquet, billiards, cards - but his mind was not content with these, and he expanded, extended, and experimented with all forms and fashions, pushing traditional entertainments to their outer limits and inventing new ones. In the 1870s he created a veritable cornucopia of conundrums and mental challenges, brilliant additions to the store of magic and game playing ... He was so creative and so productive that his games and diversions fill sizeable anthologies."

Dodgson lectured and tutored Oxford students in mathematics and was a fine photographer. I have a book of his photographs, many of them children. I have discovered if a person has a lot of books, it is hard to memorize just where they are. Do old librarians keep their books in Dewey order? Not this one, who is more interested in the Chi of her surroundings. There is something to be said for Dewey and his Decimals.