In Search Of My Remembrance
Yes, Nellie Bly went around the world in less than eighty days. But she also got decent treatment for the insane, and heating stoves for sweatshop workers, and an end to dozens of evil rackets. If something must be forgotten, let it be the eighty-day junket. Nellie Bly has a nobler claim to our remembrance than that.
Even though the "eighty-day junket" is most likely what people remember if they strain. Inspired by Jules Verne's 1873 novel Around The World In Eighty Days, the reporter born Elizabeth Cochrane proposed to Joseph Pulitzer publisher of the New York World that she could travel the world in less time than that. By the way, Cochrane had taken on the alias "Nellie Bly" many years before to alleviate her family's fear of seeing her name in print when women just didn't write for newspapers. It's from a Stephen Foster melody, the same man who wrote "Swannee River" which became Florida's state anthem though he himself had never been there, but I digress.
Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds.
That's how long it took her to round the world, and THAT was in the late 1890s. A "modern" figure cited in this 1956 life story written by Nina Brown Baker in Nellie Bly, Reporter (TX 308) places travel time around the world by jet at three days. I don't doubt it's faster now, but I have no plans to travel the globe to find out. After that, Nellie Bly pretty much dropped out of sight; she's not especially commended for traveling round the world, and five years after her journey she leaves the newspaper business entirely. That's the part of her life usually not told about, her serving on many civic boards, her getting married and helping her husband with his business.
Be very, very careful to not be forgotten after you do something "big".
Or to forget yourself. Yes, I keep a lot of papers from when I was growing up but at least I keep them (mostly) neat in journals and envelopes and folders. You could say I was or maybe still am a scrapbooker before I even knew what scrapbooking was! It's easy for me to come down on others when they seem more interested in what's happening/what's on the tablet now and forgetting that there was anything that happened before. There's a why, and so many of us have a hard time finding our why that we get lost acting on instinct, or at least what we believe is our instinct. I wonder if that's the reasoning behind the Marcel Proust novel the author took fourteen years to finish
Remembrance of Things Past
(and I first remember hearing of THAT from a Monty Python sketch) got re-translated from the original French in the early 1990s as In Search of Lost Time. For aren't we all searching for what we know we can never get back? Like an hourglass, the only way we get to get back anything is by turning it over. But it's the same sand, back and forth, back and forth -- you don't get to change anything. There is a devotion in this, I must remember to hold on to it ... Got the kids home last night and got them off this morning to Grandma and Grandpa's, even after picking up a bag of busted garbage in our backyard. And now we've got school to get the kids and us used to in a few weeks!
I remember,
David
Even though the "eighty-day junket" is most likely what people remember if they strain. Inspired by Jules Verne's 1873 novel Around The World In Eighty Days, the reporter born Elizabeth Cochrane proposed to Joseph Pulitzer publisher of the New York World that she could travel the world in less time than that. By the way, Cochrane had taken on the alias "Nellie Bly" many years before to alleviate her family's fear of seeing her name in print when women just didn't write for newspapers. It's from a Stephen Foster melody, the same man who wrote "Swannee River" which became Florida's state anthem though he himself had never been there, but I digress.
Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds.
That's how long it took her to round the world, and THAT was in the late 1890s. A "modern" figure cited in this 1956 life story written by Nina Brown Baker in Nellie Bly, Reporter (TX 308) places travel time around the world by jet at three days. I don't doubt it's faster now, but I have no plans to travel the globe to find out. After that, Nellie Bly pretty much dropped out of sight; she's not especially commended for traveling round the world, and five years after her journey she leaves the newspaper business entirely. That's the part of her life usually not told about, her serving on many civic boards, her getting married and helping her husband with his business.
Be very, very careful to not be forgotten after you do something "big".
Or to forget yourself. Yes, I keep a lot of papers from when I was growing up but at least I keep them (mostly) neat in journals and envelopes and folders. You could say I was or maybe still am a scrapbooker before I even knew what scrapbooking was! It's easy for me to come down on others when they seem more interested in what's happening/what's on the tablet now and forgetting that there was anything that happened before. There's a why, and so many of us have a hard time finding our why that we get lost acting on instinct, or at least what we believe is our instinct. I wonder if that's the reasoning behind the Marcel Proust novel the author took fourteen years to finish
Remembrance of Things Past
(and I first remember hearing of THAT from a Monty Python sketch) got re-translated from the original French in the early 1990s as In Search of Lost Time. For aren't we all searching for what we know we can never get back? Like an hourglass, the only way we get to get back anything is by turning it over. But it's the same sand, back and forth, back and forth -- you don't get to change anything. There is a devotion in this, I must remember to hold on to it ... Got the kids home last night and got them off this morning to Grandma and Grandpa's, even after picking up a bag of busted garbage in our backyard. And now we've got school to get the kids and us used to in a few weeks!
I remember,
David
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