Coagulatio Solummodo Celerat Cor Intrépĭdus: Recommended Reading February '24
Coagulation only quickens a courageous heart.
coagulatio solummodo celerat cor intrépĭdus
Coventry, a short story first published in 1940 in an American science fiction magazine, is a deeply figurative narrative that focuses on a ruggedly individualistic and stubborn young man as he experiences society and governance in very different but distinct forms, mirroring the major modes of governance we see in the world today. With a significant regard for the power and value that arrises out of one’s personal strength of conviction, the tone of the story is delightfully early Irish-American. This is evident both in the character’s names, (MacKinnon, Fader Magee, Mother Johnston), as well as in the uniquely early Irish-American command of a sarcastic quick wit, “A man has to have larceny in his heart or he wouldn’t be a customs guard.”
Robert A. Heinlein, the author, was born in 1907. He later received his education from the US naval academy as an aeronautical engineer before entering into the Navy as an officer. He rose, over time, to the rank of lieutenant, and had been deployed on multiple missions at sea throughout the 1930s, keeping his love for literature, language, and critical thinking with him all the while.
It may delight you to know that this 1941 recording features Franklyn MacCormack reading Burdette’s ‘Alone’ as Wayne King and his Orchestra play a piece from Tchaikovsky. ‘Alone’ is one of my favorite American poetical works, as it reads almost like a French villanelle; a song that sings itself. Unable to locate the original source of the pdf copy saved in my files, finding the recording was truly serendipitous, and so I took the time to make the above video, where you can read it rather than listen if you prefer.
Robert J. Burdette, born in 1844, has personal significance for me as well as literary. He and I, though born over 100 years apart, spent the younger years of childhood in the very same creeks (we called them “cricks”), doing the very same things — picking blackberries, catching “crawdads,” and climbing, more likely than you might imagine, the very same trees. The Appalachian mountains really are wonderful, especially in the play hours of a childhood spent outdoors in the woods, where boredom is an impossibility. The photo featured in the video is one I took myself about a decade or so ago, and it just so happens that Burdette mentions that exact little stream in a few of his other works.
Redburn is a deeply emotional - both positive and negative - account of a New England boy who sets out as a sailor to test and grow into his own manhood. I read the book cover to cover the very first time I ever opened it; to put it down for more than an occasional break for eating would have been simply impossible. The scenes and stories presented are so perfectly and vividly portrayed that there is no other literary work that has made me cry or laugh out loud so fully, and so often.
Herman Melville, born in 1819, is best known today as the author of ‘Moby Dick.’ However, his semi-autobiographical novel ‘Redburn,’ was published earlier, and was based on a trip he’d taken to Liverpool in 1839. If you have time for only one book, excluding the New Testament, then let it be this one; the stories within it become your own.
-by M. Shultz