Today I suspect that many of you will be dressing in wild and gaudy costumes and indulging in revels to celebrate the anniversary of Reza Pahlavi’s declaring himself, on this day in 1980, the rightful heir to the Peacock Throne.
Others will be doing the same thing to honor Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, nailed defiantly to the Wittenberg door on this day in 1517, and of which an on-topic version can be found here.
As for me, if it were not for the fact that my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk, I would tell you that today is also John Keats’ birthday. Celebrate his birthday today in honor of the civilization of which his work is a small but luminous component, and commit yourself anew to defending that civilization.