Catharsis on the Fly

It’s the birthday of Enoch Pratt, the philanthropist whose money founded the city of Baltimore’s public library; hence, the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

It’s also the birthday of novelist Franz Werfel. Werfel is well known for marrying Alma Mahler after Gustav Mahler’s death and for two of his several novels: The Song of Bernadette and The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. But Writer’s Almanac does not mention his final, posthumously published novel, Star of the Unborn. This was reprinted by Ballantine during the fantasy boom of the 1970s, and inspired by some strange muse, my parents bought it for me one Christmas when I was no older than twelve. In this visionary novel, a protagonist based on the author is mysteriously resurrected in a distant future when humanity seems to have refined and perfected itself and suffering has been eliminated. But, of course, all is not as it seems….

I’ve been trying off and on to read this book for decades. Perhaps I’ll give it another go.

–that Christopher Robin Milne should be only six years older than my mother, four years older than my father. They might have read the Pooh books as children. To me Winnie-the-Pooh and its world seem like something that has always existed–and I guess it has, just not in book form.