Letters Live – Helen Keller

A letter from someone to whom isolation was a way of life for the first eight years of her life. She found many ways out of that isolation during the next 80 years.

Letters Live is a remarkable programme created to celebrate “the enduring power of literary correspondence.”

The word for April 7th is:
Live /liv/: [verb]
1. To be in the present
2. To have life
3. To be located or stored
4. To experience first hand
Old English libban, lifian, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch leven and German leben, also to life and leave.
There are at least 10 other definitions – at this moment I’m favouring 1. and 4.

Peace For A Time

The candle for the Second Sunday of Advent is the Peace candle.  In the past few years what became known as the Christmas Truce of 1914  has been the topic of  songs, movies, documentaries and an opera.  It is a moving and strange moment of peace in the midst of what was to be five years of hell.  There were Christmas truces in 1915 and a few in 1916 but as the war dragged on and death tools mounted the bitterness and hatred won the day.

Peter Capaldi reads this letter from December 24, 1914:

All the movies, music, documents and stories I have read did not prepared me for this.  Dare we even pray for “peace for our time”?

I realize this clip is not a short one but please take the time to play it all.

On this day in 1911:  Delhi replaces Calcutta as the capital of India.