I’ve been reading about Anne Bronte (today is her birthday) here, and I found out several things I didn’t know. The author compares her writing several times to that of Jane Austen–less passionate and romantic, more calm and insightful than the novels of Charlotte and Emily. Since I’ve read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and never read anything by Anne Bronte, I didn’t know her writing was so different. Also, Charlotte Bronte apparently didn’t care for Jane Austen and so really didn’t appreciate her sister Anne’s novels either. Maybe I should read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and see what I think. And Anne was only 28 years old when she died. What a short life!

I’m reading Peggy Noonan’s book A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag: America Today. The book is a collection of her columns from The Wall Street Journal–mostly those written after September 11, 2001. However, I’ve been most impressed with one essay written by Ms. Noonan before 9/11; it seems so prescient. She wrote this in 1998:

“We live in a world of three billion men and hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, missiles, warheads. It’s a world of extraordinary germs that can be harnessed and used to kill whole populations, a world of extraordinary chemicals that can be harnessed and used to do the same. Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.
What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: what are the odds it will not? Low. Nonexistent, I think.
When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage . . .When you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . Who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense ten-mile-long island called Manhattan . . .”

How could she predict all that three years before it happened?