The Writer's Almanac for Thursday, August 24, 2017

Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying the Roman city of Pompeii, on this date in the year 79. Pompeii was about five miles away from the mountain, and it was a resort town for Rome's elite. It's estimated that about 20,000 people lived in and around Pompeii at that time, and most of them were able to escape relatively unscathed.

Just after noon, a plume of ash, pumice rock, and debris shot up into the air and began falling on the surrounding area. Before long, the ash in the streets of Pompeii lay nine feet deep. Pliny the Younger witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius from across the Bay of Naples, and noted that the billowing soot, rocks, and gas looked like an enormous pine tree. It eclipsed the sun. "Darkness fell," Pliny wrote, "not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a dark room." Even from his safe distance, he observed, "I believed I was perishing with the world, and the world with me." About five thousand people died — most likely from a blast of blistering hot, poisonous gas, not debris or lava — and the whole city was buried under millions of tons of ash and debris.

Pompeii and the nearby city of Herculaneum were rediscovered in the 18thcentury. They were almost completely intact, buried under about 23 feet of volcanic debris. The modern science of archaeology was born with the widespread excavations of the two cities. The excavation is still ongoing today, with about one-third of Pompeii still buried.

Mount Vesuvius erupted last in 1944, and experts believe it could erupt again at any time. Today, about 3 million people live within a few miles of the crater; 600,000 of them live close enough to the volcano that they would not survive an eruption today. Scientists monitor the volcano — one of the world's most dangerous — around the clock and have a plan to evacuate the area in advance, if an eruption seems imminent.

Alaric, a chieftain in his mid-30s, was the leader of the Visigoths. They came from what is now Germany, and were one of the many tribes who were suffering at the hands of the Roman Empire. Roman leaders enforced higher and higher taxes on the people in their outer provinces, and corrupt local officials grew wealthy while the people stayed poor. Rebellions broke out, and the Visigoths started moving toward Rome.

The Visigoths began their siege of Rome in 408, and soon residents were starving. Alaric wanted land on which he and his people could settle. He also wanted a position of respect within the empire. He ended his first siege when the Roman Senate paid him off. But after his chief demands were repeatedly rebuffed, he returned to his siege on Rome, this time waging an all-out attack. Rebellious Roman slaves — many of whom had been captured from Germanic tribes — opened the gates to Alaric in the middle of the night. The Visigoths burned, looted, raped, and pillaged, but they treated Christian sites and relics with respect.

St. Jerome, one of the great Church leaders of the day, was living in Bethlehem when Rome fell. He wrote: "In one city, the whole world perished." At its height, the Roman Empire had stretched from Britain and the Atlantic to North Africa and Mesopotamia.

Borges grew up comfortably, but not wealthily. His family was rich in literature, though, and he had access to over 1,000 books in his family's large library. He began reading Shakespeare at 12 and always knew he would be a writer. At nine, he translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish. It was published in a newspaper and was so good that many people thought his father must have done it, not Borges.

Borges's family moved to Switzerland when he was 15, traveling widely throughout Europe. He began writing poems in the fashion of Walt Whitman and reading the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which would influence his later writing.

His family returned to Buenos Aires and Borges published his first collection of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). He got a job in a municipal library with a very small collection, which allowed him to finish his daily cataloguing duties quickly. He spent the rest of the day in the basement, writing. His first collection of short stories, A Universal History of Infamy (1935), which is a fictionalized account of real-life criminals, is considered to be the beginning of magical realism and Borges's true style. After Borges suffered a serious head wound (1938), he wrote his most famous works, creating his own worlds, languages, and symbols. His second collection of short stories, El jardín desenderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of the Forking Paths, 1941), is a combination of book and maze, featuring stories about a library containing every possible 410-page text and a man who forgets nothing. He even wrote strange detective stories with a friend under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. They were published as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1941). When dictator Juan Domingo Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was fired from the library for his support of the Allies during World War II. Perón made him head inspector of rabbit and poultry to punish him. Borges resigned the post.

Borges was famous in Argentina, but didn't become famous in America until after his books began to be translated in 1961. He traveled and lectured frequently, but he also began to go blind, which he called "a slow, summer twilight." He never learned to read Braille, and his mother — who lived into her 90s — became his secretary. He dictated his stories to her and, gradually, began writing only poetry. He said: "Blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory." Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986. His books include Ficciones (1944), The Aleph (1949), Book of Imaginary Beings(1967), and The Book of Sand (1975).