Here is a Welsh alphabet poster titled "Y Wyddor" ("The Alphabet") which dates all the way back to 1900.
The contents of the poster is based on the alphabet of the great antiquary T.C. Evans of Llangynwyd (unrelated but a home of the Mari Lwyd). It was also illustrated by his son, Christopher Evans... and I think he did a fine job!
The poster was a staple of Glamorgan schools throughout the early twentieth century, a time of mini revival for the Welsh language within classrooms following the previous Draconian measures (such as the Welsh Not) to eradicate it in the preceding decades and centuries.
That was the sentence Albert Camus wrote to his primary school teacher days after winning the Nobel Prize.
The letter moved many to tears and inspired millions more.
On November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria, Albert Camus was born into the kind of poverty that usually defines how a life will end.
But his teacher, Louis Germain, saw something in him.
Although ten-year-old Albert barely spoke, when he put pen to paper, the sentences came out with a strange clarity, almost too sharp for a boy his age.
Of course, his home had no books and his father, Lucien, was a poor agricultural worker who was sent to fight when the First World War broke out.
He was killed at the First Battle of the Marne before Albert turned one. The boy would grow up without ever remembering his father’s face.
His mother, Catherine, could not read or write. She was partially deaf and worked as a cleaning woman in the homes of wealthy French colonials. Every day, she scrubbed floors in houses that had more books in a single room than her sons would see in their entire childhood.
Then she would return to a cramped apartment in the district of Belcourt: two small boys, a strict grandmother who never believed in education, a partially paralyzed uncle, no running water, no electricity, no privacy, and no hope.
By every measure that mattered in 1920s colonial Algeria, Albert Camus had no future.
In that part of the world, education usually ended at fourteen for children like him. That was the year you were supposed to leave school and go earn money.
But one teacher refused to let that happen.
Louis Germain believed intelligence had nothing to do with wealth. He had spent years teaching poor children who usually disappeared into factories and docks. He knew what the pattern looked like.
And he knew when someone was about to break it.
Albert was quiet and small for his age, but when he wrote, there was a clarity that made his teacher marvel.
So Germain did something simple and radical.
He stayed every day after school and tutored the boy for free. He prepared him for the scholarship exam that would allow him to attend secondary school.
And when Albert’s family hesitated and insisted he needed to work and start earning money, Germain went to their apartment himself.
He stood in that small, dim room and argued for a future that no one there had ever seen.
Catherine reluctantly agreed.
In 1924, Albert took the scholarship examination for the Grand Lycée in Algiers.
He passed.
He became one of the very few poor children in his neighborhood to advance beyond primary school.
He wore secondhand clothes and often went without lunch. But he studied with a ferocious intensity because he understood something most children never have to:
This was his only door. And he did not let it close.
Years later, he would write The Stranger. Then The Plague. Then The Myth of Sisyphus.
He would become one of the defining voices of the twentieth century, asking questions about justice, suffering, and how to live in a world that makes no promises.
Who would have thought his books would sell in the millions? That they would be translated across continents? That in lecture halls and cafés, intellectuals would debate his philosophy of the absurd and his insistence on moral rebellion?
All of it written in that sharp, bone-dry, almost transparent style that became his signature.
People often wonder why he wrote the way he did. Camus wasn’t writing to impress anyone.
He said he wrote in plain, simple language because of his mother.
He wanted to write in a language that would not feel like a stranger to the silent, illiterate woman waiting in the Belcourt apartment.
In 1957, at forty-four, he stood in Stockholm and accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming one of the youngest recipients in history.
The first letter he wrote afterward was not to a publisher or a critic.
On November 19, 1957, he wrote to Louis Germain.
“Without you,” he said, “none of this would have happened.”
And that was not sentiment. It was a fact.
Three years later, on January 4, 1960, Albert Camus died in a car crash. He was forty-six.
It happened on a rainy road.
In his pocket was an unused train ticket. He had originally planned to travel by train, but at the last minute he accepted a friend’s offer for a ride.
In the mud near the wrecked car, investigators found his briefcase.
Inside it was the manuscript of an unfinished novel: The First Man.
It was a book he had dedicated to his mother.
NB:
If you’re curious about the full letter Albert Camus wrote to his teacher Louis Germain, here it is:
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited. But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you.
Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.
I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil.
"What if you were wrong? What if everything you ever believed was a lie? What if you missed your opportunity because you didn't know your worth? What if you settled on familiar, but God was trying to give you something better? What if you decided not to go backwards, but forward? What if doing what you have never done before was the answer to everything that didn't make sense? What if the answer wasn't to be found in words, but in action? What if you found the courage to do what you really wanted to do and doing it changed your whole life?"
~ Shannon L. Alder
"What if you just did it your own way? No rules, no right or wrong, just what you think is beautiful?"
~ Sandra Magsamen
Turn your "what ifs" into "what is". Have a happy Saturday!
What music is to the heart, mathematics is to the mind.
- Amit Kalantri,
Wealth of Words
[Image: Le Note Finali (The Final Note)(2021) oil painting on canvas by contemporary Italian artist Sergio Cerchi, known for a unique style often called "quadrantism," where the pictorial surface is fractured and multiplied, akin to a musical staff.]
Fort Belan, built in 1775, history below. Also have holiday cottages. Amazing place to stay but remote if you wanted to walk to the pub. Booklet produced here gives a potted history. For prices and availability you can contact the owner from the link below.
The fort was built in 1775 for a reported cost of £30,000 (£3,418,209 as of 2016), by Thomas Wynn, then MP for Caernarfonshire and later to become Lord Newborough. He was worried about the vulnerability of Britain’s coastline to attack, particularly because of the ongoing American War of Independence. Fort Belan was the only purpose-built fort of the American Revolution on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean. It guards a narrow passage of 35 m (115 ft) width.
In the late 1780s, the barracks were used to ward off raiding American privateers from the Irish Sea. But despite its military history, "no shots have been fired in anger from the fort". In the 1820s, the Wynn family turned it into a private fort for themselves, adding a small harbor for Spencer Wynn's steam yacht. Major construction works took place between 1824 and 1826. The watchtower was built in the 1890s by Freddie Wynn, and it housed a telescope.
In 1907, Sir Ralph Frankland-Payne-Gallwey described seeing a dock, workshops for repairing vessels, marine storehouses, winches, and cranes. During World War II, the fort was again used for military purposes as the base for the Home Guard and two rescue launches. In the 1950s it was owned by Colonel Robert Vaughan Wynn. The Wynn family sold the property in 1992 to the Blundells as a base for marine biology exploration. In 1996 the fort was reclassified as a Grade I listed building.
Andersen’s ugly duckling was never a broken duck, just a swan in the wrong nest. On misfits, introverts, and why not fitting in is information, not a verdict.
There is a boy I think about often. He grew up in France, and he does not quite fit. The other children seem to share a script he was never given. So he does what such children have always done: he builds a world of his own. Books, mostly. Fantasy and science fiction, whole galaxies of them, a private universe running quietly behind his eyes while the playground carries on without him.
I can tell you with some authority what became of that boy, because he was me. And I can tell you the strangest part: the thing that made him an outsider is now the engine of his entire life. But we will get to that.
First, a fairy tale.
The Bird in the Wrong Nest
In 1843, a Danish writer published a story about a bird hatched into a family of ducks. The bird is large and grey and wrong, and the farmyard lets him know it. He is pecked, mocked, and driven out. He survives a lonely winter, and in the spring he approaches a flock of beautiful white swans, expecting to be killed. Instead, he sees his reflection. He was never an ugly duck at all. He was a swan, hatched into the wrong nest.
Photo Credit: Stories With Clever Hedgehog
Hans Christian Andersen knew exactly what he was writing. He had been a poor, gangly, odd-looking boy in Odense, mercilessly teased, with a love of theatre and stories that made no sense to anyone around him. Years later, when he was asked whether he would write his autobiography, he replied that he already had. It was called The Ugly Duckling.
“It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard, if one has lain in a swan’s egg.” — Hans Christian Andersen
Read it again as an adult, and the story’s real insight emerges. The duckling never becomes beautiful. He does not transform, does not earn acceptance, does not fix himself. He simply finds the right pond. His “ugliness” was never a defect. It was a category error. He was being measured against a standard that was never his.
Not fitting in, in other words, is very often not a verdict on you. It is information about the nest.
The World That Measures Ducklings
If the farmyard has a modern name, Susan Cain gave it to us. In her 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, she describes the “Extrovert Ideal”: the pervasive belief that the ideal self is gregarious, bold, and comfortable in the spotlight. Schools built around group work, offices built around open plans, cultures built around self-promotion. A world, in short, designed by ducks, for ducks.
The numbers alone should give us pause. Cain reports that between a third and a half of all people are introverts, the ones who prefer listening to speaking, who create but dislike self-promotion, who recharge alone. And yet research shows we consistently rate talkative, fast-speaking people as smarter and more competent, despite there being no correlation between confident chatter and good ideas. Half the room is being marked down against a standard that measures volume rather than depth.
If you spent your childhood being told you were too quiet, too dreamy, too much in your own head, you were not failing. You were a swan being graded on your duck impression.
Science has since gone a step further, and the finding is almost mischievous. In 2012, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Cornell published a study titled Outside Advantage: Can Social Rejection Fuel Creative Thought? Across three experiments, they found that for people with an independent sense of self, being rejected by a group did not diminish their thinking. It improved it.
They performed measurably more creatively after exclusion than after inclusion, because rejection can act, in the researchers’ words, as “a form of validation” for those who already know they are different. The sting of not belonging, for the independent-minded, does not close the mind. It frees it.
The Patron Saints of the Wrong Nest
Literature knew all of this long before the laboratories did. Open the books we press into children’s hands, and you find, over and over, the same figure: the one who does not fit.
Roald Dahl’s Matilda teaches herself to read in a house that worships television, and walks to the library alone because no one will take her; her family treats her mind as a defect right up until it reveals itself as a power. Anne of Green Gables talks too much, imagines too hard, and is entirely wrong for the quiet farm that takes her in, and it is exactly this wrongness that transforms every life around her.
Photo Credit: Shop at Sullivan
Anne even gives us the vocabulary for the swan’s discovery: she is not looking for popularity, she is looking for kindred spirits, and she knows one on sight. And in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, awkward, stubborn, furious Meg Murry receives the strangest blessing in children’s literature. Setting out to rescue her brother, she is given, as her equipment for the journey, her faults. The very traits her school despises are the ones that save him.
The pattern is everywhere once you see it. The boy in the cupboard under the stairs turns out to belong to a different world entirely. The Hobbit is too odd for the Shire and precisely odd enough for the quest. Jane Eyre is too plain and too fierce for everyone’s comfort, and refuses on principle to be anyone but herself.
This is not a coincidence of plotting. It is a confession. Books about misfits are written by former misfits for current ones, a long chain of Andersens passing the same note down the generations: you are not broken, you are early. And reading itself, the very habit that marked so many of us as strange, is the misfit’s great technology, the means by which the child in the wrong nest discovers that kindred spirits exist, even if the nearest one is a hundred years dead or entirely fictional. We read because we did not fit, and in reading, we fit.
The Unfair Advantages of the Outsider
Here is what nobody tells the child at the edge of the playground: the edge has the best view.
The one who does not fit in is forced to become an observer, and observation is the beginning of every art. The child who reads through lunch is quietly acquiring more lives than one. The daydreamer dismissed as absent is doing what psychologists now recognise as some of the mind’s most creative work; solitude, as Cain argues in one of the most-watched TED talks ever given, is a catalyst for innovation, which is why so many of the people who gave us the things we love, the novels and the symphonies and the personal computer, did their best work alone.
History’s shelves are stacked by people who could not manage small talk.
And there is a subtler gift. The misfit never gets to mistake the local rules for the laws of the universe. When you have stood outside one world, you understand, forever, that every world is optional, that its hierarchies are invented, that there are other ponds. That knowledge is the seed of every original life.
Finding Your Pond
My own winter lasted a long time. I did the sensible thing for years; I wore the corporate costume and performed the script, and, like Cain, who described her time as a Wall Street lawyer as feeling like years in a foreign country, I was competent and quietly elsewhere.
Then I left, and became, of all improbable things, a bookseller. And something happened that I had not planned for: the private universe became the public one. The obsession that made me strange at nine, the books, the imagined worlds, the need to talk about stories, turned out to be the exact thing other people wanted from me.
I found my people, or they found me, and I noticed something my younger self would not have believed. I become most alive when I am talking about books. The weirdness was never the obstacle. The weirdness was the offer.
This, I think, is the fable’s true ending, and it is better than beauty. The swan does not win the farmyard’s approval. He stops needing it. Somewhere out there is a pond full of people who are strange in your exact direction, and every hour spent contorting yourself to fit the wrong nest is an hour not spent swimming toward them.
So if you were the child with a world going on behind your eyes, I hope you will consider the possibility that nothing was ever wrong with you. You were simply early to yourself.
What might happen if you stopped auditioning for the farmyard, and went looking for your pond?
