Swift (as Sir Walter Scott relates in his Life of Swift) early adopted the custom of celebrating his birthday, not as a time of joy, but of sadness, and of reading on that day the passage from the Bible where Job laments and curses the day on which it was said in the house of his father that a man-child is born.
It appears that it is a custom among a certain section of people in Malabar to weep when a child is born in the house and celebrate a death with pomp. Really, one should lament having left one’s real state and taken birth again in this world, and not celebrate it as a festive occasion.
The Mexicans welcomed the new-born child with the words: “My child, you are born to endure; therefore endure, suffer, and keep silence.”
The custom of the Thracians, first mentioned by Herodotus (v, 4), and often referred to later, of welcoming the new-born child with lamentation, and recounting all the evils that face it, and, on the other hand, of burying the dead with mirth and merriment, because they have escaped from so many great sufferings.
It appears that it is a custom among a certain section of people in Malabar to weep when a child is born in the house and celebrate a death with pomp. Really, one should lament having left one’s real state and taken birth again in this world, and not celebrate it as a festive occasion.
The Mexicans welcomed the new-born child with the words: “My child, you are born to endure; therefore endure, suffer, and keep silence.”
The custom of the Thracians, first mentioned by Herodotus (v, 4), and often referred to later, of welcoming the new-born child with lamentation, and recounting all the evils that face it, and, on the other hand, of burying the dead with mirth and merriment, because they have escaped from so many great sufferings.
