March 22

In literary history

• 1832Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at eighty-two in Weimar, having sealed the manuscript of Faust Part Two months earlier and waited. His reported last words were a request to open the shutters for more light. Commentators have been reading them symbolically ever since.
• 1897Anton Chekhov sat down to dinner with his publisher at Moscow's Hermitage restaurant and began coughing blood. Doctors confirmed tuberculosis. Chekhov had been a physician for fifteen years and had suspected the diagnosis for most of them; he had told no one.

The Daily Canon for March 22

The Masnavi by Rumi (1273).