Marketing/Growth thread by @_BenMyers_

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Thread. Last year my grandmother went viral on Twitter when I shared the reading list that she had kept for 80 years. Her funeral was on Monday. When she died, she left me a bundle of old diaries

Ben Myers@_BenMyers_

My 94-year-old grandmother has kept a list of every book she ever read since she was 14 years old. Amazing archive of one person’s mind over nearly a century

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The oldest one is dated May 1945. It’s a collection of poems and quotes that she copied from her reading during this period

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While the world was at war around her, my 16-year-old refugee grandmother was collecting love poems and copying them in her diary (this cover page says “love poems: collected by Nada Novakovic from Sombor: A human life without love is like a flower without petals”)

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She copied out poems and went back later to mark off the ones that she had memorised. In an example pictured here of a poem by Friedrich Halm, my grandmother came some back years later and used the poem to practise her English

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Since she was reading German books at the time, material with a Nazi tone made its way into her collection. She must have come back later and struck out these passages. On this page she has crossed out lines about German greatness and love-of-fatherland

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Although she kept similar diaries for many years, she kept returning to this early one and would sometimes record the date (50 years later!) on which she had finally gotten around to memorising one of the poems

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She was particularly devoted to Goethe, and was memorising passages from Goethe for 80 years. In my last conversation with her, a week before she died, she quoted—at 95 years of age!—a Goethe poem that she had just been memorising

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And she was forever writing down bits of Goethe to memorise. Even the package that contained these diaries, which was found in her room after she died, has one last Goethe poem scribbled on it

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Here’s a poem by Goethe that was read out at her funeral on Monday:

Over all the hilltops
Is peace.
In all the treetops
You feel hardly a breath of air.
The little birds are silent in the wood.
Just wait—soon
You will rest too.

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Thanks for all the love for my grandmother Nada. 🥹I’ll post a few more excerpts for those who are interested. The lines by Goethe scribbled on this packet say:

Years, moons, days, hours
Sow seeds, heal wounds.
If not carelessly allowed to slip away,
They sow, and need not heal.

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On her mother’s birthday in 1951 she wrote out this poem. She had come to Australia and left her mother behind in Germany. Here are some lines from this page:

Far from home, a refugee here
Lost in the world around,
Finding neither my dear homeland
Nor my little child anymore

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Here’s another example of a Nazi-sounding passage that she later crossed out

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This one is an aphorism by Goethe:

That’s what human beings are like! They lament the past, fear the future, but do not cherish the present.

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Another Goethe passage, this time about social status:

Put on wigs with millions of curls,
Put on knee-high socks—
You still remain what you are.

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Here’s a passage from a German song:

Farewell in the distance,
The stars shine in the sky,
It’s night on earth:
Sleep well, good night.

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These parts are too sad to translate. On facing pages she marked the birth of her first child Vera, born in 1948. The poem is about how rich life is when it looks at you through the eyes of a child. On the next page is a poem with the date of the baby’s death 4 months later

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One last passage - very fitting for my grandmother Nada:

Wide world and broad life,
Long years of honest striving…
Faithfully preserving the old things
And kindly welcoming the new:
Cheerful spirit and pure intentions.
Well then! One surely comes a long way.

Thread. Last year my grandmother went viral on Twitter when I...

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