I hope you're not lonely without me

​Recently, I had a psychedelic retreat in Portugal.

During my trips, the song Society popped up into my mind and replayed non-stopped for four days.

When I got back home, I rewatched the movie Into the Wild, where I heard the song for the first time.

At the right beginning, George Gordon Byron (aka Lord Byron) ’s poem appeared on the screen and inspired me to write a couple of fun facts about him.

• Lord Byron spent his formative years in Aberdeen, Scotland, because his mother was Scottish. He had a love-hate relationship with Scotland. In his early years, Byron depicted Scotland as the land of bastards, full meanness, sophistry, and mist. However, later in his life, he wrote poems to praise Scotland as his beloved homeland and proudly claimed himself as “half a Scot by birth, and bred/A whole one”. Just like my relationship with my mother country China - only after I left her for good did I realize my deep roots entangled with her in many ways. 

 

• “Byronic hero” refers to a person with severe physical and mental defects (e.g. Byron himself suffers from lameness and is regarded as an unethical bad boy), walking between the lines of villain and hero. Perhaps irascible and cynical, but at the same time talented, full of passion, rebelling against the authority and injustice of the world, and usually end their life with self-destructive. 

A Byronic hero is a type of character who is a moody, talented, brooding rebel, often haunted by a dark secret from his past.
- Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights
- Steerforth in David Copperfield
- Erik in the Phantom of the Opera
- Roark in The Fountainhead
Steve Jobs in reality.

— Camellia Yang 翊瑄 (@Camelliayang) November 3, 2021

• Lord Byron’s wife left him following the birth of their daughter because of his alcoholism and debt. He never saw either his wife or daughter again. His only legitimate daughter Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer. Coincidentally, Ada died aged 36, the same age as Byron himself.

• Lord Byron had a close friendship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He presided over Shelley’s funeral and became the executor of his will. In 1816, Byron hosted the group, including the Shelley couple, to spend a rainy afternoon writing ghost stories, where Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley,  wrote what became Frankenstein. Mary had a pair of celebrity parents: the first modern proponent of anarchism William Godwin as her father and the feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft as her mother. 

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• Lord Byron wrote a poem named Lachin y Gair (known as Dark Lochnagar in English), discussing his childhood in northeast Scotland. This poem later became a classic Scottish folk song. The most prevalent version is by the Scottish folk band The Corries.