May 1 was codifed in 1820 as the date housing contracts in New York City expired or were renewed. Davy Crockett witnessed moving day in 1834. “It seemed a kind of frolic, as if they were changing houses just for fun,” he wrote. “Every street was crowded with carts, drays, and people. So the world goes. It would take a good deal to get me out of my log house, but here, I understand, many persons ‘move’ every year.”
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During a battle with Scythians in Macedonia on April 29, 1091, Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus noted the midday sun “shedding its rays,” reported his daughter Anna Comnena in the Alexiad. He dispatched local peasants to bring water in skins or jars to his troops, who “sipped a drop of water, then returned to the fray.” The newly hydrated Byzantines wiped out their enemies, and a chant began: “All because of one day the Scythians never saw May.”
“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his failed 1965 master’s thesis in anthropology, in which he argued that the plots of stories, when graphed, conform to a set of standard patterns. “The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.”
The contentious relationship of the two Roman consuls of 59 bc, Julius Caesar and Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, culminated in the former arranging to have the latter attacked in the Forum in order to prevent him from voting against an agrarian law Caesar supported. The next day Bibulus tried to censure Caesar formally but found no support among the senators. “From that time until the end of his term,” wrote Suetonius, Bibulus “did not leave his house, but merely issued proclamations announcing adverse omens.”
Henry James said in 1915, “The war has used up words…they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms.” While writing A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway copied out part of this interview, wrote above it “on the debasement of words by war,” and gave his main character the line, “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
Advocating in 1790 for the adoption of card catalogues, the German librarian Albrecht Christoph Kayser cited the “common mistake of employees that they believe they will live forever.” Workers “arrange their shops without regard for their successors, considering them well kept in their own memory, without written notes, thus making it impossible for those eventually taking their place, or at least making it infinitely more complicated for anyone to pick up the thread of those who have been called to meet their maker.”
In July 1947, a U.S. Army spokesman in Roswell, New Mexico, issued a press release to announce that the military had found a “flying disc” that had landed at a ranch near an air base. “It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field,” according to the army, “and subsequently loaned to higher headquarters.” There were no further public statements about the matter.
According to the Talmud, “If a fledgling bird is found within fifty cubits of a dovecote, it belongs to the owner of the dovecote. If it is found outside the limit of fifty cubits, it belongs to the person who finds it.” Jeremiah, a renowned fourth-century rabbi, once asked what the outcome would be if a bird were to have one foot inside the limit and the other outside. This was one quibble too many. “It was for this question,” the text relates, “that Rabbi Jeremiah was thrown out of the House of Study.”
The Ongee of the Andaman Islands base their calendar on smell: their names for seasons derive from the flowers that are in bloom at the time.
The title track of Van Morrison’s 1990 album Enlightenment opens with the lyrics “chop that wood, carry water,” a reference to the popular Zen Buddhist dictum that before enlightenment, one must chop wood and carry water, and that after enlightenment, one must chop wood and carry water. The origin is a verse by the late eighth-century Chinese poet Layman Pang, who declared that his “supernatural power and marvelous activity” was “drawing water and carrying firewood.”
In the summer of 1867, Chinese laborers working on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada went on strike, demanding a pay increase and a ten-hour workday. Desperate to resume the railroad’s progress, executives considered asking the Freedmen’s Bureau to send African American laborers to take over. “A Negro labor force would keep the Chinese steady,” one executive wrote, “as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.”
On January 9, 2022, sixteen elite U.S. universities were sued in federal court for offering fraudulent financial-aid packages, overcharging more than 170,000 financial-aid recipients, and conspiring to “reduce or eliminate price competition” in order to establish “a uniform and lower level of aid to all prospective students.”
Gertrude Stein recalled that on the copy of her final exam for a class taught by William James she wrote, “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.” She then left the room. The next day a note arrived from Professor James that said, “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself”—and then awarded her the highest mark in the course.
“When Simonides or someone offered to teach him the art of memory,” Cicero noted in his De Finibus, the Athenian politician Themistocles “replied that he would prefer the art of forgetting. ‘For I remember,’ said he, ‘even things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget.’ ”
A 2018 study of sediment cores taken from the bed of Walden Pond found signs of “cultural eutrophication”: human urine released into the pond since it became a popular swimming spot in the 1920s has altered the water chemistry and could turn the “beautiful clear lake into a slimy green stew.” The study was reported in the Boston Globe with the headline “Please Stop Peeing in Walden Pond, Researchers Beg.”