“It requires great exertion,” wrote Lady Irwin in 1771 about the dangers of life in a grand country house, “to use exercise and stir about when the will is not so inclined and the sofas appear in every corner of the room.”
Archive
Miscellany
“When summer and winter separate,” wrote Hildegard of Bingen circa 1158, “so that either summer recedes and winter arrives or winter recedes and summer arrives, then a certain mixed substance appears, flying in the air, like a whiteness of threads, where the air is purifying itself.”
Annoyed by a prohibition against nocturnal work in late medieval France—enacted because candles provided insufficient light for quality performance—employers complained to Louis XI that workers occupied themselves from “four or five o’clock until the next day with various games and dissipations, and hardly want to apply themselves to do well.” In the winter of 1467, they received permission to extend working hours to ten pm.
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.”
Eighth-century Persian scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa recorded a parable describing human existence. A man, fearing an elephant, dangles himself into a pit to hide but soon realizes a dragon waits at the bottom and rats are gnawing at the branches he’s holding on to. He then notices a beehive, tastes its honey, and becomes “diverted, unaware, preoccupied with that sweetness.” While he’s distracted, the rats finish gnawing the branches, and the man falls into the dragon’s mouth.
“No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon,” wrote William James in 1893. “When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear.”
Ezra Pound began his radio broadcasts for Benito Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture on January 21, 1941. Familiar with his friend’s admiration for fascism and his vocal anti-Semitism, William Carlos Williams wrote him on November 26 of that year, asking, “Can’t you see that every word you utter reveals to any intelligent and well-informed man that you know nothing at all?…You’re a wonder. Barnum missed something when he missed you.” Postal delivery to Italy was halted in December; the letter was returned to its sender. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Pound for treason on July 26, 1943.
In a 1985 election for the Victorian Legislative Council in Australia, candidates Bob Ives and Rosemary Varty tied at 54,281 votes each. Ives won the seat with a casting vote provided by an official who drew Ives’ name from a hat. The Court of Disputed Returns voided the result after determining that forty-four votes had not been counted. Varty won a subsequent special election.
According to one theory, the association between storks and human infants in northern European folklore arose from an ancient Germanic custom of holding weddings on the summer solstice, before storks began their annual migration to Africa. Nine months later, when the babies conceived the previous summer were being born, the storks would return north to breed.
A young nobleman in ancient Athens fell in love with a statue of Agathe Tyche, goddess of good fortune. He hugged and kissed it, then offered the local council a large sum of money to purchase it. When his request was denied, he decorated the statue extravagantly with crowns and garlands, offered a sacrifice, uttered a lengthy lamentation, and killed himself.
A common belief in antiquity was that bees were born of decaying ox flesh. Virgil instructs in his Georgics to stop up a young bullock’s nostrils and mouth, beat it “to a pulp through the unbroken hide,” shut the carcass in a small room to ferment, and await the bees that will burst out “like a shower pouring from summer clouds.”
According to a 2021 study published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “noninstructional spending” at universities is growing faster than “instructional spending”; between 2012 and 2018, “colleges and universities prioritized hiring less expensive and often less credentialed instructional staff and more expensive administrative staff.”
Tacitus reports in his Annals that Nero’s “passion for extravagance” brought disrepute and danger in the year 60 when the emperor went bathing in the spring that fed the Aqua Marcia, the aqueduct believed to deliver Rome’s healthiest drinking water. Nero “profaned the sacred waters,” complains Tacitus, and “the divine anger was confirmed by a grave illness that followed.”
To rival the 1,063-foot-tall Eiffel Tower, nearly twice the height of the Washington Monument, planners of the Chicago Exposition of 1893 presented the Ferris Wheel, which was 264 feet tall. While the wheel was slowly spinning, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper in which he proclaimed the end of the frontier phase of American history.
To cure madness in “men fond of literature,” medical encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus suggests reading aloud to them “incorrectly, if that’s what gets them going; for by correcting you they begin to divert their mind.”