According to the fourth-century-bc Zhuangzi, the man who attains unity with nature “mounts on the clouds and wind, rides the sun and moon, and roams beyond the four seas. Life and death do not alter him, much less principles of gain and loss.” Such human beings “turn beginning and end around and don’t know start from finish. They carelessly loiter beyond the dust and the dirt and wander free and easy.”
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In the 1790s in the United States, the average American over the age of fifteen consumed almost six gallons of pure alcohol per annum. The modern figure is 2.8.
Abdul Kassem Ismael, a tenth-century Persian grand vizier and author of an extensive Arabic dictionary, had a library of 117,000 volumes. According to one account, the scholar declined an invitation to serve in the court of the Samanid ruler Nuh II, insisting that four hundred camels would be required to transport his library. Other accounts report that Ismael did undergo the trip, and that the camels were lined up in the alphabetical order of the volumes they carried.
In 1639 Puritan settlers in Massachusetts authorized the expulsion of “pauper aliens” in what is thought to be the first case of deportation in the country. Soon after, Virginia and Pennsylvania passed laws heavily restricting “the importation of paupers,” which included criminals and “foreigners and Irish servants.”
“Why do you wrong the gods so much?” Greek poet Athenaeus asks a sober party guest in a late second-century work. “You’re no use to the city if you drink water, / because you’re hurting the farmer and the trader; / whereas I increase their income by getting drunk.”
Wikipedia editing guidelines ask that page authors avoid including mission statements in entries. “These usually focus on platitudes rather than specifics,” the site warns. “In short, they rarely tell us anything useful.”
Analysis of lead pipe from the buried city of Pompeii revealed in 2017 that the Roman water supply may have had high levels of antimony, a toxic element likely used to increase the pipes’ strength. “It’s bigger than the diarrhea,” said an expert in archaeological chemistry about antimony’s possible effect on the population. “It’s the decline of the Roman Empire in 476.”
Discussing the “secret and more adult” appeal of Shirley Temple, Graham Greene wrote in his review of Wee Willie Winkie in 1937, “Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialog drops between their intelligence and their desire.” He also noted her “neat and well-developed rump” and “dimpled depravity.” Twentieth Century Fox sued for libel, Greene fled to Mexico, and a court ordered a settlement of 3,500 pounds.
Dorothy Parker was once asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence. “You can lead a horticulture,” she replied, “but you can’t make her think.”
“By the end of the fifteenth century, when the power of theology was exhausted and the patriarchal understanding of the origin of kingship no longer satisfied people’s appetite for science, politics started to develop as a science,” wrote political theorist Carl Schmitt. “Dictatorship, in particular, is described as a specific arcanum dominationis of the aristocracy. Its purpose is to create an institution that frightens the people into believing that it constitutes an authority against which there is no possibility of provocation…In the state certain events are always necessary that conjure the impression of freedom, simulacra or decorative occasions designed to pacify the population.”
“Kings embodied the whole period of their reign,” wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power. “Their death, whether it came with the decline of their strength or, as later, coincided with their natural span of life, indicated a break in time. They were time. Between one king and the next, time stood still. There was a gap in it—an interregnum—which people sought to keep as short as possible.”
“Bomb the shit out of them!” was reportedly a drunken President Richard Nixon’s conclusion as to what should be done about Cambodia. Henry Kissinger recalled in an interview in 1999 that “two glasses of wine were quite enough to make him boisterous, just one more to grow bellicose or sentimental with slurred speech.”
Afridi tribesmen agreed not to engage in traditional blood feuds on a road through the Khyber Pass after it was seized by the British Raj in 1879. One result, the writer E.F. Benson later reported, was that Afridis would travel through clandestine tunnels to the road to “smile at each other.” Then, “having taken the air,” he wrote, “they rabbit it into their fortresses again.”
A Theravada story is told about an early incarnation of the Buddha who, at one month old, watches his father, the king, sentencing criminals to death and corporal punishments. He suddenly remembers a past life in which he, too, condemned men to death, then suffered 80,000 years in hell as karmic comeuppance. He decides to avoid inheriting the throne by pretending to be deaf, dumb, and immobile.
In 2020 bioarchaeologists found evidence that six individuals buried in southern Peru’s Chincha Valley during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries began their lives hundreds of miles away, on the country’s upper coast. The findings support colonists’ descriptions of the Incan Empire forcibly resettling populations to quell dissent and increase the procurement of natural resources. “The state generally sought to put people in ecological zones similar to their home,” the researchers noted, and the Chincha Valley would have been “a prime destination for the resettlement of northern water-management specialists and miners.”