A cuneiform tablet dating to around 1950 bc describes residents of the Assyrian merchant colony of Kanesh, situated in what is now central Turkey, resolving conflicts by majority vote. This early example of a protodemocratic decision-making process is a sharp contrast with the consensus-based systems more commonly found in primitive societies, where “the restoration of social harmony is the primary goal,” notes Assyriologist Mogens Trolle Larsen. “This was clearly not a realistic aim for the Old Assyrian merchant society.”
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“I haven’t come here to settle down / I’ve come here to depart,” wrote the thirteenth-century Turkish Sufi mystic and itinerant bard Yunus Emre, who traveled throughout Anatolia preaching Islam by way of memorized couplets. “I didn’t come to create any problems / I’m only here to love…He is my teacher. I am His servant / I am a nightingale in His garden.”
“Don’t take mother’s milk—it’s for young calves,” reads a medieval poem by the blind ascetic al-Maarri, “or thick white honey…the bees didn’t make it just to give it away!” In al-Maarri’s Epistle of the Horse and the Mule, the titular horse complains of “torture from the sons of Eve” and Bedouins’ cruelty toward the “tribes of equus”: “Our lot is to have hardships thrown around our necks and heaped onto our backs!”
The first lines spoken by the old shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale are, “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”
“There is a dockyard at Woolwich where one hundred warships of all sizes are built yearly to replace ships lost to the enemy or which have become obsolete. Because of the high costs of armaments and machinery, the government is usually in debt and forced to borrow from the public,” observed Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, a Persian ambassador on a diplomatic visit to London in 1810.
Some four hundred years after the death of Lucretius, Saint Jerome wrote the only existing biography of the philosopher, in two sentences, suggesting that Lucretius “was rendered insane by a love potion” and killed himself. In 1868 Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in “Lucretius” that the philosopher’s wife “dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch / Who brewed the philter which had power, they said, / To lead an errant passion home again. / And this, at times, she mingled with his drink, / And this destroyed him.”
On Halloween 1981, a Los Angeles punk band called Fear was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Comedian John Belushi, who had invited Fear to play, brought in punks to watch the performance. Chaos ensued; SNL’s stage manager was hit in the chest with a pumpkin. “The real audience at Saturday Night Live was scared to death,” Fear’s lead singer later said. The band was banned from appearing again.
Economist Frédéric Bastiat published a parodic open letter to French parliament in 1845 that imagined the national lighting industry lobbying for a law to black out all windows in response to the “ruinous competition” of the sun, which was “flooding the domestic market.” “Be logical,” the letter concludes, “for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!”
In 1864, responding to his friend Victor Hugo’s invitation to visit Guernsey, where the writer was living in exile, the French painter Gustave Courbet wrote, “In your sympathetic retreat I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect. I confess, poet, I love terra firma and the orchestration of the countless herds that inhabit our mountains. The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods, it recalls the crocodile’s tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”
In 2014 Amelia Hamrick, an undergraduate at Oklahoma Christian University, noticed musical notes written across the buttocks of one of the denizens of hell depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. She transcribed it into modern notation and made a recording she posted on her blog. “So yes,” she wrote, “this is literally the 600-year-old butt song from hell.” The post went viral.
In An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind, published in 1785, physician and Founding Father Benjamin Rush wrote that drunkenness, an “odious disease (for by that name it should be called),” appeared with, among other symptoms, “unusual garrulity…unusual silence…a disposition to quarrel…uncommon good humor and an insipid simpering or laugh…disclosure of their own or other people’s secrets…a rude disposition to tell those persons in company whom they know, their faults…certain extravagant acts which indicate a temporary fit of madness.”
“I have made a bet, Mr. Coolidge, that I could get you to say more than two words,” a lady remarked to the president during a dinner. “You lose,” he responded.
After Helen Gahagan Douglas was elected as a Democratic representative in 1944, news outlets spread rumors of a vicious rivalry between her and Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce; one headline read helen vs. clare: torch vs. icicle. “For reporters short of real news,” Douglas complained, “it was a simple day’s work to speculate that we would claw at one another.” The women resolved to avoid giving fodder to such baseless stories by never discussing the same subject on the same day.
A seventh-century Chinese treatise declares after “careful investigation” that “there are but thirty main positions for consummating the sexual union.” These include Bamboos Near the Altar, Reversed Flying Ducks, Phoenix Holding Its Chicken, Cat and Mouse in One Hole, and Donkeys in the Third Moon of Spring. “The understanding reader,” it concludes, will “probe their wonderful meaning to its very depth.”
In Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, published in 1843, Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “What philosophers say about actuality is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: pressing done here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.”