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.
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When told by a doctor that he was dying in 1851, J.M.W. Turner replied, “Go downstairs, take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again.” The doctor followed the painter’s suggestion but returned with the same prognosis. The day Turner died he was wheeled to the window so that he could see the sunshine on the river and boats passing by.
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.”
“Mine is a peaceable disposition,” Heinrich Heine writes in his journals, declaring simple wishes: a humble cottage, some fine trees out front. But “if God wants to make my happiness complete,” he adds, “he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.”
“Not one cent for scenery,” Republican House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon said in opposition to President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation agenda. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson, at the signing of a conservation bill, said, “Today we are repealing Cannon’s law.”
Hero of Alexandria invented the aeolipile, a primitive steam engine, in the first century. A hollow sphere with elbow-shaped tubes mounted on an axle and suspended over a cauldron of boiling water, the engine likely could not have powered anything. “It should probably be remembered,” wrote historian William Rosen, “as the first in a line of engineering dead ends.”
“The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire,” reads the Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997. Among the signatories were Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush—but not George W.
In 480 bc, with the Persian army on the cusp of defeating Greece, Athenian general Themistocles sent a trusted slave to convey a message to Persian king Xerxes; the note professed allegiance to Persia and reported many Greek ships prepared to defect. The Persians, acting hastily on this false intelligence, sailed into the Strait of Salamis, where the Greek fleet was waiting and gained a decisive victory.
“One enterprising seventeenth-century systematizer,” noted classicist Mary Beard in a discussion of the different ways the sounds of laughter have been recorded throughout history, “attempted to classify the variants in these sounds and relate them to the different temperaments, hi hi hi indicating melancholics, he he he cholerics, ha ha ha phlegmatics, and ho ho ho hotheads.”
At the 1883 trial of Alferd Packer, who ate five members of his prospecting party in Colorado after the group got lost during a winter trek, the judge was said to have told the convicted, “There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you’ve ate five of them, God damn you. I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you is dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democrat population of the state.”
“I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby,” Saint Augustine reports in his Confessions. “He could not speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother’s milk.” Regarding the baby’s sinister intent, Augustine contends that “it can hardly be innocence,” when the milk “is flowing richly and abundantly, not to endure a share going to one’s blood brother, who is in profound need.”
“It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1915, “and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”
Herodotus reports that after Cyrus the Great was warned by a Spartan herald not to tread further into Greek lands, the Persian king received a primer on Sparta, including an explanation of an agora, to inform his response. “I have never yet been afraid of any men,” he told the herald, “who have a set place in the middle of their city where they come together to cheat each other.”
Philadelphia chemist Robert Cornelius took what is widely believed to be the first “selfie,” in the back of his family shop, by removing the camera lens cap, running into the frame, and then replacing the lens cap. On the back of the photograph he wrote, “The first light picture ever taken. 1839.” Three-quarters of a century later, Russia’s grand duchess Anastasiya Nikolayevna took a series of self-portraits, steadying herself on the back of a chair. “I took this picture of myself looking in the mirror,” she wrote in 1914, four years before her execution. “It was very hard, as my hands were trembling.”
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.”