Lucian claims in his True History to have traveled to the moon. There, he writes, he encountered a tribe of Treemen whose reproductive method was to cut off and plant a man’s right testicle, let it grow into “an enormous tree of flesh, like a phallus,” then harvest and carve men from its large acorns. Wealthy Treemen were given genitals of ivory; the poor got wood.
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In 2012 a revenue office in Uttar Pradesh received an official-looking notice addressed to the Hindu storm god Indra, ordering the deity to provide written justification for a drought caused by insufficient rain during that year’s monsoon season. “If the Lord fails to give a satisfactory explanation within the stipulated period,” the notice warned, “it will be presumed that he has nothing to say, and stern action will be taken.”
Nearly forty years ago, the Coordination and Planning Division of Exxon Research and Engineering conducted a technical review of how fossil fuels influence climate. The study, which was distributed to Exxon’s top management, advocated for “major reductions in fossil-fuel consumption.” Unless that happened, the study concluded, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered. Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”
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.”
At Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa police used cameras and biometric face-recognition software to survey fans. The system identified nineteen subjects of outstanding warrants, far more than anticipated. None were arrested. “We thought we were ready to use it,” said a detective.
In 1938 Guy Stewart Callendar published a paper titled “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.” “It may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel…is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways,” concluded Callendar. “The small increases of mean temperature would be important on the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favorably situated plants is directly proportional to the carbon dioxide pressure. In any case, the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.”
Julius Caesar was criticized for his loosely belted toga. “Beware the badly belted boy,” said Sulla; Cicero sneered at Caesar’s habit of “trailing the fringe of the toga on the ground like an effeminate.” His political rival Cato the Younger made a point of wearing a short toga with no tunic underneath, as was considered masculine. But a decade later it was common for young Roman men to grow goatees, wear flowing togas, and use “loosely belted” as a catchphrase.
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.”
A hand’s primary function, Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power, is as “a claw to grasp whole branches” while climbing; both hands partner in “grasping” and “letting go.” This is like trade, he argues: “one hand tenaciously holds on to the object with which it seeks to tempt the stranger” while the other “is stretched out in demand.” Trading, then, offers “profound and universal pleasure” as “a translation into nonphysical terms of one of the oldest movement patterns.”
Primo Levi’s 1971 short story “Heading West” describes a group of indigenous people who refuse to partake in an experiment requiring them to take a new drug purported to end a suicide epidemic; the chief writes that his people “prefer freedom to drugs and death to illusion.” A few years later, after Levi’s German teacher was found hanged, Levi refused to sign a petition claiming that he had actually been murdered, insisting that “suicide is a right we all have.” In a letter, Levi described suicide as “an act of will, a free decision.” His own death in 1987—from a fall down his apartment building’s stairwell—was ruled a suicide, though some contemporary scholars have contested this.
Jin dynasty general Yuanzi once peeked in on a soothsaying Buddhist nun while she bathed. He watched her carve open her belly, take out her viscera, and cut off her own head. Later, the nun emerged intact. “If you remove or bully the supreme ruler,” she told Yuanzi, “your body should be like that.” The general was disappointed; he had been planning a coup but now reconsidered.
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.
The first known legal use of the phrase act of God was in a 1581 English case concerning property inheritance. It referred, in that instance, to death, declared by the judge to be among “those things which are inevitable by the act of God, which no industry can avoid, nor policy prevent.”
Primary school students in eastern Nigeria are encouraged to focus on their education with a song whose lyrics translate as “Education is sweet but hard to learn, but with patience, you can succeed if your parents have the white man’s money.”
While on his American speaking tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Leadville, Colorado, where he went into a saloon. There was a piano player in the corner with a sign over him that said: DON’T SHOOT THE PIANIST; HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN. It was, observed Wilde, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He also visited a nearby mine where, upon reaching the bottom, the miners implored him to stay for supper: “the first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”