Michel de Montaigne’s father believed “it disorders the tender brains of children to awake them by surprise in the morning, and suddenly and violently to snatch them from sleep”; he preferred to rouse his son from slumber “by the sound of some instrument of music,” likely an early form of harpsichord called an epinette. Montaigne recalled later that he “was never without a musician for that purpose.”
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As a youth, the writer V.S. Naipaul struggled with hysteria. He described watching the film The African Queen while at Oxford: “Just when Bogart said something to Katharine Hepburn about sleeping one off or something, I could take it no longer and left the cinema. What form did it take? One was terrified of human beings. One didn’t wish to show oneself to them.” Naipaul claimed he cured himself over a two-year period. “Intellect and will,” he said, “intellect and will.”
In his eponymous saga, Icelandic outlaw Grettir swims through icy waters to a friend’s farm. That night, while he sleeps on a bench inside the longhouse, his clothes fall off. He wakes the next morning to a servant woman laughing at him. “He’s out of proportion,” she says. “He’s big but small between the legs.” This episode, according to a scholar of saga-era Icelandic life, “illustrates the openness of the life in the hall.”
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.
“I am the emperor, and I want dumplings,” said Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria. His only lucid remark, the historian A. J. P. Taylor thought.
Before Inuit tribes in southeastern Alaska would offer hospitality, anthropologist Franz Boas noted, a stranger would have to exchange blows to the head with a tribesman until one combatant was “vanquished.” In other areas, men would strip down and arm wrestle, sometimes to the death. The Inuit understanding: “The two men in meeting wish to know which of them is the better man.”
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.”
On October 30, 1938, a CBS radio announcer presented the 8 p.m. broadcast: “Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.” After the 23-year-old Welles read an ominous introduction and the “music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra” played, bulletins followed with reports of Martians crash-landing in New Jersey. Many listeners thought that the Welles-Wells adaptation was news: some people crowded highways trying to flee from aliens; others pleaded with police for gas masks. Welles said at the broadcast’s end that it was only a “holiday offering” in anticipation of Halloween.
“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.”
About 40 percent of employers peer at the social-media profiles of prospective candidates, and 40 percent of party guests admit to snooping through a host’s medicine cabinet or drawers. The percent of women who admit to having looked through a partner’s phone without permission is 34 percent; of men, 62.
About the presidential election of 1928, between anti-Prohibitionist Al Smith and Prohibitionist Herbert Hoover, H.L. Mencken wrote, “If Al wins tomorrow, it will be because the American people have decided at last to vote as they drink.” Hoover won, earning 444 of the 531 electoral-college votes.
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.”
In 1840 Mikhail Lermontov published his only novel, A Hero of Our Time, in which the protagonist, Pechorin, kills a fellow officer in a duel in the Caucasus. A year later, Lermontov wrote in a poem, “In noon’s heat, in a dale of Dagestan / With lead inside my breast, stirless I lay; / The deep wound still smoked on.” Within a few months, Lermontov was dead, killed in a duel with a fellow officer in the Caucasus, shot through the heart after firing his own gun into the air.
A 1551 municipal law in Lisbon regulated water at the Palacete Chafariz d’el Rei, segregating access across six spouts: the first for “slaves, freedmen, black people, mulattoes, and Indians”; the second for galley slaves; the fifth for “black and mulatto women and Indian women, both freed and captive”; and the sixth for white women and girls. White men and boys got the middle spouts, the third and the fourth.
A public announcement from 156 bc offers a reward of three talents of copper for the recapture of an eighteen-year-old Syrian-born slave named Hermon who has escaped from an Alexandria household; two talents to anyone who “points him out in a temple”; five if he is found “in the house of a substantial and actionable man.” The advertisement notes that Hermon “has taken with him three octadrachms of coined gold, ten pearls, an iron ring…and is wearing a cloak and a loincloth”; that he has “a mole by the left side of the nose”; and that he is “tattooed on the right wrist with two barbaric letters.”