During a total solar eclipse in 1919, astronomer and physicist Arthur Eddington observed from Príncipe Island that gravity bent the path of light to the degree predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Eddington went on to help popularize relativity and the idea that the universe was expanding. When asked how many people really understood his theories of universal expansion, he replied, “Perhaps seven.”
Archive
Miscellany
“Six days, six weeks. I doubt six months,” said Donald Rumsfeld, on February 7, 2003, about the duration of the Iraq war. “Whatever happens in Vietnam, I can conceive of nothing except military victory,” Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1967. Four years before that, Robert McNamara asserted, “The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.”
Before their journey westward in America in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were advised by Thomas Jefferson to “observe the animals” and especially “the remains and accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct.” One of the animal fossils that the expedition sent back is believed to have been of a dinosaur, dating from the Cretaceous Period.
While running the Vincent Astor Foundation, Brooke Astor established in 1991 an organization that provided furnishings to formerly homeless families, inspired by visits to two such families in Queens whose apartments were bare. “How can you build a new life if you don’t have any furniture?” Astor asked. “To move into a place and just sit there with a bag and not even have a teacup is terrible.”
In the Arabian Nights, Shahrazad tells of a merman who guides a fisherman around the ocean floor, where underwater societies shun clothing, commerce, and religious restrictions. “I have seen enough,” the fisherman says after eighty days, “for I am getting tired of eating fish.”
Thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist Mugai Nyodai, the world’s first Zen abbess, struggled to achieve enlightenment until, one night during her training, the bottom fell out of an old bamboo-bound pail she was using to carry water. The spill freed her. “No more water in the pail!” she wrote in a poem commemorating the experience. “No more moon in the water!”
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.”
As a young man, Giacomo Casanova spent his nights roaming through Venice, “thinking up the most scandalous practical jokes and putting them into execution,” he later wrote in his memoirs. “When we could get into bell towers, we thought it great sport to alarm the whole neighborhood by ringing the tocsin that announces a fire, or to cut all the bell ropes…The whole city was complaining of our nocturnal malefactions, and we laughed at the investigations that were made to discover the disturbers of the public peace.”
Before Michelangelo’s David was placed in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1504, Leonardo argued the nude sculpture needed “a decent ornament” and sketched it with underpants inked on. David was later fitted with a prim brass girdle sustaining twenty-eight copper leaves. It remained for at least forty years.
Not long before his death in 961, Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III testified that over his fifty years of reign, during which “riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call,” he had “diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness.” Al-Rahman had counted only fourteen. “O man,” he lamented, “place not thy confidence in this present world!”
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.”
After receiving a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, Aldous Huxley wrote to George Orwell, “I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals—the ultimate revolution?” By this he meant “the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology.” Thirty-two years earlier, Huxley had taught French to Orwell at Eton College.
At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce asked T.H. Huxley, who came to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” if it was on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side that he was descended from a monkey. To which Huxley reportedly replied, “I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin; but I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and eloquence to the service of prejudice and of falsehood.”
From 1929 to 1965, Sherman Billingsley ran the Stork Club, called by columnist Walter Winchell “New York’s New Yorkiest place.” Among its patrons were Orson Welles, Grace Kelly, Tallulah Bankhead, and Frank Sinatra. When photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life in 1944, Billingsley shared the hand signals he used to communicate with his waiters: hand on tie (no bill for the table); hand touching nose (unimportant people, do not cash their checks); hands interlocked, thumb raised (get them out and don’t let them back in); and pulling ear (summon me to a phone call).
Among those who stayed at the Florida Hotel while reporting on the Spanish Civil War were John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Herbst, Robert Capa, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn noted a day when an “influx of shits” came for lunch, one of whom was “a nice handsome dumb named Errol Flynn who looks like white fire on screen but is only very, very average off.”