Plato’s uncle Charmides boasted to wealthy aristocrat Callias that poverty granted freedom. “I lose nothing because I have nothing,” he said. Callias was unconvinced. “So, do you also pray never to be rich,” he asked, “and if you have a good dream, do you sacrifice to the averters of disaster?” “Not at all,” Charmides replied, “I accept the outcome like a daredevil.”
Archive
Miscellany
“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in a letter in the last year of his life.
Charlotte Brontë wrote to a friend about a woman who “must be a regular bore with her unfortunate homophobia,” advising, “Don’t look for that word in the dictionary.” This may indicate, notes a scholar, “fear or dislike of men,” from the Latin homo (man), not the Greek homo (same). The word is unclear in the manuscript; it could also be monophobia, fear of being alone.
One in four thousand people are said to suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, in which flashing computer screens can induce seizures. In 2008 the World Wide Web Consortium determined that online content should not flash more than three times in a one-second period. Federal government websites must design pages that avoid screen flickering within the range of 2 to 55 hertz.
John Florio’s 1603 translation of Michel de Montaigne’s essays contains an early instance of the word emotion being used to refer to feelings distinct from reasoning. Unsure of the word’s merits, Florio included it on a list of “uncouth termes” he apologized to readers for introducing into English from the French.
About how statements get written up by the press, Andy Warhol wrote, “It would always be different from what I’d actually said—and a lot more fun for me to read. Like if I’d said, ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,’ it could come out ‘In fifteen minutes everyone will be famous.’ ” About the future, Andy Warhol also wrote, “I really do live for the future, because when I’m eating a box of candy, I can’t wait to taste the last piece. I don’t even taste any of the other pieces.”
“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.
“Were it possible that the sea could be drained of its waters and emptied by some extraordinary accident, what incredible numbers, what infinite variety of uncommon and amazing sea monsters would exhibit themselves to our view, which are now entirely unknown!” wrote Reverend Erich Pontoppidan in his Natural History of Norway, published in 1753. Ninety-five percent of the ocean remains unseen by humankind, and it is believed that up to sixty-five percent of its plant and animal life has not yet been undiscovered.
A section on law and justice in the Arthashastra, an ancient Indian manual of statecraft, describes an apparently coveted capital punishment. “Being gored to death by an elephant is as meritorious as having the sacred bath at the end of the ashvamedha horse sacrifice,” it reads. Anyone seeking this sentence is required to provide gifts of rice, wine, and garlands as well as “a piece of cloth to clean the tusks.”
In August 2018 data scientist David Bamman examined how authors recently interviewed in the New York Times’ By the Book column answered the question “What’s on your nightstand?” Women mentioned male and female authors almost equally; men mentioned male authors more than 79 percent of the time. “Don’t read in bed,” advised Fran Lebowitz. “It’s too stimulating. Watch TV instead. It’s boring.”
According to a 2012 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, over 87 percent of global fish stocks are either “fully exploited” or “overexploited.”
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.
When the British Petroleum oil rig Deepwater Horizon was forced to shut down temporarily because of a gas surge, one engineer tried to persuade his colleagues that a liner was required to secure the pipe. The proposal, which would have cost about $7 million, was rejected by management. “This has been a nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,” the engineer wrote to a colleague. Six days later, on April 20, 2010, the rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and spilled more than four million barrels of oil before it was capped almost three months later.
At a Johns Hopkins campus hospital in 1920, behavioral psychologists conducted an experiment with a nine-month-old boy known as Little Albert, who was given a white rat to play with. The scientists then made loud noises behind Albert’s head while he played, conditioning in him a fear of other furry animals and objects, previously sources of joy. Albert’s mother, a wet nurse at a nearby hospital, was paid one dollar for her son’s participation.
The ancient physician Galen catalogued the anxious delusions of his melancholic patients, including those of a man who “believes he has been turned into a kind of snail” and “runs away from everyone he meets lest his shell get crushed,” and those of another who “is afraid that Atlas, who supports the world, will become tired and throw it away, and he and all of us will be crushed and pushed together.”