Rewards

Sydney Smith said that Henry Luttrell’s idea of heaven was eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

“My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral.” — Henry Adams

“Perhaps in the next eggzi stens you and I and My lady may be able to sit for placid hours under a lotus tree a eating of ice creams and pelican pie with our feet in a hazure coloured stream and with the birds and beasts of Paradise a sporting around us.” — Edward Lear, letter to Chichester Fortescue, Aug. 16, 1869

“He [Boni de Castellane] once stated that his idea of heaven on earth was to live in a palace whose furnishings and decor would be in a continual state of change and replacement, while outside in formal gardens would be rare fountains and ancient statues, also being constantly moved about.” — Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962

“Many years before, it is true, on a visit to the poet laureate, Alfred Austin, as they sat with others on the lawn in the afternoon, it was suggested that each person should tell his idea of heaven: ‘Austin’s idea was to sit … in a garden, and while he sat to receive constant telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land’; ‘mine’, said Blunt, ‘was to be laid out to sleep in a garden, with running water near, and so to sleep for a hundred thousand years, then to be woke by a bird singing, and to call out to the person one loved best, “Are you there?” and for her to answer, “Yes, are you?” and so turn round and go to sleep again for another hundred thousand years’.” — Edith Finch, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1938

See Writers’ Fancies.

| Quotations

In Other Words

Raymond Queneau’s 1947 book Exercises in Style tells the same story in 99 different ways, from telegram to ode:

Narrative:

“One day at about midday in the Parc Monceau district, on the back platform of a more or less full S bus (now No. 84), I observed a person with a very long neck who was wearing a felt hat which had a plaited cord round it instead of a ribbon. …”

Apostrophe:

“O platinum-nibbed stylograph, let thy smooth and rapid course trace on this single-side calendared paper those alphabetic glyphs which shall transmit to men of sparkling spectacles the narcissistic tale of a double encounter of omnibusilistic cause. …”

Sonnet:

“Glabrous was his dial and plaited was his bonnet,
And he, a puny colt — (how sad the neck he bore,
And long) — was now intent on his quotidian chore —
The bus arriving full, of somehow getting on it. …”

In response, Colin Crumplin’s 1977 book Hommage à Queneau features 100 different drawings of a cup, and Philip Ording’s 99 Variations on a Proof proves the same mathematical result in 99 different ways.

| Language

Recent Developments

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Universe_blocks_timeline_visualisation.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

From Wikimedia user Cmglee: If the history of the universe were recounted backward in a 138-page book, with 100 lines on each page and 100 letters in each line, written human history would occupy half a letter. Everything involving humans would lie on the first line; the dinosaurs would die out on the first page; and by page 10 the most complex lifeforms would be green algae.

For comparison, if the universe had begun in 4004 B.C., at this scale its history would occupy six-tenths of a letter.

| History

Zoology

Reponse of a 10-year-old child invited to write an essay about a bird and a beast:

The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.

I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides — right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.

— Ernest Gowers and Sir Bruce Fraser, The Complete Plain Words, 1973

| Humor · Science & Math

A Number Maze

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maze_Type_Number.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

By Wikimedia user Efbrazil. Begin at the star. The number at your current position tells you the number of blocks that your next jump must span. All jumps must be orthogonal. So, for example, your first jump must take you to the 1 in the lower left corner or the 2 in the upper right. What sequence of jumps will return you to the star?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Vista Paradox

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Effetto_Cannocchiale.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In Bologna, the former convent of San Michele in Bosco contains a 162-meter hallway that’s “aimed” at the Asinelli tower 1,407 meters from the window. This produces an odd effect: As you move north along the hallway toward the window, you’re approaching the tower, yet it seems to shrink. This is because the retinal size of the window’s aperture increases enormously as you approach it, while the retinal size of the distant tower remains relatively unchanged.

Similarly, as you back away from the window the tower seems to grow and draw closer, because the “shrinking” window shuts out the panorama, leaving only the tower in view. The illusion was first reported on a 1714 map by Paolo Battista Baldi of the University of Bologna.

The city contains a second “vista paradox” in the hermitage of Ronzano, where another long hallway is oriented toward the Sanctuary of San Luca 1,970 meters away. The Sanctuary seems to shrink as one approaches the frame and to grow as one retreats.

| Oddities

Memoranda

Excerpts from the literary notebooks of Thomas Hardy:

  • “Loughborough used to say, ‘Do what you think right, & never think of what you are going to say to excuse it beforehand.’ — a good maxim.”
  • “Bonaparte had not the patience requisite for defensive operations, said Wellington.”
  • “Miracles, scriptural & ecclesiastical — how make a difference?”
  • “Brahms – The individual character of his ideas. … With him beauty seems to hold a place subordinate to expression.” [Grove Dictionary of Music]
  • “‘Be it so; then minimize pain.’ Words of Jeremy Bentham when his physician told him he was about to die.” [F.R.E. Dowden]
  • “Epicurean philosophy – always in vogue in declining & sickly states.” [Life of Virgil]
  • “Indirect road to honour. Virgil’s introduction to Octavius was because of his reputation as a horse doctor.”
  • “Caesar, & Brutus, tampered with the muses. Poems curiously bound, & lodged in the most famous libraries; but neither the sacredness of those places, nor the greatness of their names, cd. preserve ill poetry.”
  • “You will find, perhaps to your surprise, that nine-tenths of all human suffering endured by men is useless.” [Tolstoy]
  • “Swift says some men know books as others do lords: learn their titles & then boast of their acquaintance with them.”
  • “Like all persons who have looked a great deal at human life, Balzac had been greatly struck by most people’s selfishness.” [Henry James]
  • “A fair test of the value of an institution is this — Supposing it did not exist, should we set about to establish it?” [Montague Cookson]
  • “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies & to end as superstitions.” [Thomas Huxley]
  • “The scientific spirit is of more value than its products; & irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors” [Huxley]
  • “The artist may be known rather by what he omits.” [Schiller]
  • “Nothing is so great as it seems beforehand.” [George Eliot]

“‘He who has to act on his own responsibility is a slave if he does not act on his own judgment.’ Saying of Sir H. Edwardes — highly valued by Livingstone.”

| Literature