Inventory

A striking passage from Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s 1959 biography of Ivan Turgenev:

By the end of May [1840] the traveler was back in Berlin. Before he reached the capital he touched at Leghorn, Pisa, Genoa, sailed on Lago Maggiore, traveled to St. Gotthard in a sleigh, visited Lucerne, Basel, Mannheim, Mainz, Frankfort and Leipzig, all within thirteen days. In the same period he managed to lose an umbrella, a cloak, a box, a walking stick, an opera glass, a hat, a pillow, a pen knife, a purse, three towels, two neckerchiefs, two shirts, and, for a short time, his heart.

He had entered a brief affair with Mikhail Bakunin’s sister Tatyana, but passed just as quickly out of it. “I never loved any woman more than you,” he wrote her, “though I don’t love even you with a complete and steadfast love.”

| Literature

Misc

  • Samuel Johnson said that sending a timid boy to a public school is “forcing an owl upon day.”
  • Inscribed over the door of the library at Murcia, Spain: “Here the dead open the eyes of the living.”
  • TRICE in Pig Latin is ICE TRAY.
  • 35 × 1482 × 9760 = 3514829760 (Jean-Marc Falcoz)
  • “Mauve is pink trying to be purple.” — Whistler

Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik Lake is a lake in Manitoba. Its name is Cree for “where the wild trout are caught by fishing with hooks.”

Muckanaghederdauhaulia, a townland in County Galway, means “pig-marsh between two sea inlets.”

Saaranpaskantamasaari, an island in northeastern Finland, means “an island shat by Saara.”

Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya is a hill in South Australia. Its name means “where the devil urinates.”

(Thanks, Colin.)

| Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math

Error Count

Edmund Clerihew Bentley invented the clerihew, a distinctive biographical poem in four lines:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St Paul’s.”

For The Complete Clerihews of E. Clerihew Bentley, Bentley compiled an “Index of Psychology, Mentality and Other Things Frequently Noted in Connection With Genius,” so that his readers might explore particular personality traits in the people he wrote about. To the poem above he assigned the following entries:

Atrocity
Bankruptcy, moral
Conduct, disingenuous
Domestic servants, dishonesty among, encouragement of
Escutcheon, blot on, action involving
Fact, cynical perversion of
Guile
Hypocrisy, calculated
Integrity, low standard of
Jesuitry
Knavery
Lie, bouncing circulation of
Machiavelli, unholy precepts of, tendency to act upon
Noblesse Oblige, disregard of apophthegm
Openness, want of
Principle, lack of
Quickening, spiritual, need of
Restoration, lax morality of, readiness to fall in with
Satanism, revolting display of
Turpitude
Untruth, plausible, ability to frame
Veracity, departure from
World, the next, neglect of prospects in
Y.M.C.A., unfitness for
Zion, outcast from

A few more sample poems.

| Literature · Poems

Advance Billing

When the philosopher Antisthenes was being initiated into the mysteries of Orpheus, and the priest told him that those who vowed themselves to that religion were to receive after death eternal and perfect blessings, he said to him: ‘Why, then, do you not die yourself?’

— Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, 1576

| Death · Literature · Religion

Worldly Wise

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Proverbs from around the world:

  • Don’t buy someone else’s problems. (Chinese)
  • Strange smoke irritates the eyes. (Lithuanian)
  • The poor lack much, but the greedy more. (Swiss)
  • It is the mind that wins or loses. (Nepalese)
  • The point of the needle must pass first. (Ethiopian)
  • God did not create hurry. (Finnish)
  • When you go, the road is rough; when you return, smooth. (Thai)
  • If you want to marry wisely, marry your equal. (Spanish)
  • Where is there a tree not shaken by the wind? (Armenian)
  • Wherever you go, you can’t get rid of yourself. (Polish)
  • Money swore an oath that nobody that did not love it should ever have it. (Irish)
  • Character is habit long continued. (Greek)
  • Where you were born is less important than how you live. (Turkish)
  • It is better to prevent than to cure. (Peruvian)
  • Don’t do all you can, spend all you have, believe all you hear, or tell all you know. (English)
  • Better is better. (German)

(From Reynold Feldman and Cynthia Voelke, A World Treasury of Folk Wisdom, 1992.)

| Literature · Society

Early Adopter

At the start of H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, the Time Traveller explains to his friends that “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and — Duration.” This idea, of conceiving time as a fourth dimension, had been broached in the 18th century, but it had first been treated seriously in a mysterious letter to Nature in 1885:

“I [propose] to consider Time as a fourth dimension of our existence. … Since this fourth dimension cannot be introduced into space, as commonly understood, we require a new kind of space for its existence, which we may call time-space.”

The letter writer identified himself only as “S.” Was this Wells? Apparently not: In his 1934 Experiment in Autobiography Wells wrote, “In the universe in which my brain was living in 1879 there was no nonsense about time being space or anything of that sort. There were three dimensions, up and down, fore and aft and right and left, and I never heard of a fourth dimension until 1884 or there-about. Then I thought it was a witticism.”

So someone had anticipated Wells’ idea by a full decade. As far as I know, his identity has never been discovered.

(Via Paul J. Nahin, Holy Sci-Fi!, 2014.)

| Literature · Science & Math

Pseudonyms

Fictitious correspondents invented by T.S. Eliot in kick-starting a letters page in The Egoist in 1917:

The Rev. Charles James Grimble
Muriel A. Schwarz
Charles Augustus Conybeare
Helen B. Trundlett
J.A.D. Spence

Apparently this wasn’t unusual for Eliot, who wrote for The Tyro in 1921 as Gus Krutzsch. When I.A. Richards invited Krutzsch to meet him in Peking, Eliot replied, “I do not care to visit any country which has no native cheese.”

As a hedge against hard times, W.C. Fields used to open bank accounts under assumed names, including Sneed Hearn, Dr. Otis Guelpe, Figley E. Whitesides, and Professor Curtis T. Bascom.

“He had bank accounts, or at least safe-deposit boxes, in such cities as London, Paris, Sydney, Cape Town, and Suva,” said his friend Gene Fowler in 1949. “I do not know this for a fact, but I think that much of his fortune still rests in safe-deposit boxes about which, deliberately or not, he said nothing.”

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