One stormy morning in 1880, naturalist John Muir set out to explore a glacier in Alaska’s Taylor Bay, accompanied by an adventurous little dog that had joined his expedition. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the harrowing predicament that the two faced on the ice, which became the basis of one of Muir’s most beloved stories.
We’ll also marvel at some phonetic actors and puzzle over a season for vasectomies.
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” — Mark Twain
In 1884 Robert Louis Stevenson began to give writing lessons to his 26-year-old neighbor Adelaide Boodle. One of his first assignments was to describe a place. When he read her attempt, he said, “Oh, but this work is disgracefully bad! It could hardly be worse. What induced you to bring me stuff like this?” When she asked him what was wrong with it, he said:
‘As a first step in the right direction we will do a sum together. Count the adjectives in that exercise.’
I did so.
‘Now then, see how many times that will go into the number of words allowed for the whole description.’
The result proved that my modest percentage of adjectives was 17 1/2.
‘And mostly weak ones at that!’ remarked the Master with a queer little grimace at the culprit.
‘But how ought it to have been done?’
The voice that made this appeal for light and leading was no longer in the least lachrymose: it was now, I flattered myself, that of a vigorous and determined student.
‘You should have used fewer adjectives and many more descriptive verbs,’ came the swift reply. ‘If you want me to see your garden, don’t, for pity’s sake, talk about “climbing roses” or “green, mossy lawns”. Tell me, if you like, that roses twined themselves round the apple trees and fell in showers from the branches. Never dare to tell me again anything about “green grass”. Tell me how the lawn was flecked with shadows. I know perfectly well that grass is green. So does everybody else in England. What you have to learn is something different from that. Make me see what it was that made your garden distinct from a thousand others. And, by the way, while we are about it, remember once for all that green is a word I flatly forbid you to utter in a description more than, perhaps, once in a lifetime.’
She judged that the lesson was “well worth suffering for,” and the two became good friends. “After all, R.L.S. ‘was going to teach me to write’. What on earth did anything else matter?”
(From Boodle’s R.L.S. and His Sine Qua Non, 1926.)
In 1922 J.M. Barrie wrote to A.E. Housman:
Dear Professor Houseman,
I am sorry about last night, when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man.
Sincerely yours, J.M. Barrie
Housman wrote back:
Dear Sir James Barrie,
I am sorry about last night, when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man.
Sincerely yours, A.E. Housman
He added, “P.S. And now you’ve made it worse for you have spelt my name wrong.”
In 1941, the BBC established an Eastern Services Committee to discuss programming in India. The meetings were held in Room 101 at 55 Portland Place in London. George Orwell attended at least 12 meetings there and was asked to convene a subcommittee to consider organizing drama and poetry competitions.
Orwell scholar Peter Davison writes, “In Nineteen Eighty-Four O’Brien tells Orwell that the thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. The understandable impression is that this is something like drowning, death by fire, or impalement, but Orwell is more subtle: for many, and for him, the worst thing in the world is that which is the bureaucrat’s life-blood: attendance at meetings.”
In 2003, when the original building was scheduled to be demolished, artist Rachel Whiteread made a plaster cast of the room’s interior (above). It was displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum later that year.
(From George Orwell: A Life in Letters, 2013.)
Gustave Flaubert posed this teasing problem to his sister Caroline in an 1841 letter:
Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?
He didn’t give an answer. Elsewhere he wrote, “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness — though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”
In Germany, where modern forestry began, a curious new sort of literature arose in the 18th century:
Some enthusiast thought to go one better than the botanical volumes that merely illustrated the taxonomy of trees. Instead the books themselves were to be fabricated from their subject matter, so that the volume on Fagus, for example, the common European beech, would be bound in the bark of that tree. Its interior would contain samples of beech nuts and seeds; and its pages would literally be its leaves, the folios its feuilles.
That’s from Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, 1995. These xylotheques, or wood repositories, grew up throughout the developed world — the largest, now held by the U.S. Forest Service, houses 60,000 samples. “But the wooden books were not pure caprice, a nice pun on the meaning of cultivation,” Schama writes. “By paying homage to the vegetable matter from which it, and all literature, was constituted, the wooden library made a dazzling statement about the necessary union of culture and nature.”
For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly, he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis. He must trick him into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds. And that is where there was a certain slight novelty in my stories when first they appeared. Hitherto, except in exploration fantasies, the fantastic element was brought in by magic. Frankenstein even, used some jiggery-pokery magic to animate his artificial monster. There was trouble about the thing’s soul. But by the end of last century it had become difficult to squeeze even a momentary belief out of magic any longer. It occurred to me that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted. That was no great discovery. I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible.
— H.G. Wells, June 1934 (from the H.G. Wells Scrapbook)
A facsimile of a letter from Lewis Carroll to Miss Edith Ball, Nov. 6, 1893:
My dear Edith,
I was very much pleased to get your nice little letter: and I hope you won’t mind letting Maud have the Nursery Alice, now that you have got the real one. Some day I will send you the other book about Alice, called Through the Looking-Glass, but you had better not have it just yet, for fear you should get them mixed in your mind. Which would you like best, do you think, a horse that draws you in a cab, or a lady that draws your picture, or a dentist, that draws your teeth, or a Mother, that draws you into her arms, to give you a kiss? And what order would you put the others in? Do you find Looking Glass writing easy to read? I remain
Your loving,
Lewis Carroll.
(From Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, 1898.)
For four months in 1840 Edgar Allan Poe conducted a puzzle column for the Philadelphia newspaper Alexander’s Daily Messenger. In that time he defied his readers to send him a cryptogram that he could not solve, and at the end of his tenure he declared himself undefeated. One of the later challenges came from 17-year-old Schuyler Colfax of New Carlisle, Iowa, who would grow up to become vice president of the United States:
Dear Sir — As you have in your Weekly Messenger defied the world to puzzle you by substituting arbitrary signs, figures, etc. for the different letters of the alphabet, I have resolved to try my utmost to corner you and your system together, and have manufactured the two odd looking subjects which accompany this as avant couriers. … If you succeed in solving the accompanying, I will, of course, as you request, acknowledge it publicly to my friends.
Poe responded: “We have only time, this week, to look at the first and longest cypher — the unriddling of which, however, will no doubt fully satisfy Mr. Colfax that we have not been playing possum with our readers.” Here’s Colfax’s cryptogram:
8n()58†d w!0 b† !x6n†z k65 !nz k65,8l†n b)x 8nd)Pxd !zw8x 6k n6 36w-†nd!x86n;
x=†0 z†,5!z† x=† w8nz 8n 8xd 62n †dx††w !nz k653† 8x x6 5†36l†5 8xd P†l†P b0 5†l†n,†.
()n8)d
What’s the solution?
