Chronicle

I take delight in history, even its most prosaic details, because they become poetical as they recede into the past. The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are to-day, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like a ghost at cock-crow. This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical, and the knowledge of it has never ceased to entrance me, and to throw a halo of poetry round the dustiest record that Dryasdust can bring to light.

— G.M. Trevelyan, Autobiography and Other Essays, 1949

| History

Chesterton’s Fence

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’

— G.K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, 1929

| Literature · Society

Field Notes

Two perceptive entries from the journals of English naturalist Gilbert White:

“December 4, 1770 – Most owls seem to hoot exactly in B flat according to several pitch-pipes used in tuning of harpsichords, & sold as strictly at concert pitch.”

“February 8, 1782 – Venus shadows very strongly, showing the bars of the windows on the floors & walls.”

Between these he makes what may be the earliest written use of the word golly, in 1775.

| Language · Science & Math

Artificial Night

https://books.google.com/books?id=Wx4uAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA56

It is true we do not often see the stars in broad daylight, but they are there nevertheless. The blaze of sunlight makes them invisible. A good telescope will always show the stars, and even without a telescope they can sometimes be seen in daylight in rather an odd way. If you can obtain a glimpse of the blue sky on a fine day from the bottom of a coal pit, stars are often visible. The top of the shaft is, however, generally obstructed by the machinery for hoisting up the coal, but the stars may be seen occasionally through the tall chimney attached to a chimney manufactory when an opportune disuse of the chimney permits of the observation being made. The fact is that the long tube has the effect of completely screening from the eye the direct light of the sun. The eye thus becomes more sensitive, and the feeble light from the stars can make their impression and produce vision.

— Robert Stawell Ball, Star-Land, 1890

01/17/2025 UPDATE: This is false. Reader Catalin Voinescu writes, “The stars aren’t obscured by the glare of the sun in the vicinity of the observer. That is easy to shield from. Starlight is overwhelmed by sunlight scattered by the bulk of the atmosphere — by the sky, in other words. While shorter wavelengths scatter more (which is why the sky appears blue), filtering out the blue is still not enough to make the stars visible during the day: red still scatters plenty. Only in wavelengths much longer than visible light is the scattering low enough to observe the stars: radio astronomers can make observations during the day, as long as they don’t point their dishes too close to the sun.” (Thanks, Catalin.)

| Science & Math

Noted

At age 18, James Joyce wrote a play, A Brilliant Career. He began it with an inscription:

To
My own Soul I
dedicate the first
true work of my
life.

It’s the only one of his writings that bears a dedication.

| Literature

The Gentleman Highwayman

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_strange_story_book_-_illustration_at_page_093.png

In “Short Notes of My Life,” Horace Walpole records an alarming experience:

One night in the beginning of November, 1749, as I was returning from Holland House by moonlight, about ten at night, I was attacked by two highwaymen in Hyde Park, and the pistol of one of them going off accidentally, razed the skin under my eye, left some marks of shot on my face, and stunned me. The ball went through the top of the chariot, and if I had sat an inch nearer to the left side, must have gone through my head.

After an account of the robbery appeared in the London Evening Post, he received a letter:

Sir: seeing an advertisement in the papers of to Day giveing an account of your being Rob’d by two Highway men on wedensday night last in Hyde Parke and during the time a Pistol being fired whether Intended or Accidentally was Doubtfull Oblidges Us to take this Method of assureing you that it was the latter and by no means Design’d Either to hurt or frighten you for tho’ we are Reduced by the misfortunes of the world and obliged to have Recourse to this method getting money Yet we have Humanity Enough not to take any body’s life where there is Not a Nessecety for it.

The highwayman returned Walpole’s belongings in exchange for the reward that had been offered. He turned out to be James MacLaine, second son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, who had turned to crime after his wife’s death. Over the course of six months, he and his accomplices committed 20 highway robberies, wearing Venetian masks and treating their victims with courtesy. When MacLaine was captured the following year, Walpole refused to appear against him, and when he was condemned Walpole noted that 3,000 people went to see him in his cell at Newgate.

| Crime

Range

Index entries in John Carey’s The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination, 1973:

babies, bottled, 82
begging-letters, 67
beheading, 21
caged birds, 44, 46, 116-19
cannibalism, 22-4, 175
cleanliness, excessive, 36-7
climbing boys, 72
coffins, walking, 80-1
combustible persons, 14, 165
dolls’ houses, 34
dust heaps, 109-11
fire, seeing pictures in, 16
furniture, live, 102-3
grindstones, 129
home-smashing, 17
junk, enchantment of, 49-50
land-ships, 43-6, 49-9
legs, humour of, 61-2, 92-3
mirrored episodes, 125-6
old clothes, 89-91
pokers, red-hot, 26, 85
‘ruffian class,’ the, 38-9
scissored women, 163-4
seedsman’s shops, 45-6, 48
silent laughter, 98-100, 165
snuff, composed of dead bodies, 80
talking birds, 100-1
umbrellas, 128-9
virtuous violence, 28-9
waxworks, 82, 84
wooden legs, 91-3, 103
zoo, feeding time at, 68-9

“It does not matter that Dickens’s world is not lifelike,” wrote Lord David Cecil. “It is alive.”

| Literature

Gun Control

Marksman A hits a certain small target 75 percent of the time. Marksman B hits it 25 percent of the time. The two of them aim at that target and fire simultaneously. One bullet hits it. What’s the probability that it came from A?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Call of the Wild

I heard the story — but I cannot verify it — that Marshall Lyautey (1854-1934) owned a parrot which incorporated these words in its vocabulary: What a beautiful evening! What a beautiful evening! and often repeated them in earnest.

Now one day the renowned soldier, on returning home, was greeted by the same interjection which seemed so in keeping with the fine evening. But what was his astonishment when he found himself before the spectacle presented by his bird. The parrot, which had spent the evening alone with a monkey, had been entirely defeathered by his everyday household companion. ‘What a beautiful evening! What a beautiful evening!’, in that context, took on a droll and ironic meaning.

— Elian Finbert, Les Perroquets Vous Parlent, 1975, quoted in George Gardner Herrick, Winter Rules, 1997

| Humor