Anton Reicha’s piano fugue number 18 has an uninspired subject — it’s just the same note repeated 34 times:
Or maybe that is inspired?
Simple Enough
Puzzling Lines
In his 1943 book The Life of Johnny Reb, Emory University historian Bell Wiley collects misspellings found in the letters of Confederate soldiers. Can you decipher these words?
- agetent
- bregad
- cerce
- crawsed
- furteege
- orpital
- perperce
- porchun
- regislatury
- ridgement
Bonus: What does A brim ham lillkern mean?
Togetherness
Louisa May Alcott’s father suffered a stroke in 1888, and she arrived at his bedside on March 2, just two days before he died.
She said, “Father, here is your Louy, what are you thinking as you lie here so happily?”
He said, “I am going up. Come with me.”
She said, “Oh, I wish I could.”
She did: She died four days later, on March 6.
The Moralist
More maxims of La Rochefoucauld:
- “We should often be ashamed of our best Actions, if the world saw all their Motives.”
- “If we had no Faults ourselves, we should not take such Pleasure in observing those of others.”
- “The Reason we are so angry with such as trick us is, because they think they have more Wit than we.”
- “There are Heroes in Ill, as well as in Good.”
- “There are People who are disagreeable with great Merit; and others who with great Faults are agreeable.”
- “We easily forget Crimes that are known to none but ourselves.”
- “To judge of Love by most of its Effects, one would think it more like Hatred than Kindness.”
- “Our Merit procures us the Esteem of Men of Sense, and our Fortune that of the Public.”
- “Narrowness of Mind is the Cause of Obstinacy; and we don’t easily believe beyond what we see.”
- “Quarrels would not last long if the Fault was but on one Side.”
- “We are not able to act up to our Reason.”
- “Men are oftener treacherous through Weakness than Design.”
- “Our Self-love bears with less Patience the Condemnation of our Tastes, than of our Opinions.”
- “We are almost always tired with the Company of those whom we ought not to be tired of.”
- “The Mind, thro’ Laziness and Constancy, fixes on what is easy or agreeable to it. This Habit bounds our Knowledge; and no Man has ever given himself the trouble to extend and carry his Genius as far as it was capable of going.”
And “Few People are well-acquainted with Death. ‘Tis generally submitted to thro’ Stupidity and Custom, not Resolution; and most Men die merely because they can’t help it.”
Plain Value
Higgledy-piggledy
Euclid Geometer
Pained by the asking of
“What is the use
Studying the doctrines so
Axiomatical?”
Answered acutely, “Oh,
Don’t be obtuse!”
— Anthony Harrington
Last Words
A letter from Arthur Conan Doyle to Light, April 5, 1930:
SIR, — It might interest your readers to know that some weeks ago I had a communication which professed to come from Thomas Hardy. It came through an amateur Medium from whom I had only once before had a message, which was most veridical. Therefore, I was inclined to take Hardy’s message seriously, the more so as intrinsically it was worthy of him. I should place it on the same level of internal evidence as the Oscar Wilde and the Jack London scripts. Hardy gave a posthumous review of his own work, some aspects of which he now desired to revise and modify. The level of his criticism was a very high and just one. He then, as a sign of identity, sent a poem, which seems to me to be a remarkable one. It describes evening in a Dorsetshire village. Without quoting it all I will give here the second verse which runs thus:
Full well we know the shadow o’er the green,
When Westering sun reclines behind the trees,
The little hours of evening, when the scene
Is faintly fashioned, fading by degrees.The third and fourth lines are in my opinion exquisite. I do not know if they were memories of something written in life. I should be glad to know if anyone recognises them.
Arthur Conan Doyle
In a Word
periculant
adj. endangered, exposed to peril
Thirsty Work
As the series developed, readers came to expect an ever more extensive drinks menu. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, for example, the eleventh book, Bond downs no less than forty-six drinks, the widest variety in any single book. According to one Bondologist, these include: unspecified quantities of Pouilly-Fuissé white wine, Taittinger champagne, Mouton Rothschild ’53 claret, calvados, Krug champagne, three bourbons with water, four vodka and tonics, two double brandy and ginger ales, two whisky and sodas, three double vodka martinis, two double bourbons on the rocks, at least one glass of neat whisky, a flask of Enzian schnapps, Marsala wine, the better part of a bottle of fiery Algerian wine (served by M), two more Scotch whiskies, half a pint of I.W. Harper bourbon, a Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whisky with water, on the rocks, a bottle of Riquewihr wine, four steins of Franziskaner beer, and a double Steinhäger gin. The same indefatigable researcher has found that although vodka martini has now become Bond’s signature drink, he only drinks nineteen of them in the books, compared to thirty-seven bourbons, twenty-one Scotches and a remarkable thirty-five sakes (entirely the result of his massive consumption of that particular drink in You Only Live Twice).
— Ben MacIntyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, 2008
“An Aeronaut to His Love”
In Patterns of Poetry (1986), Miller Williams writes, “Fourteen words have rarely done such duty as in the following sonnet, which differs from the traditional form only in not having ten syllables per line and in the combining of the Italian octave and the Shakespearean sestet”:
I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?
Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow.
— Witter Brynner
A Chess Maze
By O. Wurzburg, 1919. If Black does not move at all, in how few moves can the white king reach f4? White can move only his king; as in regular play, it can capture enemy pieces but cannot enter check.