From W.H. Auden’s 1970 commonplace book A Certain World:
David Hartley offered a vest-pocket edition of his moral and religious philosophy in the formula W = F2/L, where W is the love of the world, F is the fear of God, and L is the love of God. It is necessary to add only this. Hartley said that as one grows older L increases and indeed becomes infinite. It follows then that W, the love of the world, decreases and approaches zero.
“To read History is to run the risk of asking, ‘Which is more honorable? To rule over people, or to be hanged?'” — J.G. Seume
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.)
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.”
I was in the chair at a most interesting meeting at the Wakefield Asylum last night. It was, too, a curious sensation, sleeping under the same roof as 1,500 lunatics. I was kept awake by thoughts of the kind of sleep that was going on about me. … I made some preliminary remarks on the wide and desolate borderland of cerebral disturbance that lies between sleep and mania.
— Richard Monckton Milnes, letter to Henry Bright, Nov. 26, 1873
George Herrick notes this oddity in his 1997 commonplace book: The record of this U.S. congressional hearing on dirigible disasters contains an inadvertent poem — the encoded weather report for April 3, 1933:
Washington numoil nihilist radnell deadly wabash.
Titusville sanno reflect unripe turfs.
Harrington bonfire gecko unfold.
George felger naked neggins.
Pas roofage gedby gafol.
Havana sorrow mabin caramel.
Father safable oak barfee rogue.
Wichita nineveh mulberry somnific cupsail.
Doucet nightfall naked gargarize birds.
Galveston sirup gullish sacred cupsail.
Sound narford naked ungear seemly.
Antonio surrogate fabella sausage cunette.
Davenport ridgy reflow feugar needs consort.
Birmingham simulate subjoin formosa faints.
Buffalo nightfire ribard gummut gently.
Evansville romulus seahog femme mends control.
Memphis similar suburb gammon medlar wired catsup.
Detroit negative rabate fengone miley currency.
Indianapolis regent seabate formal gently catsup.
Nashville samuda sabula ginmill mexico congregate.
Columbus rugate mallet farmable feline.
Herrick writes, “This particular code has literary flair and one wants the rich prose to read on.”
This rank impossibility by Kokichi Sugihara won second prize in the Neural Correlate Society’s 2016 illusion of the year contest.
The key is that the top of each cylinder is not a planar curve. Dickinson College mathematician David Richeson has created an interactive applet that you can use to examine the shape, and see his paper below for an explanation of the math and the template of a paper model.
(David Richeson, “Do the Math!: Sugihara’s Impossible Cylinder,” Math Horizons 24:1 [September 2016], 18-19.)
In Ambrosia and Small Beer (1964), Edward Marsh describes a way of passing time during a long sermon:
[Y]ou look out for words beginning with each letter of the alphabet in succession, and if you get as far as Z (for which you may count a Z in the middle of a word) you cast a Bible on the ground and leave the building. It is palpitating. On this occasion we were held up by B, which seemed as if it would never come; and as the sermon was short neither of us got beyond M.
In Strong Drink, Strong Language (1990), John Espey writes,
Like most ministers’ children, I imagine, I early perfected several techniques for surviving sermons — counting games, making knight’s moves through the congregation using bald heads, or brown-haired, or ladies’ hats for jumps; betting my right hand against my left on which side of the center aisle the next cough would come from; or what the division would be in the Lord’s Prayer between ‘debts’ and ‘trespasses.’ I had, after all, heard everything, and more than once, by the time I turned ten.
P.G. Wodehouse’s 1922 story “The Great Sermon Handicap” describes a variation on a horse race: “Steggles is making the book. Each parson is to be clocked by a reliable steward of the course, and the one that preaches the longest sermon wins.” In 1930 a group of Cambridge undergraduates carried this out in real life — the winner, for the record, was the Rev. H.C. Read, “riding” the parish church of St Andrew-the-Great.
Pensées of Mauritian aphorist Malcolm de Chazal:
And “Number is the alphabet of form, which is why children always want to touch whatever they count.”
Perhaps the most touching story is told by a Canadian, Flight-Commander R. Leckie, D.S.O., in a letter home, published in an American paper. After an engagement with hostile aircraft over the North Sea he came down, his seaplane riddled with shrapnel, over fifty miles from land, and then had to act as rescuer and host to the crew of an aeroplane, wrecked by engine failure. Six men were then adrift in a doomed machine, with no food and little water. The Commander had four pigeons; one was released at once, a second on the next day, a third on the third day. All failed to reach home, perishing over the waste of waters. The fourth, set free in a fog, hungry and thirsty, struggled over the fifty miles of sea without a landmark and without a rest. He could not reach his loft, but fluttered down in a coastguard station, and there fell dead from exhaustion. But his message was delivered, and six men were saved.
— Bird Notes and News, Winter 1918
