“I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.” — Montesquieu
“It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.” — Aeschylus
“All wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common ignorance.” — Montaigne
When Ernest Shackleton set out for Antarctica in 1914, his carpenter, Harry “Chippy” McNish, brought along a tabby who was quickly named “Mrs. Chippy,” though he proved to be a male. When the Endurance was crushed by pack ice, Shackleton ordered the “weakling” cat to be shot, a decision for which McNish never forgave him. Cat and carpenter were reunited in 2004, when a life-size bronze statue of Mrs. Chippy was added to McNish’s grave in Wellington.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s 1913 arctic expedition ended in disaster when the main vessel sank, but ship’s kitten Nigeraurak (“little black one”) was lugged safely home in a sack, “the only member of the expedition to survive the whole affair sleek and unscathed.”
And Matthew Flinders’ cat Trim accompanied him on several adventures, including the circumnavigation of Australia, a shipwreck in 1803, and imprisonment in Mauritius during the return to England. Today Sydney’s Mitchell Library bears a statue of the cat (below), with a plaque quoting Flinders’ own words:
TO THE MEMORY OF
TRIM
The best and most illustrious of his race
The most affectionate of friends,
faithful of servants,
and best of creatures
He made the tour of the globe, and a voyage to Australia,
which he circumnavigated, and was ever the
delight and pleasure of his fellow voyagers.
On June 1, 1873, during a visit to New College, Oxford, South Carolina planter William Heyward Trapier asked for a mint julep, “to the utter bewilderment of the butler,” according to the Oxford Companion to the Year.
When his hosts confessed their ignorance of the American drink, Trapier gave them his family recipe, a silver pot in which to share it, and instructions to prepare it every year on the anniversary of his visit. Thereafter it became a college tradition to substitute juleps for the after-dinner port on June 1 each year, and to leave a place empty for Trapier.
This continued for a century, but apparently the tradition died out during World War II. But there’s good news — Oxford’s student newspaper now says that the college has approved a Mint Julep Quartermaster to start it up again.
Here’s the recipe that Trapier gave to the college, according to the Oxford Times:
Ben Franklin’s “necessary hints to those that would be rich,” written around 1730:
In the 19th century, feeling expansive, the Welsh village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll extended its name to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, meaning “The Church of Mary of White Hazel Pool quite near the rapid whirlpool, the church of Tysilio under a red cave.”
In the same spirit, the gift shop in Llangollen bears the name Ysiopfachgardiauwrthybontdrosyrafonddyfrdwyynllangollen. It means “The little card shop by the bridge over the river Dee in Llangollen.”
Oxfordshire’s annual stag hunt took a strange turn in 1819:
Dec. 21, being St. Thomas’s Day, as usual, a stag was turned out from Blenheim Park, the property of his Grace, the Duke of Marlborough. It directed its course towards Wickham; from thence it took the high road and proceeded to Oxford; and then formed one of the most beautiful and picturesque sights that can be imagined. The stag, and dogs in close pursuit, followed by a great number of well-known and experienced sportsmen, proceeded up the High-street, as far as Brazenose College; when, to the no small astonishment of hundreds of spectators, the stag took refuge in the chapel, during divine service; where it was killed, sans ceremonie, by the eager dogs.
From The Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1820.
Psycho is certainly suspenseful on the first viewing. But why does it remain so on the second?
“How can there be suspense if we already know how things will turn out?” asks University of Michigan philosopher Kendall Walton. “Why, for example, should Tom and Becky’s plight concern or even interest a reader who knows, from reading the novel previously, that eventually they will escape from the cave? One might have supposed that, once we have experienced a work often enough to learn thoroughly the relevant features of the plot, it would lose its capacity to create suspense, and that future readings or viewings of it would lack the excitement of the first one. But this frequently is not what happens.”
The paradox extends to music. Why does a crescendo continue to “work” on repeated listenings? Why does it still move us?
(Kendall Walton, “Fearing Fictions,” The Journal of Philosophy 75:1 [January 1978], 26)
Maybe figures can’t lie, but liars can certainly figure, and that is why statistics can be made to ‘prove’ almost anything. Consider a group of ten girls, nine of them virgins, one pregnant. On the ‘average’ each of the nine virgins is ten per cent pregnant, while the girl who is about to have a baby is ninety per cent a virgin. Or, assuming that a fox terrier two feet long, with a tail an inch and a half high, can dig a hole three feet deep in ten minutes, to dig the Panama Canal in a single year would require only one fox terrier fifteen miles long, with a tail a mile and a half high.
— Stuart Cloete, The Third Way, 1947
James Joyce took extraordinary pains in composing Ulysses. By his estimate the book cost him 20,000 hours of labor over eight years, and he told a friend that the resulting research “filled a small valise.” On Nov. 2, 1921, just weeks before the novel went to press, he wrote to his aunt, Josephine Murray:
Is it possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of no 7 Eccles street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 of the ground and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build. I require this information in detail in order to determine the wording of a paragraph.
Sure enough, this passage appears in “Ithaca,” the book’s 17th episode, when Leopold Bloom realizes he has forgotten his key:
A stratagem. Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches of the area pavement, and allowed his body to move freely in space by separating himself from the railings and crouching in preparation for the impact of the fall.
But time was always pressing. On Oct. 12 he begged Josephine for her recollections of some Dublin acquaintances: “Get an ordinary sheet of foolscap and a pencil,” he wrote, “and scribble any God damn drivel you may remember about these people.”
