A Living Casualty

On Feb. 1, 1918, a French soldier appeared in the railway station in Lyon. He had lost his memory: He muttered that his name was Anthelme Mangin, but he didn’t know who he was or where he belonged. His uniform lacked unit tags, and his pockets held only a cigarette lighter. The authorities placed him in an asylum and published his photograph in newspapers, hoping that his family would recognize him.

This gave desperate hope to scores of families whose loved ones had disappeared. World War I had claimed the lives of 1.4 million Frenchmen, and 300,000 of their bodies were unidentified or never found. Three hundred families claimed Mangin as their own, and dozens of these were given personal interviews with him. But he responded to none of them.

In 1930 he was identified tentatively as Octave Monjoin, a French waiter in the London embassy of the Ottoman State who had returned to his homeland to fight and been taken prisoner on the western front in August 1914. Judicial officers dropped him off near Monjoin’s hometown and observed him from a distance. He went from the railway station to the village, sat in a café that Monjoin had once enjoyed, walked to the house of Monjoin’s father, whom he did not recognize, and said, “The church has changed.”

But others, who had different hopes for Mangin’s identity, refused to accept the validity of the test, and Mangin remained in official limbo until his death in a French mental institution in 1942 — in the midst of another wrenching war.

| History

Unquote

“I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it — between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.” — William Hazlitt

| Quotations

Pursuit of Truth

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deiker_Jagdbare_Tiere_1093204.jpg

Can animals reason without using language? Sextus Empiricus writes:

[Chrysippus] declares that the dog makes use of the fifth complex indemonstrable syllogism when, on arriving at a spot where three ways meet …, after smelling at the two roads by which the quarry did not pass, he rushes off at once by the third without stopping to smell. For, says the old writer, the dog implicitly reasons thus: ‘The animal went either by this road, or by that, or by the other: but it did not go by this or that, therefore he went the other way.’

So, perhaps. There’s a limit, though.

| Science & Math

Riddle

In the February 1926 issue of the National Puzzlers’ League publication Enigma, “Remardo” offered this mock-Latin verse:

Justa sibi dama ne
Luci dat eas qua re
Ibi dama id per se
Veret odo thesa me

What does it mean?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Turn, Turn, Turn

A Russian problem from the 1999 Mathematical Olympiad:

Each cell in an 8×8 grid contains an arrow that points up, down, left, or right. There’s an exit at the top edge of the top right square. You begin in the bottom left square. On each turn, you move one square in the direction of the arrow, and then the square you have departed turns 90° clockwise. If you’re not able to move because the edge of the board blocks your path, then you remain on the square and it turns 90° clockwise. Prove that eventually you’ll leave the maze.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Ghost House

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Architect Robert Venturi got a tricky assignment in 1976: The National Park Service wanted to commemorate Ben Franklin’s residence in Philadelphia, but Franklin’s house had been demolished in 1812 and no record of its appearance had survived.

“There were fire insurance descriptions and archaeological remains of the house, so you could tell the exact configuration of the walls, and there were letters about the house exchanged between Franklin and his wife while he was in London and the house was in construction,” Venturi said. “But, with so little visual information, the Park Service was pretty easily persuaded not to try to reproduce the house.”

He solved the problem with a “ghost house” outlining the dimensions of the original house with a steel armature. “The aim was to create a delightful open place in the center of the dense texture of the city,” he said. “So the courtyard became a pleasant neighborhood amenity for people who live there, as well as for tourists.”

| Art

Object Lessons

oldenburg good humor monument

In 1965, sculptor Claes Oldenburg proposed building a colossal Good Humor bar on Park Avenue in Manhattan. All the traffic would have to be routed through a bite in the bar’s corner.

He also proposed replacing the Statue of Liberty with a giant electric fan and the Washington Monument with a pair of scissors.

The fan, he said, would guarantee workers in lower Manhattan a “steady breeze.” “You can also think of the Fan as a sort of substitute image of America. The suggestion is probably there but I haven’t drawn a conclusion.”

| Art

The Bargain Bin

Unusual book titles collected by Russell Ash and Brian Lake for Bizarre Books (1998):

Jokes Cracked by Lord Aberdeen by Lord Aberdeen, 1929
The Romance of Proctology by Charles Elton Blanchard, 1938
Atomic Bombing: How to Protect Yourself by Watson Davis, 1950
God Drives a Flying Saucer by R.L. Dione, 1973
The Fangs of Suet Pudding by Adams Farr, 1944
The Benefit of Farting Explain’d by “Don Fart-inhando Puffindorst” (Jonathan Swift), 1727
Handbook for the Limbless by Geoffrey Howson, 1922
A Toddler’s Guide to the Rubber Industry by D. Lowe, 1947
Be Married and Like It by Bernarr Macfadden, 1937
Hand Grenade Throwing As a College Sport by Lewis Omer, 1918

In 1963 the Athens publisher Harmi Press published an edition of Oliver Twist by “Mark Twain.” They managed to credit it to Charles Dickens on the title page.

| Literature

Future History

“A Tryst,” a sadly prophetic poem by Celia Thaxter, from the Atlantic Monthly, August 1872:

From out the desolation of the North
An iceberg took its way,
From its detaining comrades breaking forth,
And travelling night and day.

At whose command? Who bade it sail the deep
With that resistless force?
Who made the dread appointment it must keep?
Who traced its awful course?

To the warm airs that stir in the sweet South
A good ship spread her sails;
Stately she passed beyond the harbor’s mouth,
Chased by the favoring gales.

And on her ample decks a happy crowd
Bade the fair land good by;
Clear shone the day, with not a single cloud
In all the peaceful sky.

Brave men, sweet women, little children bright,
For all these she made room,
And with her freight of beauty and delight
She went to meet her doom.

Storms buffeted the iceberg, spray was swept
Across its loftiest height;
Guided alike by storm and calm it kept
Its fatal path aright.

Then warmer waves gnawed at its crumbling base
As if in piteous plea,
The ardent sun sent slow tears down its face,
Soft flowing to the sea.

Dawn kissed it with her tender rose-tints, eve
Bathed it in violet;
The wistful color o’er it seemed to grieve
With a divine regret.

Whether day clad its clefts in rainbows dim
And shadowy as a dream,
Or night through lonely spaces saw it swim
White in the moonlight’s gleam,

Ever Death rode upon its solemn heights,
Ever his watch he kept;
Cold at its heart through changing days and nights
Its changeless purpose slept.

And where afar a smiling coast it passed
Straightway the air grew chill,
Dwellers thereon perceived a bitter blast,
A vague report of ill.

Like some imperial creature, moving slow
Meanwhile, with matchless grace,
The stately ship, unconscious of her foe,
Drew near the trysting-place.

For still the prosperous breezes followed her,
And half the voyage was o’er;
In many a breast glad thoughts began to stir
Of lands that lay before:

And human hearts with longing love were dumb
That soon should cease to beat,
Thrilled with the hope of meetings soon to come,
And lost in memories sweet.

Was not the weltering waste of water wide
Enough for both to sail?
What drew the two together o’er the tide,
Fair ship and iceberg pale?

There came a night with neither moon nor star,
Clouds draped the sky in black;
With straining canvas reefed at every spar,
And weird fire in her track,

The ship swept on, a wild wind gathering fast
Drove her at utmost speed;
Bravely she bent before the fitful blast
That shook her like a reed.

O helmsman, turn thy wheel! Will no surmise
Cleave through the midnight drear?
No warning of the horrible surprise
Reach thine unconscious ear?

She rushed upon her ruin; not a flash
Broke up the waiting dark:
Dully through wind and sea one awful crash
Sounded, with none to mark.

Scarcely her crew had time to clutch despair,
So swift the work was done;
Ere their pale lips could frame a speechless prayer
They perished, every one!

| Poems