Confined

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Oppressed by the sexual advances of her master, 22-year-old North Carolina slave Harriet Jacobs fled in 1835 and hid for seven years in a tiny loft under the roof of her grandmother’s house nearby:

The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air. … The air was stifling; the darkness total. A bed had been spread on the floor. I could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on the other without hitting the roof. The rats and mice ran over my bed; but I was weary, and I slept such sleep as the wretched may, when a tempest has passed over them.

She cut a tiny peephole in the roof so that she could watch her children, who lived in the house but did not know of her presence. Eventually she escaped to the North, was reunited there with her brother and her children, and published an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in 1861. “My body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment,” she wrote, “to say nothing of my soul.”

See Out of Sight.

| History

Dirty Laundry

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So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief! Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief? … We have heard of Fortunatus his Purse, and of the Invisible Cloak, long ago worn thread bare, and stow’d up in the Wardrobe of obsolete Romances: one might think, that were a fitter place for this Handkerchief, than that it, at this time of day, be worn on the Stage, to raise every where all this clutter and turmoil. Had it been Desdemona’s Garter, the Sagacious Moor might have smelt a Rat: but the Handkerchief is so remote a trifle, no Booby, on this side Mauritania, cou’d make any consequence from it.

— Thomas Rymer pans Othello in A Short View of Tragedy, 1693

| Literature

Spendthrift

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Didius Julianus bought Rome. When Pertinax, the successor to Emperor Commodus, failed to support the Praetorian Guard in 193, they overthrew him and auctioned off the whole empire. Cassius Dio writes:

Didius Julianus, at once an insatiate money-getter and a wanton spendthrift, who was always eager for revolution and hence had been exiled by Commodus to his native city of Mediolanum, now, when he heard of the death of Pertinax, hastily made his way to the camp, and, standing at the gates of the enclosure, made bids to the soldiers for the rule over the Romans. Then ensued a most disgraceful business and one unworthy of Rome. For, just as if it had been in some market or auction-room, both the City and its entire empire were auctioned off. The sellers were the ones who had slain their emperor, and the would-be buyers were Sulpicianus and Julianus, who vied to outbid each other, one from the inside, the other from the outside. They gradually raised their bids up to twenty thousand sesterces per soldier. Some of the soldiers would carry word to Julianus, ‘Sulpicianus offers so much; how much more do you make it?’ And to Sulpicianus in turn, ‘Julianus promises so much; how much do you raise him?’ Sulpicianus would have won the day, being inside and being prefect of the city and also the first to name the figure twenty thousand, had not Julianus raised his bid no longer by a small amount but by five thousand at one time, both shouting it in a loud voice and also indicating the amount with his fingers. So the soldiers, captivated by this excessive bid and at the same time fearing that Sulpicianus might avenge Pertinax (an idea that Julianus put into their heads), received Julianus inside and declared him emperor.

He didn’t last long — Septimius Severus swept into the capital after nine weeks, and the Praetorians switched allegiance again. “And so it came about that Julianus was slain as he was reclining in the palace itself; his only words were, ‘But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?’ He had lived sixty years, four months, and the same number of days, out of which he had reigned sixty-six days.”

| History

Lessons

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“Not for life, but for school do we learn.” — Seneca the Younger

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” — Henry Adams

“Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” — Leonardo

“I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.” — Petronius

But to go to school in a summer morn,
Oh, it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day —
In sighing and dismay.

— William Blake, The Schoolboy

“The only thing I ever learned in school that did me any good in after life was that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.” — Dorothy Parker

The pupils of St. Cassian, a schoolmaster, stabbed him to death with their pens.

| Society

Fish Story

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David Hume argued that reports of miracles can never be credited, because the weight of human experience must always favor a more natural explanation. “Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.”

The sun is said to have danced in the sky in 1917. Well, which is more likely, that such an extraordinary event actually occurred, or that it was really a mass hallucination, an optical illusion, or any of a hundred more familiar explanations? A miracle, a suspension of natural law, is always the least likely possibility, so as rational creatures we must always reject it.

But Alfred Russel Wallace objected, “Such a simple fact as the existence of flying fish could never be proved, if Hume’s argument is a good one; for the first man who saw and described one, would have the universal experience against him that fish do not fly, or make any approach to flying, and his evidence being rejected, the same argument would apply to the second, and to every subsequent witness.”

Hume’s argument, he said, was “radically fallacious,” because if it were sound “no perfectly new fact could ever be proved, since the first and each succeeding witness would be assumed to have universal experience against him.” Who’s right?

| Science & Math

Rock Music

From the 2001 Moscow Mathematical Olympiad:

Before you are three piles of stones. One contains 51 stones, one 49 stones, and one 5 stones. On each move you can either combine two piles into one or divide any pile with an even number of stones into two equal piles. Is it possible to end up with 105 piles, each containing a single stone?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Busy

On May 29, 1933, Harper’s Bazaar editor Art Samuels was awaiting a piece by the notoriously unreliable Robert Benchley when he received six successive telegrams:

AM TAKING CARE OF MY SICK MOTHER.
AM ACTING AS GUIDE FOR HUNTING PARTY.
AM INSPECTING NEW PACKARD ENGINES.
AM JUDGING ORANGE BLOSSOM CARNIVAL.
AM BEING INDUCTED INTO INDIAN TRIBE.
AM WORKING ON PICTURE WITH GRETA GARBO.

All bore the current date, but their origins were listed as Worcester, Massachusetts; Presque Isle, Maine; Detroit, Michigan; Miami Beach, Florida; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Hollywood, California. Samuels wrote back GATHER YOU HAVEN’T DONE THE PIECE.

Benchley avoided another engagement by having his mother send this wire from Massachusetts:

SORRY I CAN’T ATTEND LUNCHEON TODAY BECAUSE I AM IN BOSTON. DON’T KNOW WHY I AM IN BOSTON BUT IT MUST BE IMPORTANT BECAUSE HERE I AM.

BENCHLEY

| Humor

Finnegans Brake

In 1932 C.K. Ogden translated the last four pages of Anna Livia Plurabelle into Basic English, “the International Language of 850 words in which everything may be said.”

Here’s Joyce’s text:

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a tailing and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing. My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ‘Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace!

And here’s Ogden’s translation:

Well are you conscious, or haven’t you knowledge, or haven’t I said it, that every story has an ending and that’s the he and she of it. Look, look, the dark is coming. My branches high are taking root, And my cold seat’s gone grey. ‘Viel Uhr? Filou! What time is it? It’s getting late. How far the day when I or anyone last saw Waterhouse’s clock! They took it to pieces, so they said. When will they put it together again? O, my back, my back, my back! I would go then to Aix-les-Pains. Ping pong! That the bell for Sachseläute — And Concepta de Spiritu — Pang! Take the water of your cloths! Out with the old, in with the new! Godavari keep off the rains! And give us support!

“The simplest and most complex languages of man are placed side by side,” Ogden wrote. “The reader will see that it has generally been possible to keep almost the same rhythms.” Judge for yourself.

| Language · Literature