...human was the music, natural was the static....

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

after the treaty of amiens, a french officer named surcouf and his british rival sat for a dinner together.

Finally, the British officer remarked on the low character of the French privateers, “You must admit you French fight for money, while we English fight for honor.”

Surcouf calmly replied, “Certainly, sir, we all fight for what we lack.”

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

Cottingley Fairies, 1917

when the picture above was printed across newspapers in England in 1917 (73 years before Photoshop), many were convinced that this was definitive proof of the existence of fairies.

among those fooled was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes (the literary paragon of reason) and ardent spiritualist. he wrote praises and purchased the young girls cameras so they can document even more photographic proof of the mythical fairies.

and in 1917 one would think cameras were not cheap.

suffice to say, it was all a hoax by the young girls.

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train 
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.

it was the first time I'd 
realized 
that.

as he lay unexpectedly dying at the age of 32, Alexander the Great had conquered much of the known world in an impressive series of campaigns. much of this success was due to the extraordinary generals he had amassed.

on his deathbed his inner circle of ambitious commanders gathered, confused as to who exactly would inherit the empire from this young (heirless) king.

with no clear succession plan and a room full of cutthroat and exceptionally competent warmongers, Alexander might have given the worst possible answer when asked point blank to whom he would leave the empire...

To the strongest.

the wars that ensued amongst his generals resulted in the death of thousands.

He next proceeded to inspect his [horse], which, with more quartos than a real and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that "tantum pellis et ossa fuit," surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or the Babieca of the Cid.

Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name.

...

...he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a [horse] before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the [horses] in the world.

cervantes included several meta jokes in his famous novel, but he could not have planned for this one.

in this passage we have the delusional knight deciding his gaunt, malnourished horse should have a name worthy of his fame. so he names the horse 'rocinante', which roughly translates to "before all horses" or the "first of horses" because in don quixote's mind this horse would rival the great horses of history.

rocinante has since become one the most famous horses in history.

Jerusalem (1834)

The Immovable Ladder is a wooden ladder located above the facade, under the window of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem...it was first mentioned in 1757 and has remained in the same exact location since the 18th century.

The ladder is referred to as immovable due to an understanding that no cleric of the six ecumenical Christian orders may move, rearrange, or alter any property without the consent of the other five orders.

the ladder was first explicitly mentioned in 1757, and the painting above from 1834 shows it exactly where it can still be found today (top right window).

The end of a man's own world does not come as it does in one of the great paintings Mr. Bobby had outlined. It comes with one of the island boys bringing a radio message up the road from the local post office and saying, "Please sign on the detachable part of the envelope. We're sorry, Mr. Tom."

JMW Turner, "Rain, Steam, and Speed" (1844)

british painter jmw turner excelled at capturing nature and the advancing industrial tides as experienced in the 19th century. the painting above is a great example of how art shifts.

as society became more exposed to motion and power in the age of the locomotive, the art of the time began to turn more abstract in order to best represent its presence. indeed, even we, the modern spectator, can see in the painting the subject of motion and kinetics. but to people born just a century prior, the painting's central theme of motion would be lost in its entirety- seemingly blind to an entire dimension of life.

(eventually art would evolve on this abstraction concept until arriving at color itself as a driver of emotion/perception as exemplified by rothko.)

jmw turner was not without his detractors. this (snarky but funny) satirical caricature of turner represented him with a bucket of yellow paint and half haphazardly smearing the painting with a mop.

The Almanack of the Month (circa 1846)

The race was close and [Lyndon B Johnson] was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get a way calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

the LBJ campaign never formally denied the story.

after the death of richard feynman, renown physics (of Manhattan Project fame) and bongo player, a letter was found. the letter was seemingly written to his first wife, Arline, who had died of tuberculosis years prior.

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don't only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

...

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

the melancholic letter continues, as the distraught scientist writes to his deceased wife. but, it would not be feynman without a bit of sardonic humor, as he closes out the letter...

PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don't know your new address.

the letter was sealed in an envelope for close to 40 years.

Young "Ernestine" Hemingway

as was popular at the time, ernest hemingway's mother would dress the young boy in girl's clothes in a practice known as 'breeching.' however, she would go a bit farther and match his sister's dresses (pretend they were twins) and refer to the boy as 'ernestine.'

this was the same mother who sent news of her husband's suicide alongside the revolver used to the young teenage ernest.

I don't like it and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides, 
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

the first Peanut cartoon strip, 1950

I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.

for obvious reasons, NASA did not broadcast the religious ceremony during the mission.

“Where is it,” thought Raskolnikov. “Where is it I’ve read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once!

"Where is it" indeed...

In prison [Fyodor Dostoyevsky] was given the “silent treatment” for eight months (guards even wore velvet soled boots) before he was led in front a firing squad. Dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited execution, when suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence.