Noo lyart leaves blaw ower the green,
Whilk noo, wi’ frosts ohint her.
These words are often brought home to me by the febrile, even open-hearted, attempts of my man-servant to brush my waistcoat, and I feel that I am no longer capable of judging such things.
You will doubtless deem me a churlish fellow for not having replied to your last epistle long ere this, and, indeed, such I am. But you must know, in your coeur des coeurs that I am inseparably bound up with my work here.
Yesterday I saw a man on a bicycle. He was pedalling along, hands on the handle-bars, feet in their proper places, eyes on the road, for all the world like Prometheus on the rocks, and, although I incur your verdict of sentimentalist, I must tell you that I whistled at him as he went by. It is little incidents such as this that make life here what it is.
And now comes the twilight, and with it the consciousness of approaching darkness. Will you not write at an early date, and tell me all about your good self? Do plan to favor this province with a visit before the Equinox. We have artichokes every day. What more can I say?
Believe me, my dear Mrs. Babington Churchill,
Yours, etc., etc.,
R. L. S.
But I won’t be able to sell this article myself if I run on so, even in imitation of Stevenson. Editors simply won’t take padded stuff from an unknown writer.
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The Dying Thesaurus
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On top of everything else comes the announcement in the newspapers that, unless $10,000.00 is forthcoming within a month, the great thesaurus of the Latin tongue will have to be abandoned! And yet the war was fought ostensibly for Democracy!
In case there are a few scattered illiterates who have never heard of the great thesaurus of the Latin tongue, let it be explained that it has been under way for twenty years, that five volumes of it have already been published (even if the whole thing were to collapse now, we still would have those five volumes; so don’t take on so), and that the general scheme of the thing was to give the history of every word in the Latin tongue from the earliest times to the Middle Ages. And now, for the lack of a mere $10,000.00, the Thesaurus Commission, through Dean West of Princeton, stands in the doorway looking up the road toward the setting sun and murmurs sadly: “Well, Dean, we might as well face it now as later. We can’t go on. We’ve – got – to – stop – (gulp) – the – old – thesaurus.”
It hardly seems possible that, in a land of plenty like ours, a project like this can be allowed to fail. Just think what it would mean to have a complete history of every word in the Latin tongue from earliest times right plumb up to the Middle Ages. You may think perhaps that the history that you have is complete enough, but does it bring the thing up to the Middle Ages? Suppose, for instance, that a dispute were to arise some night at dinner over the history of the word agricola.
“I’ll bet you two seats to the Follies,” you might say to your brother-in-law, “that the word agricola used to be practically interchangeable with the masculine demonstrative pronoun hic. Agricola means ‘farmer,’ and so does hic, or, as it has come down to us in English, ‘hick.’”
One word would lead to another, or perhaps to something worse, and the upshot of the whole thing would be a hurried reaching for your vest-pocket history of Latin words and phrases. And what would be your chagrin to find that the volume began with the First Punic War and gave absolutely nothing previous to that period that you could rely upon!
We are a thorough people and we demand that our history of the Latin tongue shall be thorough. As the popular song-hit has it: “If our thesaurus ain’t a real thesaurus, we don’t want no thesaurus at all.” That’s the way the rank and file of Americans feel about it. Home life is the basis of all our national institutions and there is nothing that contributes to its stability like a good book for reading aloud.
“What shall it be to-night, kiddies?” says the father, drawing up his chair before the fireplace in which stands a vase of hydrangeas, “the story of how mensa came to have its feminine ending?” “Oh, no, Daddy,” lisps little Hazel, “read us about the root verbs which are traceable to the Etruscan influence on the early Latin language. You know, Daddy, the one about the great big prefix, the middle-sized prefix, and the little baby prefix which went ‘huius, huius, huius’ all the way home.”
And so the father read the old, old story of how the good fairy came and told ad, ante, con, in, inter, ob, post, prae, pro, sub, and super that some day they would grow up and govern the accusative and how it all worked out just as the good fairy had said. And all the little children fell asleep with smiles and post-toasties on their faces.
And for the lack of ten thousand dollars shall this dream of American home life fade away?
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Brain-Fag
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It has been figured out by somebody who likes to figure out things that students in institutions for the feeble-minded die much earlier than people on the outside. This is because, according to the figurer-out, their brains do not function normally.
Several feeble-minded people have disputed this, claiming that their brains are the only ones which do function normally, and I have no way of proving that they are wrong, except that they are in the minority. I also have no way of proving that they are in the minority.
But the point seems to be that it is all a question of using up energy, and that idiots use it up quicker than anybody else – idiots and people who run around the Reservoir every morning. When a feeble-minded person starts thinking, he goes at it hammer and tongs, and thinks so hard and so fast that he wears himself out. This should certainly be a lesson to all of us not to think too much. I, myself, haven’t had much trouble in this line since I gave up worrying over transmigration of souls. I worried over that perhaps 15 minutes once.
But a man named Friedenthal (never heard of him) went to work and made things harder by figuring out a ratio of brain-weight, body-weight and longevity, which he called “the cephalization factor.” (Possibly he heard it wrong and meant “civilization factor,” but the result is the same in the end.)
The “cephalization factor” is expressed by the formula “brain-weight over body-weight multiplied by two-thirds.” The “two-thirds” is just put in there to give the thing a scientific look, I guess.
Personally, I would be inclined to multiply by seven-eighths, and I’ll bet that no one could tell me why I shouldn’t. Crazed with success, I might even go ahead and multiply by 12 apples and a man swimming a mile down-stream with a current running four miles an hour. Give up?
Now, as the cephalization factor rises, so does the natural length of life. In other, and worse, words – “the larger the brain in proportion to the protoplasmic mass it controls the longer the animal lives.” That’s something to think over.
I haven’t any idea how much my brain weighs. Some days (shall we say today?) it feels like an old-fashioned Remington Invisible sitting up there in my cranium, and other days it is off somewhere up in the corner of the ceiling lying in wait for butterflies. And as for “the protoplasmic mass which it controls,” I would rather not think about it. I know what it weighs, all right, but I won’t tell.
So I guess that I’ll just have to wait and see how long I live, without having recourse to the cephalization factor. But, what I don’t understand is, if feeble-minded people die earlier because they wear their brains out with too concentrated thinking on subjects which are beyond their grasp, wherein do they differ from Mr. Friedenthal, who certainly worried a lot about the cephalization factor?
Granted that Mr. Friedenthal had a better mental equipment to wear out, why didn’t he wear it out just the same? You can’t tell me that all that formula-business came easy to him, especially that deciding to multiply by two-thirds.
My inclination would be to avoid thinking entirely, whether it be with feeble-minded people or Mr. Friedenthal,
and just see what happens. I’ll bet I outlive them both.
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Plans for Eclipse Day
What To Do When It Gets Dark
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If you really want to figure out just when and where there will be a complete eclipse of the sun, it is a pretty simple matter. All you have to do is think of a number. The only specification is that it has to be a number of twelve digits. You must know lots of good numbers of twelve digits. When you have found one, you write it on a piece of paper and hand it to an usher. Then you take the circumference of the earth and draw a line from it parallel to the sun’s orbit. (You may have a little trouble in finding the sun’s orbit, but don’t be discouraged. Look everywhere.) Now this line represents the earth’s shadow. It isn’t a very good representation, it is true, but it will do, unless you are an artist and can draw a good shadow.
Now put a calendar under this piece of paper (what piece of paper?) and trace the line representing the earth’s shadow onto the calendar. When you take off the tracing sheet you will find that the line points to the exact day of the month when the next eclipse will take place. And in some strange way, as yet unexplained by science, you will also find written in a clear, round hand, the exact hour and locations from which the eclipse will be visible. This is the most interesting phase of the whole thing. Where does that writing come from? And yet there are people who deny that there are supernatural forces at work in the world! I forgot to add that if you want to know how long the eclipse will last, you must add seven to the total, one for each of the days in the week.
Now that we have found out that there is surely going to be an eclipse, the next thing to do is to plan how to take advantage of it. It isn’t often that right in the middle of the day you get complete darkness, and there is no sense in just sitting around looking blank while the thing is going on. At such times there is a man’s work to be done, and “England expects every man,” etc.
In the first place, you can count on practically everyone else being out in the street gaping up at the sky or paying fifty cents to look through a telescope at nothing. You will have the run of the town. This is no small advantage. The only thing is that you will have to work fast, for the eclipse lasts only a few minutes. This will make it necessary for you to decide just what it is you want to do, map out your route, and be ready to start the second that darkness sets in.
For instance, supposing that for years you have been repressing a wild desire to insult somebody – the president of your local board of aldermen, your wife’s father – anybody. Find out where he is going to be at the time of the eclipse, station yourself within ten feet of him, and just as soon as it gets good and dark, rush up and pull his hat down over his ears, untie his necktie and then run. By the time the lights are on, or the sun is out again, you can be back at your desk, breathing heavily but very happy.
Perhaps you have always wanted to violate the law against smoking in the Art Museum. Very well, now is your chance. Get your pipe or cigarette all lighted and, at the proper moment, rush into the verboten territory, take a dozen good drags, and fill the place with smoke. You might even knock a lot of ashes on the floor. You won’t have to run after this, for when it grows light you can hide the apparatus and help the authorities look for the culprit.
Another good game would be to hire some accomplices and change all the street signs. This would be more in the nature of a prank and would call for the release of no malicious repressions. It would be a lot of fun that afternoon to stand on the corner and watch the confusion of traffic, with people and cars going up the wrong streets, family men rushing about trying to find their homes (giving up after two or three minutes and staying downtown all night), postmen crying softly to themselves and roaming through Elizabeth Street looking for 114 South Division Street with a lot of undelivered mail, and the whole town in general facing a complete tie-up. It might be necessary to re-district the whole city or perhaps build an entire new one ten miles up the river. Then, a few years later, at the Board of Commerce dinner, you could get up and tell everybody of the joke you played and get a good laugh.
Personally, I intend to devote myself to a more harmless experiment. For years I have wanted to wear a silk hat, a batwing collar, and a spotted bow tie. I tried it once and was told that I looked terrible. It wasn’t just a few friends who told me. Perfect strangers wrote letters to the papers about it and said that it was a disgrace to the city that such things should be allowed. A lot of people got up a round robin and sent it to me, reminding me of my wife and children. The thing created such a stir that I bowed to public opinion and put the hat away in a box on the top shelf of my closet and went back to the old fedora. But in my heart I knew that I was in the right and resolved to wear that outfit once more before the Grim Reaper got in his dirty work – in the daytime, too.
So on January twenty-fourth, I will stay at home in the morning and have a simple breakfast of fruit and one dropped egg on toast. Then I will put on my Appellate Division coat, with perhaps a gardenia in the buttonhole, a pair of trousers with a modest stripe, patent-leather shoes and gray spats, a white waistcoat, and a batwing collar with a spotted bow tie. Then I will have my man ready at the door to hand me my silk hat and stick when the time comes. At the very first sign of darkness, I will start out on a brisk trot up the street, covering the block bounded by Madison Avenue, Forty-fourth Street, Fifth Avenue, and Forty-fifth Street. If I see that things are working out all right and that I have plenty of time, I may slow down to a walk, or even saunter, swinging my stick when I get on Fifth Avenue. I have paced the distance out in my regular clothes and find that I can do it in about five minutes, or under, if the track is fast. This will bring me back to the house just in time to escape the full light of day and yet I guess enough people will see me to give the thing that spice which danger lends to an exploit of this kind. I don’t care about the elevator man. He is paid to take people up and down in the elevator and it is none of his business what they look like. He’s used to masqueraders anyhow.
The only trouble with these plans for Eclipse Day is that it may not be entirely dark during the event. I can’t find anyone who knows exactly about that. It may work out to be merely like a very cloudy day. And in some sections of the country, of course, there won’t be a complete eclipse visible at all. This would make it rather difficult to get away with anything spectacular, like kissing Peggy Hopkins Joyce. And, at any rate, the very fact that there is an eclipse going on at all, will give you an excuse for knocking off work for a few minutes.
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In the Beginning
Thoughts on Starting Up the Furnace
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Along about now is the time when there falls upon the ears of the Old Man one of the most ominous of all household phrases: “Well, Sam, I guess we’ll have to get the furnace-fire started today.”
No matter what Daddy is doing at the moment, no matter how light-hearted he may be, gathering autumn leaves or romping on the terrace, at the sound of these words a shadow passes across his handsome face and into his eyes there comes that far-away look of a man who is about to go down into the Valley. He drops his golf-clubs or balloon or whatever it is he is playing with when the news comes, and protests softly: “The paper says warmer tomorrow.”
But in his heart he knows that it is no use. The family has been talking it over behind his back and has decided that it is time to have the furnace started, and he might as well tell the back wall of the Michigan Central Terminal that the paper says it will be warmer tomorrow and expect it to soften up. So there is nothing for him to do but get ready to build the fire.
Building the furnace-fire for the first time of the season is a ritual which demands considerable prayer and fasting in preparation. I would suggest that the thing be considered far enough in advance to get it done right, and to this end have outlined a course of preliminary training.
For a ma
n who is about to build a furnace-fire, good physical condition and mental poise are absolutely essential. I knew a man once who had been up late every night during the week preceding his ordeal in the cellar and as a result was tired and nervous when the day came. Furthermore, he had neglected his diet in the matter of proteids, so that his system was in rather poor shape. When confronted with the strain of getting the kindling going and putting the coal on, he simply went all to pieces and when they found him he was kicking and screaming in the bins, trying to burrow his way through the pile of pea-coal in the corner of the cellar. They caught him just in time, otherwise he might have succeeded and would probably never have been found.
It would be wise, therefore, along about the first of September, for the prospective father of the bouncing fire to pack up and leave home for a few weeks, taking a complete rest in the wilds somewhere and eating nothing but the plainest and most healthful foods. Ten hours' sleep a night would not be too much, and during the day he should be careful to let his mind dwell on nothing but the most peaceful thoughts. He should say to himself every afternoon at three o'clock: "I am Love. Love is All. I reflect no disturbance. I am Being." For exercise, he should go out and chop down several good-sized trees. This will help him when the time comes to break up the kindling.
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