When journalist Peter Andrey Smith attended the 2017 World Happiness Summit in Miami, he asked everyone he met, “Who’s the happiest person here?” Many, he reported, pointed to themselves and said, “Me.”
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In 1387 the physicians to Charles II of Navarre, in order to treat his illness, soaked his sheets in aqua vitae, a distilled wine, and wrapped him in them to enhance the curative power that the liquid was supposed to possess. The sheets were then sewn shut by a maid, who, instead of cutting the final bit of string, set a candle to it. The alcohol-soaked king went up in a blaze and the maid ran away, leaving him to burn to death.
A Theravada story is told about an early incarnation of the Buddha who, at one month old, watches his father, the king, sentencing criminals to death and corporal punishments. He suddenly remembers a past life in which he, too, condemned men to death, then suffered 80,000 years in hell as karmic comeuppance. He decides to avoid inheriting the throne by pretending to be deaf, dumb, and immobile.
Beaver fur can contain between 12,000 and 23,000 hairs per square centimeter, and it is particularly good for making thick, pliable, water-resistant felt. In 1733 the Hudson Bay Company valued one prime-quality beaver skin at the same worth as one brass kettle, two pounds of Brazilian tobacco, one gallon of brandy, or a pound and a half of gunpowder.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is hired by dwarfs to steal a dragon’s treasure. The agreement in the 1937 novel is only two sentences, but the 2012 movie adaptation substantially expanded the contract; souvenir reproductions of the film prop measure five feet in length. One law blogger deemed it to be “pretty well written” despite noticing a certain inconsistency regarding whether Baggins is the dwarfs’ employee or an independent contractor.
After the Golden Gate Bridge, the most popular spot in the world to commit suicide is Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji. Signs posted among the trees read: YOUR LIFE IS A PRECIOUS GIFT FROM YOUR PARENTS AND PLEASE CONSULT THE POLICE BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO DIE! Since the 1950s, more than five hundred people have killed themselves there, most by hanging.
In one of the earliest references to the tragedy of the commons—a concept that describes how people use natural resources to their advantage without considering the cost to society—the economist William Forster Lloyd asked in 1833, “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn and cropped so differently from adjoining enclosures?”
A riot erupted in Constantinople in 532 that forced Justinian and his advisers to consider fleeing. Procopius wrote in History of the Wars that the emperor’s wife, Theodora—the only time in the work in which she speaks—told her husband, “If now it is your wish to save yourself, O Emperor, there is no difficulty.” On hand, she noted, were money and boats. “For myself,” she went on, “I approve a certain ancient saying that royalty is a good burial shroud.” Justinian stayed, put down the revolt, and in the ashes of the city’s old church built the still-standing Hagia Sophia.
A character in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which is set in the run-up to the July Revolution in France, says at one point, “Politics…is a stone tied round the neck of literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not harmonize with the sound of any instrument.”
Discussing the “secret and more adult” appeal of Shirley Temple, Graham Greene wrote in his review of Wee Willie Winkie in 1937, “Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialog drops between their intelligence and their desire.” He also noted her “neat and well-developed rump” and “dimpled depravity.” Twentieth Century Fox sued for libel, Greene fled to Mexico, and a court ordered a settlement of 3,500 pounds.
About his habit of masturbating in public, Diogenes the Cynic said, “I only wish I could be rid of hunger by rubbing my belly.”
In 1986 a Greek professor encountered a previously unknown word while deciphering a fifth-century lexicon olisbokollix, meaning “loaf-of-bread dildo.” Later discovery of vase paintings showing women carrying baskets of phallus-shaped loaves confirmed the word had been understood correctly.
The first-century Roman writer Gaius Julius Hyginus relates the story of Agnodice, a young Athenian woman who traveled to Alexandria to study medicine. On her return to Athens she disguised herself as a man in order to practice, and was brought before the court of the Areopagus. “You men are not spouses but enemies,” Agnodice’s patients protested, “since you are condemning the woman who discovered health for us.” Around 500 bc, the law forbidding women to study medicine was repealed.
In 1851 an Episcopal rector wondered why Nathaniel Hawthorne had selected the theme of adultery for his 1850 novel. “Is it, in short, because a running undertide of filth has become as requisite to a romance as death in the fifth act to a tragedy?” wrote the cleric. “We honestly believe that The Scarlet Letter has already done not a little to degrade our literature and to encourage social licentiousness.”
To cure madness in “men fond of literature,” medical encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus suggests reading aloud to them “incorrectly, if that’s what gets them going; for by correcting you they begin to divert their mind.”