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.
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The title track of Van Morrison’s 1990 album Enlightenment opens with the lyrics “chop that wood, carry water,” a reference to the popular Zen Buddhist dictum that before enlightenment, one must chop wood and carry water, and that after enlightenment, one must chop wood and carry water. The origin is a verse by the late eighth-century Chinese poet Layman Pang, who declared that his “supernatural power and marvelous activity” was “drawing water and carrying firewood.”
Having surrendered at the Appomattox Court House earlier that year, Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1865 became the president of Washington College—now Washington & Lee University—where he suggested, “The study of the mother tongue in any country is an important element of polite education, and is moreover valuable for its practical utility and necessary relation to other branches of learning.” He established in 1869 a chair in English language and literature, the first of its kind in the United States.
As a youth, the writer V.S. Naipaul struggled with hysteria. He described watching the film The African Queen while at Oxford: “Just when Bogart said something to Katharine Hepburn about sleeping one off or something, I could take it no longer and left the cinema. What form did it take? One was terrified of human beings. One didn’t wish to show oneself to them.” Naipaul claimed he cured himself over a two-year period. “Intellect and will,” he said, “intellect and will.”
In August 1945 pioneering computer programmer Grace Hopper was working at Harvard University on the experimental Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical protocomputer being used in the war effort. After a circuit malfunctioned, one of her colleagues removed a two-inch-long moth using tweezers. Hopper taped the moth into her logbook and later recalled the first use of a now ubiquitous term: “From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.”
Carl Jung attributed his split with his mentor Sigmund Freud around 1910 in part to a generational divide. “Our descendants are our most dangerous enemies,” Jung argued, “for they will outlive us, and, therefore, without fail, will take the power from our enfeebled hands.”
Primo Levi wrote that at Auschwitz “a large amount of alcohol was put at the disposal of” members of the Special Squad, inmates of the concentration camp who were forced to work the crematoriums, “and that they were in a permanent state of complete debasement and prostration.” One such inmate said, “Doing this work, one either goes crazy the first day or gets accustomed to it.”
“Against the fashionable (and idiotic) claim that revenge is just hardwired and an instinctual response programmed into our genes and neuro-structures,” argues law professor William Ian Miller in an analysis of Njál’s Saga, “actual Icelandic feuding” rather “made it preferable for revenge to be served up cold; take your time and think. Only the stupid hit back right away.”
Afridi tribesmen agreed not to engage in traditional blood feuds on a road through the Khyber Pass after it was seized by the British Raj in 1879. One result, the writer E.F. Benson later reported, was that Afridis would travel through clandestine tunnels to the road to “smile at each other.” Then, “having taken the air,” he wrote, “they rabbit it into their fortresses again.”
Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria, queen of Hungary and Bohemia, advised son Ferdinand in 1771 not to support the Mozart family of musicians. “You ask me about taking the young Salzburger into your service. I do not know why, believing you have no need for a composer or useless people,” she wrote. “Furthermore, he has a large family.” The Mozart family had four members. Ferdinand did not make an offer.
Concluding that he and Bertrand Russell possessed irreconcilable “value judgments,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote Russell on March 3, 1914, to suggest that a continued correspondence could only be achieved by “restricting our relationship to the communication of facts capable of being established objectively, with perhaps also some mention of our friendly feelings for one another.”
A growing market for ejiao—a gelatin made from donkey hide believed by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine to increase libido and slow aging—has led to a global trade of millions of donkey skins each year. Asses are often kidnapped from rural African villages, where their labor is valued highly, then taken to markets and slaughtered for export. “The donkeys,” said a sanctuary manager while visiting a market in Tanzania, “are very stressed.”
According to Pliny, after an oracle predicted Aeschylus would die from being hit by a falling house, the poet began “trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens.” His precaution was futile; he was killed that day when hit by a tortoise dropped from the sky by a hungry eagle eager to crack open its shell.
“Demotic habits,” wrote the British clergyman Sydney Smith in support of the Reform Bill of 1832, “will be more common in a country where the rich are forced to court the poor for power.”
The Hindu Laws of Manu advises a ruler to act so that “his subjects thrill with joy in him as human beings do at the sight of the full moon.” In ancient times a king secured justice with the help of a divine Rod of Punishment. “Properly wielded,” the text explains, the rod “makes all the subjects happy; but inflicted without due consideration, it destroys everything.”