Plutarch wrote that Homer died of exasperation because he couldn’t solve a fisherman’s riddle:
“What we have caught we threw away; what we could not catch we kept.”
The answer is “fleas.”
Literature
Unquote
“Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” — Henry James
“Book-Larceny”
How hard, when those who do not wish
To lend–that’s lose–their books,
Are snared by anglers–folks that fish
With literary hooks;
Who call and take some favorite tome,
But never read it through;
They thus complete their sett at home,
By making one of you.
I, of my Spenser quite bereft,
Last winter sore was shaken;
Of Lamb I’ve but a quarter left,
Nor could I save my Bacon.
They picked my Locke, to me far more
Than Bramah’s patent worth;
And now my losses I deplore,
Without a Home on earth.
Even Glover’s works I cannot put
My frozen hands upon;
Though ever since I lost my Foote,
My Bunyan has been gone.
My life is wasting fast away;
I suffer from these shocks;
And though I’ve fixed a lock on Gray,
There’s gray upon my locks.
They still have made me slight returns,
And thus my grief divide;
For oh! they’ve cured me of my Burns,
And eased my Akenside.
But all I think I shall not say,
Nor let my anger burn;
For as they have not found me Gay,
They have not left me Sterne.
“Sir Walter Scott said that some of his friends were bad accountants, but excellent book-keepers.”
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890
Bad Actor
Molière collapsed on stage in 1673 and died hours later.
The play was called The Hypochondriac.
Postscript
Lawrence Sterne, after a lifetime of peculiarities, and becoming notorious as an eccentric, curious and able writer, at his death was buried in a graveyard near Tyburn, belonging to the Parish of Mary-le-bone, and the ‘resurrection man’ disinterred his corpse and conveyed it to the professor of anatomy at Cambridge where being laid upon the dissecting table, was at once recognized by one of those present who knew him well while living.
— Bizarre Notes & Queries, February 1886
Infinite Composition
In Tristram Shandy, the title character laments that he’ll never be able to finish his autobiography, as he seems to need a year to record each day’s events. “It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write.”
But Bertrand Russell noted that if Shandy’s eventful life had lasted forever, no part of his biography would have remained unwritten — for the hundredth day would be recorded in the hundredth year, the thousandth in the thousandth, and so on. “This paradoxical but perfectly true proposition depends upon the fact that the number of days in all time is no greater than the number of years.”
The New World Prophecy
There’s a passage in Seneca’s Medea that seems to have foretold the discovery of America 1400 years before the event:
Venient annis secula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum.
Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
Nec sit terris ultima Thule.
“The times will come in later years when ocean may relax the chain of things, and a vast continent may open; the sea may uncover new worlds, and Thule cease to be the last of lands.”
Garish
On a trip to America, G.K. Chesterton was taken one night to see the lights of Broadway.
“What a glorious garden of wonders this would be,” he said, “to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.”
“That Apparition, Sole of Men”
On June 15, 1822, Jane Williams claimed to have seen a doppelgänger of her friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two, in fact. Mary Shelley described the episode in a letter:
She was standing one day … at a window that looked on the Terrace with [Edward] Trelawny — it was day — she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket — he passed again — now as he passed both times the same way — and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried — ‘Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall? Where can he be gone?’ Shelley, said Trelawny — ‘No Shelley has past — What do you mean?’ Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time she saw him.
Two weeks later, Shelley drowned in the Bay of Spezia.
Trick or Treat
Dorothy Parker once attended a Halloween party where she noticed a group of people around a tub of water. She asked what they were doing and was told they were ducking for apples.
“There, but for a typographical error,” she said, “is the story of my life.”