Time Out of Joint

In 1582, as the Catholic world prepared to adopt the new Gregorian calendar, German pamphleteers lampooned the strife that attended the change:

The old calendar must be the right one for the animals still use it. The stork flies away according to it, the bear comes out of his hole on the Candlemas day of the old calendar and not of the Pope’s, and the cattle stand up in their stalls to honor the birth of the Lord on the Christmas night of the old and not of the new calendar. They also recognize in this work diabolical wickedness. The Pope was afraid the last day would come too quickly. He has made his new calendar so that Christ will get confused and not know when to come for the last judgment, and the Pope will be able to continue his knavery still longer. May Gott him punish.

“Inanimate objects were not so stubborn.” An Italian walnut tree that had reliably put forth leaves, nuts, and blossoms on the night before Saint John’s day under the old regime dutifully adopted the new calendar and performed its feat on the correct day in 1583. A traveler wrote, “I have today sent a branch, broken off on Saint John’s day, to Herr von Dietrichstein, who no doubt will show it to the Kaiser.”

(Roscoe Lamont, “The Reform of the Julian Calendar,” Popular Astronomy 28:1 [January 1920], 18-32.)

| History · Society

Memories

Excerpts from Mark Twain’s boyhood journal:

Monday — Got up, washed, went to bed.
Tuesday — Got up, washed, went to bed.
Wednesday — Got up, washed, went to bed.
Thursday — Got up, washed, went to bed.
Friday — Got up, washed, went to bed.
Next Friday — Got up, washed, went to bed.
Friday fortnight — Got up, washed, went to bed.
Following month — Got up, washed, went to bed.

“I stopped, then, discouraged. Startling events appeared to be too rare, in my career, to render a diary necessary.”

(From The Innocents Abroad.)

| Literature · Society

Summing Up

Much of the success of the administrator in carrying out a program depends upon how far it is his sole object overshadowing everything else, or how far he is thinking of himself; for this last is an obstruction that has caused many a good man to stumble and a good cause to fall. The two aims are inconsistent, often enough for us to state as a general rule that one cannot both do things and get the credit for them.

— A. Lawrence Lowell, What a University President Has Learned, 1938

| Society

One Solution

[Jerome Sankey] challenged Sir William [Petty] to fight with him. Sir William is extremely short-sighted, and being the challengee it belonged to him to nominate place and weapon. He nominates for the place a dark cellar, and the weapon to be a great carpenter’s axe. This turned the knight’s challenge into ridicule, and so it came to nought.

— John Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1697

| Society

Death Do Us Part

From the will of John G—-e, who died at Lambeth around 1772:

Whereas it was my misfortune to be made very uneasy by Elisabeth G—-e, my wife, for many years, from our marriage, by her turbulent behavior; for she was not content with despising my admonitions, but she contrived every method to make me unhappy; she was so perverse in her nature, that she would not be reclaimed, but seemed only to be born to be a plague to me; the strength of Sampson, the knowledge of Homer, the prudence of Augustus, the cunning of Pyrrhus, the patience of Job, the subtilty of Hannibal, and the watchfulness of Hermogenes, could not have been sufficient to subdue her; for no skill or force in the world would make her good; and as we have lived separate and apart from each other eight years, and she having perverted her son to leave and totally abandon me, therefore I give her one shilling only.

From the Annual Register.

| Death · Society

Second Thoughts

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lord_Lyndhurst_by_Felix_Roffe.jpg

On the Bench his lips would often be seen to move, but no sound proceeding from them would be heard by the Bar. The associate sitting beneath him could tell another tale. … ‘What a damned fool that man is!’ — then, after an interval, ‘Eh, not such a damned fool as I thought;’ then another interval. ‘Egad, it is I that was the damned fool.’

— J.B. Atlay on Lord Lyndhurst, in The Victorian Chancellors, 1906

| Society

“A Waste of Time”

A little boy spent his first day at school. ‘What did you learn?’ was his aunt’s question. ‘Didn’t learn nothing.’ ‘Well, what did you do?’ ‘Didn’t do nothing. There was a woman wanting to know how to spell “cat,” and I told her.’

— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899

The 12-year-old Winston Churchill found examinations “a great trial”: “I would have liked to have been examined in history, poetry and writing essays. … I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know.”

| Humor · Society