And lastly a bottle of brandy.

From the October 18, 2008 edition of The Spectator magazine.

Tell me this wasn't a guy project gone bad.

On 7 January 1785 the Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, and the American, John Jeffries, set out from Dover cliff to make the first successful hot-air balloon crossing of the English Channel. Early on each one accidentally managed to drop the other's national flag over the side, after which the entire contents of the balloon was gradually jettisoned, as it threatened to sink into the sea, including instruments, clothing and lastly a bottle of brandy. Blanchard and Jeffries eventually landed in their underclothes among the trees of the forest of Guines, 12 miles inland from Calais. Their perilous two-hour flight is described by Jeffries in Narrative of Two Aerial Voyages with M. Blanchard.

He prefers it that way

Paul Johnson, in the October 18, 2008 edition of the Spectator, Michelangelo, old boy, do you think you might . . . He is speaking of financial responsibility in general but focuses on the many instances of productive authors who were also compulsively financially improvident or just plain unlucky, including, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, etc. He does not mention any Americans but certainly Melville and Poe could be added to the list. He also tips his hat to their opposites, those authors who managed their affairs well and in turn provided assistance to their unfortunate peers. Men such as Johnson, Carlyle, and Eliot.

There were strong reasons for helping the needy in those days, for men might be arrested for paltry debts and be flung into the Marshalsea gaol, as Dickens's father was. Some never re-emerged. At least two of Lamb's friends died in debtors' prison. If you turned down a request for a 'loan', you might precipitate a chain of events which would haunt you later. It was not just the borrower himself you had to think about. There was a wan, lined, defeated wife and strings of pale children, doomed to lives of want and scrimping. Carlyle, a generous man despite all his bellowing, gave away his silver, like Dr Johnson before him. When Leigh Hunt called, obviously to 'make a touch', Carlyle would simply leave a sovereign or two on the mantelpiece, and leave the room ('He prefers it that way'). Lamb tried to avoid lending to people he knew, remembering Polonius's warning to Laertes ('Loan oft loses both itself and friend'). He gave it outright.

An exo-genetic path of evolution

I can never be near this harp without plucking at it just a little bit. I am inclined to believe that our adages, fables, folk-tales, myths, phrases, nursery rhymes, etc. are far more important to the sustenance of our culture and civilization than we give them credit for. I don't think it is too much to characterize them as lines of code that carry meaning from age to age. This is brought to mind reflecting on yesterday's post, The mystery of what sinks in in infancy and what flows by is profound quoting at length from Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner. We know that humans are one of the first species to begin to extend ourselves beyond the constraints of our biological and genetic selves. We are no longer hostage to that which we can memorize; we record and store and retrieve information in ever more sophisticated ways, an exo-genetic path of evolution.

Are adages, phrases, fables, etc. part of this exo-genetic development, a way of passing along useful traits without waiting for them to become imprinted in our genome? I suspect so. Let's look at the sampling of phrases that Napier offers up as a recollection from her own childhood. These phrases are from a hundred years ago; four generations. How many of them are still in common circulation or are accessible? Here is a run down.

She cites 42 phrases of one sort or another that have stuck with her.

28 common parental injunctions such as "Say your prayers". Interestingly, Hart & Risley studies which examined the volume of words children hear pre-school as well as the structure of the language, indicated that children with strong early reading skills heard a ratio of 6.4 positive injunctions to negative injunctions versus children with less developed reading capabilities who heard only 0.5 positive injunctions to every negative. Priscilla Napier's sample comes in at 4.6 positive injunctions to each negative; close to Hart & Risley's findings.

5 lines from rare or uncommon poems.

3 common adages

3 familiar lines from the Bible, hymns, or prayers.

2 lines from common poems or nursery rhymes.

1 quote from a familiar and enduring children's classic book.

The net is that of the 42 randomly recollected phrases, virtually all have been around for several centuries or more, and 37 of the 42 are likely to still be heard in households today. Here are the details.

Wipe your mouth - Common parental admonition still in circulation. Probably been around for a few hundred years.

Say your grace - Common parental admonition still in circulation. Probably been around for a few hundred years.

Tell the truth - Common parental admonition still in circulation. Variants of this in circulation by language or religion for some thousands of years, three or four at least.

Keep your elbows off the table - Common parental admonition still in circulation. Very much a function of extant norms of behavior but probably been around for a couple of hundred years.

Don't care was made to care, Don't care was hanged - I wasn't familiar with this one. Apparently it is a traditional London children's rhyme; offered by parents to children when they declare, "I don't care.'

Don't care didn't care,
Don't care was wild:
Don't care stole plum and pear
Like any beggar's child.

Don't care was made to care,
Don't care was hung,
Don't care was put in a pot
And boiled till he was done.

Certainly something for a child to mull on. I don't know either how old the rhyme is nor how far it has spread outside of London/England. It is quoted by the Opie's in an anthology they published in 1959. I'd grant that this one might be of limited circulation.

Take off your hat, William, to Mr and Mrs Dallin - A parental admonition but really pertinent only to the norms of behavior. While this injunction might still be hypothetically true, the general absence of hat wearing today makes it unlikely to have much current circulation.

Spare your breath to cool your porridge - Goes back to Plutarch, (circa 600 BC), relating that Periander said "Hesiod might as well have kept his breath to cool his porridge." General meaning is that you might as well save your breath, no one is interested or is listening. Versions have been in circulation in Spanish, French and English at least since the fifteen hundreds. Not sure that it is used all that much anywhere today though I understand it might be in current usage in Ireland.

And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat - From the Bible, Luke 15.16. Basically, so hungry he would eat anything. So, at least a couple of thousand years old and possibly older. Recognizable in most Christian circles.

This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed at home - Common children's nursery rhyme first appearing in its traditional form in the mid-seventeen hundreds. Still in widespread use today, often as part of finger play between parents and infants.

Blow bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying - The refrain from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Beautiful, but not a common children's poem and I doubt would have much recognition outside of a convention of English majors. Certainly the cadence of the words are probably catching to a child's ear and given that Napier's family was thoroughly steeped in the military, it perhaps had greater currency within her family than might have been common.

Blow, Bugle, blow
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Say please - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say yes - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say thank you - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say sorry - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say how do you do - Common parental admonition still in circulation though more in the current colloquial of Say hello!

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory - The Lord's prayer and therefore both a couple of thousand years old and in broad circulation.

Once upon a time there were four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter - The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter was first published in 1902 so for Priscilla Napier, these were near contemporary stories (she was born in 1908). As much of an impact as they made on her, they have likewise continued to capture the imagination and love of children ever since. I would say a reasonable duration and common circulation among reading families.

Fold your vest - Common parental admonition still in circulation though more in the current colloquial of Fold your clothes!

Clean your teeth - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say your prayers - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Nobly, nobly, Cape St. Vincent to the North West died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay - The opening lines of Robert Browning's poem Home-thoughts. Not lines most people today would recognize but Browning has a surprisingly robust, enduring and committed base of partisans.

Home-thoughts, from the Sea
by Robert Browning

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-east distance dawn'd Gibraltar grand and gray;
'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?' - say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

Love me, kiss me, Hug me tight - Common children's requests to parents and vice versa. Still in circulation.

Never kiss a lady with your hat on, William! - Similar to above. A parental admonition for adherence to the norms of behavior but with the circumstances surrounding the behavior having changed. While this injunction might still be hypothetically true, the general absence of hat wearing today makes it unlikely to have much current circulation.

It's no use grumbling - Common parental admonition still in circulation though with no particular heritage or provenance of which I am aware.

It's no use fussing - Common parental admonition still in circulation though with no particular heritage or provenance of which I am aware.

It's no use crying over spilled milk - Common parental admonition still in circulation everywhere that English is spoken. The thought is expressed in more or less similar phrases in most world languages (German, French, Arabic, etc.); don't waste time and effort on something that is past and can't be undone. Goes back to at least the 1600's.

Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall - Mother Goose nursery rhyme from at least 1800 with the most common version being:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again

That's no way to hold your spoon - Common parental admonition still in circulation (spoon, fork, knife).

Oxus forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle of Pamere - Well this allusion is exceptionally idiosyncratic. It references the river Oxus in Central Asia in a couple of lines from a nearly 900 line poem Sohrab and Rustum by Matthew Arnold. The relevant section of this massive poem is:

But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there mov'd,
Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon; - he flow'd
Right for the polar star, past Orgunje,
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles -
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foil'd circuitous wanderer - till at last
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters open, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bath'd stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.

I am amazed it is a phrase that stuck with her. I think it would be fairly safe to say that this is one line of cultural code that has probably had virtually no circulation in recent decades, anywhere.

For what we have received the Lord make us truly thankful - Common blessing at a meal and still widely circulated both in numbers and geographically.

Say, no thank you - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Say, Yes please - Common parental admonition still in circulation.

Don't cough over the table - Not necessarily frequently used but still usually used when circumstances dictate.

Say, I beg your pardon - Common parental admonition still in circulation though more in the current colloquial of Say I'm sorry!

It was no season then for her To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour - The last line of the first verse of a lengthy John Milton poem, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity composed in 1629. The poem in it's entirety is about 30 verses. Again, kind of hard to imagine the circumstances for this to have washed past those young Napier ears unless it is also a church hymn. I think it is safe to assume an extremely limited circulation today.

On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
by John Milton

It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born Child
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature in awe to Him
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
With her great Master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the sun, her lusty paramour.

Finish your mouthful before you speak - Common parental admonition still in wide and frequent circulation.

Mind the step - Common parental admonition still in circulation as circumstances dictate.

Shame the devil - An English phrase from at least the 1500's. Say the truth and shame the devil is it's full form and means to tell the truth no matter how difficult it might be to do so. Not sure that it has all that much circulation today.

Shut the door behind you - Common parental admonition still in circulation and probably been around ever since doors were invented.

Never ask a man his income - Common parental admonition still in circulation particularly in certain classes.

Never ask a woman her age - Common parental admonition still in circulation particularly in certain classes.

I saw three ships come sailing by, sailing by, sailing by - A common Christmas carol in circulation in one form or another since the 1600s.

I Saw Three Ships

I saw three ships come sailing in,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
I saw three ships come sailing in,
On Christmas day in the morning.

And what1 was in those ships all three?
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And what was in those ships all three?
On Christmas day in the morning.

Our Saviour Christ and his lady
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Our Saviour Christ and his lady,
On Christmas day in the morning.

Pray whither sailed those ships all three?
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Pray whither sailed those ships all three?
On Christmas day in the morning.

Oh, they sailed into Bethlehem,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Oh, they sailed into Bethlehem,
On Christmas day in the morning.

And all the bells on earth shall ring,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the bells on earth shall ring,
On Christmas day in the morning.

And all the Angels in Heaven shall sing,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the Angels in Heaven shall sing,
On Christmas day in the morning.

And all the souls on earth shall sing,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the souls on earth shall sing,
On Christmas day in the morning.

Then let us all rejoice, amain,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Then let us all rejoice, amain,
On Christmas day in the morning.

I saw eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless night - The opening lines to a Henry Vaughan poem. Vaughan was a Welsh poet from the 1600s. The line seems to have captured the imagination of many others including Madeleine L'Engle who seems to have used it as the inspiration for the title of one of her books, A Ring of Endless Light.

The World
by Henry Vaughan

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.
The doting lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit's sour delights,
With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,
Yet his dear treasure
All scatter'd lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flow'r.

The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight-fog mov'd there so slow,
He did not stay, nor go;
Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digg'd the mole, and lest his ways be found,
Work'd under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see
That policy;
Churches and altars fed him; perjuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rain'd about him blood and tears, but he
Drank them as free.

The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves;
Thousands there were as frantic as himself,
And hugg'd each one his pelf;
The downright epicure plac'd heav'n in sense,
And scorn'd pretence,
While others, slipp'd into a wide excess,
Said little less;
The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,
Who think them brave;
And poor despised Truth sate counting by
Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing, and weep, soar'd up into the ring;
But most would use no wing.
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
But as I did their madness so discuss
One whisper'd thus,
"This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,
But for his bride."

The trouble is that it turns out largely to be a fiction

Megan O'Rourke has an interesting article in the February 1, 2010 edition of the New Yorker, Good Grief: Is there a better way to be bereaved. Interesting because it highlights how tentative and theoretical scientific information becomes incorporated uncritically and sometimes dogmatically into popular discourse from which it then becomes difficult to correct.

The "stage theory," as it came to be known, quickly created a paradigm for how Americans die. It eventually created a paradigm, too, for how Americans grieve: Kubler-Ross suggested that families went through the same stages as the patients. Decades later, she produced a follow-up to "On Death and Dying" called "On Grief and Grieving" (2005), explaining in detail how the stages apply to mourning. Today, Kubler-Ross's theory is taken as the definitive account of how we grieve. It pervades pop culture - the opening episodes of this season's "Grey's Anatomy" were structured around the five stages - and it shapes our interactions with the bereaved. After my mother died, on Christmas of 2008, near-strangers urged me to learn about "the stages" I would be moving through.

Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made loss sound controllable. The trouble is that it turns out largely to be a fiction, based more on anecdotal observation than empirical evidence. Though Kubler-Ross captured the range of emotions that mourners experience, new research suggests that grief and mourning don't follow a checklist; they're complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process - sometimes one that never fully ends. Perhaps the most enduring psychiatric idea about grief, for instance, is the idea that people need to "let go" in order to move on; yet studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects. (In China, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors, and one study has shown that the bereaved there suffer less long-term distress than bereaved Americans do.) At the end of her life, Kubler-Ross herself recognized how far astray our understanding of grief had gone. In "On Grief and Grieving," she insisted that the stages were "never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages." If her injunction went unheeded, perhaps it is because the messiness of grief is what makes us uncomfortable.

Newton and that apple

This is really neat. One of those iconic stories of youth, similar to that of George Washington and his father's cherry tree, is that of Issac Netwon and the falling apple. But Newton's story actually has an historical basis. Newton related the story to William Stukeley who later recounted it in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life. The Royal Society in Britain, celebrating 350 years of scientific inquiry, has a collection of manuscripts that can be viewed, including William Stukeley's. Visit their site to access the original manuscript.

Here is a picture of the page from the manuscript in which Stukeley tells the story.

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself..."

They were sometimes called "paper bullets."

Back Issues, an interesting article by Jill Lepore in the January 26th, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. She covers the history of the newspaper with particular emphasis on its role during the early decades of our country.

Because early newspapers tended to take aim at people in power, they were sometimes called "paper bullets." Newspapers have long done battle with the church and the state while courting the market. This game can get dangerous. The first newspaper in the British American colonies, Publick Occurrences, printed in Boston in 1690, was shut down after just one issue for reporting, among other things, that the king of France had cuckolded his own son. Propping up power is, generally, a less dodgy proposition than defying it. The Boston News-Letter, "published by authority" - endorsed by ecclesiastics - lasted from 1704 till 1776. In 1719, two more Colonial papers began printing: the Boston Gazette and, out of Philadelphia, the American Weekly Mercury. (Nearly every early American newspaper was issued weekly; it took sixteen hours to set the type for a standard four-page paper.) But James Franklin’s New-England Courant, launched in 1721, in Boston, marks the real birth of the American newspaper. It was the first unlicensed paper in the colonies - published without authority - and, while it lasted, it was also, by far, the best. The Courant contained political essays, opinion, satire, and some word of goings on. Franklin was the first newspaperman in the world to report the results of a legislative vote count. The Boston News-Letter contained, besides the shipping news, tiresome government pronouncements, letters from Europe, and whatever smattering of local news was bland enough to pass the censor. Franklin had a different editorial policy: "I hereby invite all Men, who have Leisure, Inclination and Ability, to speak their Minds with Freedom, Sense and Moderation, and their Pieces shall be welcome to a Place in my Paper."

Spirit of the 18th century

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

By the eighteenth century, the idea that history itself was moving inexorably toward a more peaceful, intelligent and commodious life for mankind was widely held. Both David Hume and Adam Smith argued that there existed a self-generating impulse of rising expectations that must lead to a society of continuous improvement. Bernard Mandeville argued that the "private vices" of envy and pride are, in fact, "public virtues" in that they stimulate industry and invention, and Hume wrote that the "pleasures of luxury and the profit of commerce roused men from their indolence," leading them to advances in their various enterprises. If any of this sounds something like what has been called, in our own time, "Reaganism," it is because it was chiefly the eighteenth century that provided Reagan with his ideas, especially those arguments which give to ambition and even greed a moral dimension. The most extreme case for the virtues inherent in self-interest economics was made by Thomas Robert Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. Malthus argued against ameliorating the lot of the poor, on the grounds that an easier life led the poor to have more children, which led to fewer material resources to go around, which led to everybody being worse off. Of course, by this logic the best policy was to allow the poor among us to starve - a position which, happily, has not been pursued rigorously in the West.

But the point here is not that reason is unerring (although when it errs, reason itself, it is alleged, can detect its own errors). The point is that in every field - economics, politics, religion, law, and of course, science - reason was to be employed as the best means of assisting history's inevitable movement toward progress. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, attempted to describe the process by which law improves. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, showed how we advance economically. Thomas Paine showed how the rights of man will and must expand. Vico, Pope, Bentham, Jefferson, and others were engaged in similar efforts toward revealing the felicitous movement of history. (For all of the current discussion about Jefferson's ambiguous attitudes about slavery, he had no doubt that the future would be free of it.) And, of course, no one doubted that the future of science would reveal greater and still greater truths about nature. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter by Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley (who, with Karl Wilhelm Steel, discovered oxygen, although Lavoisier coined the word). The letter was sent in February 1780, and conveys the sense of optimism about the future that was characteristic of the age.

. . .I always rejoice to hear of your being still employed in experimental researches into nature, and the success you meet with. The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.