Also, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered words that resonated with me so well:
“Things are grim—both in the world at large, and for us as individuals. We all overestimated the world: even me, an absolute pessimist. The world is very, very stupid, and bestial. There are more brains in a cowshed. Everything: humanity, civilization, Europe, even Catholicism: the cowshed is cleverer.”
I never knew Alexander Dumas’ father became the Haitian governer and was a French general, then died in prison. No wonder he wrote about prison escape and revenge.
King Arthur never existed, the first reference to him comes about 600 years after his supossed reign and most details we associate with him were written about 300 years after that.
It is unlikely the Grail (as we know it) ever did either.
Yes there may have been a cup he drank from but the chances it was preserved are pretty much zero. It is not even mentioned till 500+ years after the event,
From the article:
The first mention of the existence of an actual Grail relic comes in 570 in the form of an anonymous travelogue to the Holy Land, written by a man scholars call the pilgrim of Piacenza.
It is the equivalent of someone today claiming they were shown the quill pen Shakespeare used to write Romeo and Juliet.
When he took those first sea snails in his apartment back in 2007, it was just a week after his honeymoon. “My wife was horrified by the by the smell; she almost kicked me out of the house… But I had to carry on,” he says.
He should do everything he can to keep her if she dealt with that and stayed. Decaying shellfish is just about the worst thing to smell.
That’s really neat. I don’t know that “computer” is the right term for an astronomy tracker, but it’s still an amazing find. How were they able to craft with such precision in an era without electricity, mills, lathes, micrometers, and all the common tools of the machinist?
The earth is an observable system of systems, and even back then, people were just as smart as us and perhaps a little more connected to those rhythms and cycles in their daily lives. Many cultures built physical representations of these things, like Stonehenge, but a surviving portable one is a marvel. I often wonder what was the first of such portable devices, as the complexity of this one shows that there may be a few generations of ideas.
There’s a huge difference between Stonehenge and a clock gear. The latter requires a level of precision that I didn’t know they could achieve back then. It’s not a matter of intelligence, it’s a matter of technology. This timepiece is an impressive achievement.
Never underestimate the power of obsession. I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that right now, as I write this, there is someone out there making their 4327th attempt to engrave “The Lord’s Prayer” into a watermelon seed using a handheld sewing needle. And it’s probably in an illuminated Gothic script.
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