Links in a Chain of History One of the remarkable things about Walking to Canterbury by Jerry Ellis is that while he meets people very briefly, he really captures their character. I guess it's like that stranger on the train that you'll never see again, to whom you tell things you've never told anyone before in your life.

One of the most appealing characters in the book is an elderly Irish woman he sits with on a visit to a monastery:

"She seemed to be around eighty years old, but her beauty had not faded. Indeed she was one of those rare persons who had aged with such grace that it was difficult not to stare at the accomplishment, though the painted eyebrows added carnival flare.

"My name is Maggie,' she said. 'My husband always sat with me before, but he died three months ago. A lovely man, a doctor. That's why I've come to the monastery. To try to find some direction. I can't make up my mind whether to stay at our home in London or return to Dublin to die.

"'Oh not that I want to do it anytime soon, but you know as well as me the train is coming, darling. And there's no slowing it down. The brakeman is as drunk as a young man at his wedding. Are you Catholic dear?' I shook my head. 'That's a crying shame. You have the eyes of a good Catholic. Warm and strong and you've suffered your share. Oh, but I see a wee bit of the Devil's brother dancing there as well, don't I, darling? Never mind, we all have our fires to contain.'"

Maggie holds his hands and tells him she has held the hands of the pope himself and John F. Kennedy.

"'The pope, bless him, was easy to get to because I was in the right line. But President Kennedy was a slippery catch. It was Dublin, darling, and the place was so packed that air itself was getting the life squeezed right out of it. There I was, tiny me, no taller than a weed, with everybody's elbows banging my ears.

"'But I had two American flags, and you know what I did? I did right the opposite of all those around me. They waved their flags up and down, but I waved mine sideways with the force of a gale. Darling, I was a woman on a mission, and I didn't stop waving those Stars and Stripes till the president himself made his way through the sea of Irishmen to pick me from the crowd. When he did, I dropped the flags and grabbed both his handsome hands.

"'He wasn't just a man. He was a legend, and right then and there I became part of it in my own small way. Now that legend holds your hands. We're links in a chain of history, tragic as it turned out to be for him and his poor family and the rest of us who cared.'

"I placed my hand atop hers and gave a quick squeeze. 'You're a real fireball,' I said. 'You must inspire a lot of younger women.'

"'Oh, they're too busy to notice an old rag like me.' She almost blushed, which made her all the more endearing. 'But I understand. When I was their age, I couldn't see the train coming either. Better that they don't, really.'"  ¶ 11:14 AM 0 comments

  Thank You Sergeant Cohen











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  Confusion at the Doctor's Office
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  The Economics of Conquest







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  The Economics of Headhunting After the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, his adopted son Octavian (later called Augustus) and his supposed friend and general Mark Antony had to go deal with his killers, led by Brutus and Cassius, and their army in the eastern Mediterranean.

But Octavian and Antony didn't have enough money to pay the legions, so they had to impose a lot of taxes -- very unpopular with the Romans, who hadn't had to pay taxes for a hundred years thanks to all the loot from their conquests.

And then they still didn't have enough money, so they decided to have a proscription, a technique invented by the dictator Sulla 40 years before.

It was kind of like a scavenger hunt where the members of the triumverate (Octavian, Antony and a guy named Lepidus) posted the names of people on white boards in the forum and then people would go and kill them and bring in their heads to collect their reward.

The triumvirs confiscated the victims' property and the killers got a percentage.

"From a modern viewpoint, a proscription is a strange device," writes Anthony Everitt in his biography of Augustus, "but the Roman state was remarkably nonbureaucratic; with no police force and no professional judiciary, it was simply not equipped to execute large numbers of its citizens. The task had to be privatized."

He quotes Appian: "Many people were murdered in all kinds of ways, and decapitated to furnish proof for the reward. They fled in undignified fashion, and abandoned their former conspicuous dress for strange disguises. Some went down wells, some descended into the filth of the sewers, and others climbed into smoky rafters or sat in total silence under close-packed roofs.

"To some, just as terrifying as the executioners were wives or children with whom they were not on good terms, or ex-slaves and slaves, or creditors, or neighboring landowners who coveted their estates."

The triumvirs even swapped relatives: Lepidus gave up his brother, Antony gave up an uncle and Octavian gave up his old teacher and guardian.

After about 2,300 heads had been collected, they still didn't have enough money.

"The proscription was not as effective as its designers had intended," Everitt explains. "Much less money was made than had been expected, for too much land and built property came on the market at the same time and prices collapsed."

Don't you hate it when that happens?  ¶ 2:01 PM 0 comments

  A Thrifty Campaigner When Abraham Lincoln was running for the Illinois Legislature in 1832, according to Paul M. Angle, author of The Lincoln Reader, Joshua Speed handed him $200, raised by Whig supporters, to cover his campaign expenses.

After the election was over, and Lincoln had won his seat, he handed Speed $199.25, requesting that he return it to the subscribers.

"I did not need the money," he said. "I made the canvass on my own horse; my entertainment, being at the houses of friends, cost me nothing; and my only outlay was seventy-five cents for a barrel of cider, which some farm hands insisted I should treat them to."  ¶ 7:37 PM 0 comments

  Isabella, Jim and Ring Ascend Long's Peak One her trip through Colorado in 1873, Isabella Bird finally arrived at her long-sought destination, Estes Park. She had hoped to climb "The American Matterhorn," Long's Peak, but it was late in the year and the weather seemed to be against it.

But then the weather cleared and "Mountain Jim" Nugent volunteered to take her up, with two surly young men tagging along for some unknown reason. In "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains," she has some brilliant descriptions of the scenery, as well as this sketch of her companion:

"Jim was a shocking figure; he had on a pair of high boots, with a baggy pair of old trousers made of deer hide, held on by an old scart tucked into them; a leather shirt, with three or four ragged unbuttoned waistcoats over it; an old smashed wideawake [hat], from under which his tawny, neglected ringlets hung; and with his one eye [a grizzly bear tore out the other], his one long spur, his knife in his belt, his revolver in his waistcoat pocket, his saddle covered with an old beaver skin, from which the paws hungs down; his camping blanket behind him, his rifle laid across the saddle in front of him, and his axe, canteen, and other gear hanging to the horn, he was as awful-looking a ruffian as one could see."

They get to the timberline and Jim makes a fire and they drink tea from meat tins and eat strips of beef reeking with pine smoke under a "big half moon hung out of the heavens."

"'Treat Jim as a gentleman and you'll find him one,' I had been told; and though his manner was certainly bolder and freer than that of gentlemen generally, no imaginary fault could be found. He was very agreeable as a man of culture as well as a child of nature; the desperado was altogether out of sight. He was very courteous and kind to me, which was fortunate, as the young men had little idea of showing even ordinary civilities.

"That night I made the acquaintance of his dog 'Ring,' said to be the best hunting dog in Colorado, with the body and legs of a collie, but a head approaching that of a mastiff, a noble face with a wistful human expression, and the most truthful eyes I ever saw in an animal.

"His master loves him if he loves anything, but in his savage moods ill-treats him. Ring's devotion never swerves, and his truthful eyes are rarely taken off his master's face. He is almost human in his intelligence, and, unless he is told to do so, he never takes notice of anyone but Jim.

"In a tone as if speaking to a human being, his master, pointing to me, said, 'Ring, go to that lady, and don't leave her again tonight.'

"Ring at once came to me, looked into my face, laid his head on my shoulder, and then lay down beside me with his head on my lap, but never taking his eyes from Jim's face.

"The long shadows of the pines lay upon the frosted grass, an aurora leaped fitfully, and the moonlight, though intensely bright, was pale beside the red, leaping flames of our pine logs and their red glow upon our gear, ourselves, and Ring's truthful face."

Like a lot of other people, I had a tough time with this book the first time through, but now I feel that Isabella and Mountain Jim and Ring are dear old friends.  ¶ 3:33 PM 0 comments

  The Germs' Point of View Another interesting section of Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is the section on disease. As I mentioned, the whole of this hefty volume is dedicated to explaining "why different peoples ended up with disparate degrees of power and affluence," and a big part of the answer relates to disease.

About 95 percent of the population of North and South America was killed by diseases brought by Europeans. Why, Diamond asks, didn't European traders and conquistadores bring back diseases fatal to Europeans?

The only disease that is even suspected of going from America to Europe is syphilis, and its origin is still a subject of debate. Voltaire has a funny joke about it in Candide (a very funny book) where the bishop got it from the choirboy who got it from the chambermaid who got it from a sailor who sailed with Christopher Columbus -- or something like that.

Anyway, Diamond answers this question very systematically, by looking at the microbes' point of view. "After all," he writes, "microbes are as much a product of natural selection as we are. What evolutionary benefit does a microbe derive from making us sick in bizarre ways, like giving us genital sores or diarrhea?"

Turns out germs are a lot like corporations with inventive new marketing strategies.

"Microbes evolved to feed on the nutrients within our own bodies, and they don't have wings to let them reach a new victim's body once the original victim is dead or resistant."

"From our perspective, the open genital sores caused by venereal diseases like syphilis are a vile indignity. From the microbes' point of view they're just a useful device to enlist the host's help in inoculating microbes into a body cavity of a new host."

That nagging cough that you find so annoying is just an effective marketing strategy to launch a cloud of microbes toward prospective new hosts. Other microbes hitch a ride on fleas and ticks. Others contaminate soil and water through human waste.

But the strategy that really takes the cake is the rabies virus which drives a dog victim into a frenzy of biting to transmit the virus in its saliva to other hosts.

Diamond goes on to explain why Europeans and Asians, because they had huge herds of large mammals, developed a collective "evolutionary immunity" as people who were genetically more resistant to the major killers -- smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles and cholera -- tended to survive.

Then they also developed immune system responses like the dairy maids who had been exposed to cowpox and were therefore immune to smallpox.

There's a lot more to it -- how some diseases came to be restricted to humans, how epidemics travel around the world -- but although the explanation is protracted, it's all very understandable, even for a dummy like me.  ¶ 1:54 PM 0 comments

  Mridula's Photo of the Taj Mahal


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  Putting Bread in Your Head It's really fun to read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, but a lot of people, myself included, find it a bit much to take all at one go. It's basically a comprehensive history of the human race.

Every domesticated plant or animal is discussed and there are tables showing when and where they were first domesticated. All innovations considered to be advances in human society are chronicled in the same way: agriculture, irrigation, specialization of labor, writing, metal smithing, navigation, sanitation... (notice he does not include religion, nor would I).

And he brings in evidence from so many different areas of science, as I mentioned in a previous post, and he takes it step by step so even a dummy like me can understand it if I take the time.

But it's such a huge volume, I have more fun diving in - in medias res, as it were - and picking out little manageable chunks.

I've just been reading about the development of writing - fascinating stuff. The way societies went from pictograms (one symbol per word, therefore thousands of symbols) to syllabaries (one word per syllable, therefore hundreds of symbols) to a system of consonants with little doodads on them to suggest vowels to modern alphabets in which each letter stands for a phonetic sound, so you have a manageable number of letters.

Our own alphabet comes from the Phoenicians, who invented most of the consonants, and the Greeks, who invented most of the vowels, and the Romans, who took it all and made it their own, as they were wont to do with everything else.

But the earliest forms of writing, in ancient Sumer and Mycenae and a few other places, were really only for one purpose: collecting and keeping track of taxes, so they were mostly pictographic nouns - number of cows, sheep and pigs owed by so and so - and they didn't lend themselves to rendering actual speech.

"The texts were merely accounting reports in a telegraphic shorthand devoid of grammatical elements," he writes. "Gradually, the forms of the signs became more abstract... New signs were created by combining old signs to to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat."

Makes sense when you think about it.  ¶ 5:02 PM 0 comments