VANITIES
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
—II Corinthians 4:8
7019 Mirage In Museum
A small room having walls that have to be touched to be believed was on exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Acquired from a 15th-century Italian palace, its walls contain 12 wooden cupboards whose open doors reveal on the shelves about 100 objects, including an hourglass, a celestial globe, books and musical instruments. The wall space around the cupboards is paneled and benches line the sides of the room.
However, it is all an optical illusion—a flat surface on which the uncanny perspective and shadows are produced by inlays of more than 500,000 pieces of wood in a vast variety of shapes and colors. So convincing is the three-dimensional effect that nearsighted visitors occasionally attempt to sit on the benches.
—Selected
7020 Medals For Sale
Nothing better illustrates the declaration of the apostle that “all the glory of man is the flower of the field” than the display in a pawnshop of the following list of medals for sale:
French Croix de Guerre $2.00
American Distinguished Service Medal 10.00
Belgian Croix de Guerre 2.00
French Legion d’ Honneur 12.00
German Iron Cross 1.00
Mons Star (1914) 1.00
Mons Star (1915) .50
Italian War Cross 3.00
If poverty has compelled the living to thus part with this badge of a nation’s honor, only a deep sense of sacrificial service rendered can neutralize the bitterness that almost necessarily lurks in the heart.
7021 Creators Of “Superman”
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were shy, thin youths with glasses in 1933 when they created the man of steel who would become a multi-million dollar hero: Superman.”
Siegel and Shuster are old men today, living on pennies and memories.
They have no royalties because they signed over their rights to Superman in 1938 for $130.
Siegel says he can’t bear to watch the old Superman television series and it pains him to see kids reading comic books on the Man of Steel.
Shuster said that in 1966 he stood on the sidewalk on the opening night of the broadway musical, “Superman.” “I couldn’t afford the price of a premiere ticket,” he said. “I just huddled out there, while the celebrities arrived and everyone gawked at them. I couldn’t get in to see our own creation.”
7022 Fading Of “Last Supper”
Upon the large fresco of “The Last Supper” at Milan, Da Vinci was engaged at least ten years. It is said that he often spent whole days so absorbed that he forgot to eat. Then for days he would only come and stand before it with folded arms, as if criticizing it. Sometimes he would hasten in the heat of midday from the cathedral, add a touch or two to his picture, and immediately return.
Unfortunately he mixed his colors with oil—a fatal innovation—so that in the course of a few centuries it has been repaired no less than three times. With strange insensibility the monks allowed the lower portion of the central group to be destroyed in order to make a door in the wall; and Napoleon’s dragoons not only made the refectory a stable, but amused themselves throwing brickbats at the apostles.
It is now a ruin, but one can form an idea of its merit from the copy made by Marco Uggione, one of Leonardo’s best pupils, and which is now in the Royal Academy, London.
—Selected
7023 Bowler’s Woe
This woe came to Julian Levitch in Memphis, Tennessee. A wobbly No. 5 pin that stayed up prevented this magnificent bowler from being $10,000 richer. Levitch threw eleven straight strikes at Park Bowling Lanes on a Saturday night and on his final ball, one pin swayed but wouldn’t fall. He ended with 299. The Park Bowling Lanes has a standing offer of $10,000 to any player—in open or league competition—who bowls the perfect 300 game.
7024 Allergic Queen
Olympia, Washington (UPI)—Miss Becky Alexander, 18, the 1973 Washington Wheat Queen, had an embarrassing confession to make before the State Senate—she’s allergic to wheat.
“I’m probably the only wheat queen in history who is allergic to wheat,” she told the lawmakers. She immediately put down a sheaf of what she had been carrying.
7025 “I Detest Music”
At one time Leopold Stokowski conducted a series of concerts in Paris. As time went on he became aware of a deeper and deeper expression of gloom on the concertmaster’s face, until finally, curious as to the cause of such profound melancholy, Stokowski began to question the man.
“Tell me, my friend,” he said, “why are you so unhappy? Are you having domestic troubles, or do you feel unwell? Or perhaps you’re in some financial difficulty?”
“No, no,” growled the concertmaster, “I detest music!”
7026 “Don’t Want To Be Secretary”
The Perfect Secretary had been chosen out of 5000 business-college contestants from all over Britain. Pamela MacAllister stood out a mile, the judges agreed. Her typing and shorthand were expert. She had “vitality, charm, courtesy, intelligence, etc.” Awarded the prize, Pam was brought to the dais to cries of “Speech!” She had something to say and said it: “I don’t want to be a secretary.”
—Clipper
7027 Half-Finished Painting
A. C. Dixon tells us that when the great artist Raphael died at the early age of 37, some of his friends and relatives carried his marvelous painting “The Transfiguration” in the funeral procession. It was only partially finished, and they felt that because of his youth and the limited time he was allotted to use his creative genius, it was a symbol of life’s shortness. But the completed picture has a deeper meaning—a message that should impress itself upon all of us: life’s sojourn is fleeting and death sometimes terminates even our best efforts.
—Henry G. Bosch
7028 Other Unfinished Works
Visitors may see in the study at Abbotsford the last words written by Sir Walter Scott in his journal: “Tomorrow we shall … ” The entry was never finished. Franz Schubert left his great “Unfinished Symphony,” and Charles Dickens laid down his pen in the midst of writing a novel, and students have wondered ever since how the work would have ended.
—James Hastings
7029 A Suicide’s View
A few years ago a famous writer committed suicide. He was only 62 at the time. He was world-famous as an author.
Shortly before he took his own life, he said to a friend:
“What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t got any of them. Do you understand? None of them.”
7030 “Here Lies (Napoleon)”
The body of Napoleon I, exhumed from its plain, wooden casket in October 1840, (19 years after his death) had not decomposed although his leather boots had rotted off.
The stone above his tomb on St. Helena had on it only the word “CI-GIT”—or “HERE LIES!” He had requested a simple burial, that his ashes be spread on the banks of the Seine near the people he loved … But his final resting place was the Ornate Hotel des Invalides.
7031 One Mourner Showed Up
Not for nothing did the jet-set society earn its sobriquet. People arrive and depart from it with supersonic suddenness, though few have managed to do so as discretely as Talitha Getty, the glamorous 31-year-old wife of Paul Getty, Jr. After she died of what police said was barbiturate poisoning, a Roman funeral was held for Talitha.
One unidentified woman came; no one else seemed to care. Commenting on the absence of husband, father, in-laws, friends and flowers, one of Talitha’s acquaintances mumbled, “She wouldn’t want us to do something so uselessly sad.”
7032 Mozart’s Burial
Mozart’s body was lowered into a pauper’s grave, and no loving eye to note the spot. A few friends went as far as the church, deterred from going farther by a storm. The widow was ill and seemed indifferent as to the disposition of the remains, and on inquiry it was impossible to learn where the grave had been dug.
7033 Alexander The Great’s Funeral
Alexander the Great, we are told, being upon his deathbed, commanded that, when he was carried forth to the grave, his hands should not be wrapped, as was usual, in the gravecloths, but should be left outside the bier, so that all men might see them, and might see that they were empty; that there was nothing in them. He was born to one empire, and the conqueror of another; the possessor while he lived, of two worlds, of the East, and of the West, and of the treasures of both, yet now when he was dead could retain not even the smallest portion of these treasures. The poorest beggar and he were at length upon equal terms.
7034 “I’ve Got The Bones”
The golden, jeweled coffin containing the bones of Charlemagne was returned to Aachen in a United States Army truck after having been removed from the Aachen Cathedral in 1939 for safekeeping. They came back home, bouncing on the floor of a U.S. Army truck. It was almost nightfall when the telephone rang in the office of the Aachen military government. Major Jack Bradford of Minneapolis, Minnesota, said to be Governor of Aachen, heard the voice at the other end say: “I’ve got the bones with me. Where will I put them?” That is how the remains of Europe’s most famous “displaced person” arrived back home.
7035 Talleyrand’s Brain
Victor Hugo tells this story: The doctors embalmed the corpse. After the manner of the ancient Egyptians, they removed the bowels and brains. After having transformed Prince Talleyrand into a mummy, and having nailed it up in a coffin, lined with white satin, they went away, leaving on the table that brain which had thought so much, inspired so many men, constructed so many ambitious edifices, managed two revolutions, deceived twenty kings, and held the world in check.
“The doctors gone, the servant entered and saw what they had left. Not knowing that it was wanted, and regarding it as a loathsome object, he gathered it together and threw it into the sewer in front of the house.”
7036 Why Xerxes Wept
The army which Xerxes conducted against Greece consisted of seventeen hundred thousand men, besides a numerous fleet. When the Persian monarch beheld, from an eminence, the Hellespont covered with his ships and the plains of Abydos filled with his troops of different nations he pronounced himself happy.
Immediately after, however, he began to weep; and being asked by his uncle why he wept, surrounded as he was by so much glory, he replied, that he wept to think that of the vast crowd which he then beheld not one individual would be living in a hundred years.
—Walter Baxendale
7037 Remains Of “Seven Wonders”
About all that remains of the so-called “Seven Wonders” of the ancient world are as follows:
The only remains of the tomb of Mausolus, built in 350 B.C., are now exhibited in the British Museum.
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, once the center of the fertility cult of Diana, was probably destroyed in A.D. 262 by the Goths. This was about 200 years after the city was visited by Paul.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon grow no more. They adorned one of the world’s spectacular cities during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon’s ruins have been found on the Euphrates River, about fifty-five miles south of modern Baghdad.
The magnificent statue of Zeus once stood forty-feet high in the city of Olympus where the Olympian games were held every four years. During Byzantine times plunderers dragged off and burned the huge statue.
King Ptolemy’s famous lighthouse near Alexandria, Egypt, was built 200-feet-square at the base. It crumpled during a fourteenth-century earthquake.
The Colossus of Rhodes met the same fate in 224 B.C. It was originally a giant 100-foot statue of Apollo that spanned the harbor on the isle of Rhodes.
Only the pyramids, built before the time of Moses, have survived the ravages of time. They were built as tombs for the pharaohs who fully expected to be revived after death.
7038 Shattered Statue
“Ozymandias” by Shelley, tells of a traveler from an ancient land. He says he saw in a desert country the remains of a huge statue, two vast stone legs standing, and on the sand, half sunk, he saw a shattered head whose ugly, sneering face accurately portrayed its original. On the pedestal he read the proud lines: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Many centuries had worn down the statue, this was all that remained.
No matter how carefully a proud despot may try to be remembered forever, he will finally be conquered by time. Nothing in this world is immutable. Pride will go down before time.
7039 Temple Of Diana Now
The Temple of Diana is the most faded of all Ephesus’ glories. Today all that remains of the Temple are only a few broken bits of column lying in a shallow depression.
Concerning this temple, an ancient writer said, “I have seen the Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes, the immense pyramids, and the mausoleum, but when my eyes turned on the Temple of Diana at Ephesus all the other wonders of the world lost their brilliance.”
7040 The Great Leveling In France
During the old French Revolution of 1793 the royal tombs in the crypt of the magnificent Abbey of St. Denis, near Paris, were all opened by the republicans. The treasures of the coffins were taken out, consisting of silver sceptres, coronets, rings, and other articles; the lead coffins were melted down to make bullets.
And the bones and bodies of the sovereigns that had reigned over France for fourteen centuries were all thrown into a pit near the church, and the grass grows over their common grave.
—Denton
7041 Most Beautiful Woman
Betsey Patterson of Baltimore was regarded as the most beautiful woman in America, and the charm of her beauty was acknowledged in the highest circles of Europe. In 1804 Napoleon’s youngest brother, on a visit to America, became infatuated with Elizabeth and married her; but the marriage was afterward annulled through the influence of Napoleon.
Toward the end of her remarkable career, Betsey Patterson said, “Once I had everything but money. Now I have nothing but money.” Writing in middle life to a friend, she confessed, “I am dying with ennui. I am tired of reading, and of all my ways of killing time. I doze away my existence. I am too old to croquet, and without this stimulus I die of ennui. The Princess Gallitizin tries to keep me up to the toil of dressing by telling me I am a beauty. I am tired of life, and tired of having lived.”
Such was the melancholy confession of a woman who had great beauty of body and delighted to adorn that body, but had no inner beauty of the soul.
7042 “Alabama!”
There is a tradition of an Indian chief who with his tribe fled before the prairie fires, till he had crossed a broad river, when he struck his tent-pole into the ground, and cried, “Alabama!” (Here we may rest!) He was no prophet. Hostile tribes overpowered them, and they found only graves where they sought a home.
—Foster
7043 Scott’s Business Failure
In 1825, at the height of his fame, surrounded by his family and friends, Scott was living at Abbotsford, his “romance in stoen.” In that year his printing house failed and left him in debt more than a hundred thousand pounds. In his diary of that period we find such entries as this: “Naked we entered the world and naked we leave it; blessed be the name of the Lord”; “I have walked my last in the domains I have planted—sat the last time in the halls I have built. But death would have taken them from me if misfortune had spared them.”
With splendid courage he took arms against a sea of troubles and began to write the new romances which were to clear his house of debt. Year after year he toiled on, until his health gave way under the strain, and still he continued to write until death stilled the wand of his imagination.
—C. E. Macartney
7044 Paying Too Much For Whistle
When Ben Franklin was seven years old, friends gave him copper pennies for his birthday. He took the money and bought himself a toy whistle. At home he made so much noise with it that he disturbed the whole family. They told him he had paid four times what the whistle was worth. In tears, he learned a lesson that he remembered all his life. It curbed a desire to spend money foolishly.
When he observed the actions of men later in his life, he often thought, they are paying too much for the whistle. Most of life’s miseries, he decided, were caused by a false estimate of the value of things. This wise philosophy could well be applied today in our homes, schools, churches, and nations.
—Charlotte Carpenter
7045 Surviving Signboard’s Failure
On a main business street of Yokohama the leading art store exhibited this sign: “The wealth that cannot perish. Put your money in curios!” After an earthquake, when the shop was a wreck and the curios were rubbish, the sign still survived—a cynical commentary!
7046 African Ad Misses The “Times”
The New York Times carried this advertisement for the little country of Sierra Leone:
“The climate for investment is made all the more encouraging by the political stability of the country—unsurpassed in twentieth-century Africa.”
Though a proud boast, it was for the moment “a legitimate one.” Experts had predicted that after the election “that country would be the first of the new Black African nations to change its government by means of ballots, rather than bullets.…”
Instead, by the time Times got around to running the ad, Sierra Leone already had acquired the dubious distinction of being the tenth African country in two years to be taken over by a military coup.”
—Prairie Overcomer
7047 White House Transients
Calvin Coolidge was walking with a Senator friend across from the White House when the Senator pointed to the executive mansion and asked facetiously, “Wonder who lives there?”
“Nobody,” replied Cal. “They only come and go.”
—Chester A. Wilson
7048 President’s Simple Choice
When President Johnson stopped overnight at the Chicago Hilton, the staff pulled out all stops in planning for the one meal he was to have at the hotel: breakfast. Three special chefs reported at 4 a.m., and the breakfast menu was carefully planned around their talents. The hour came at last, and with it the order for the Presidential breakfast—corn flakes and coffee.
—Selected
7049 Skull In The Picture
One of the great prizes of the National Gallery is a picture by Holbein entitled “The Ambassadors.” It is a picture which, in its colouring, its accessories, its sumptuous surroundings, as well as the rank, dignity and learning its two figures represent, makes it a symbol of all the world has to offer. The two ambassadors are men of powerful influence, they have all that the world can give—the ease which comes from high rank; the culture which comes through education of the faculties, suggested by the mathematical instruments, the globe, the flute, and the music book.
It might be taken as a picture representing the triumph of “pomp and circumstance,” were it not for a strange object which the artist has painted on the floor of the sumptuous apartment. This is the “anamorphosis” or perspectively distorted image of a human skull, which, touching the floor on the left, stretches obliquely upward toward the right. It is the artist’s commentary upon life. Remember, O man, he seems to say, that thou art mortal. The world passeth away. He only that doeth the will of God shall abide forever.
—James Burns
7050 Round And Round The Vase
Fabre tells us that he got a procession of caterpillars started around the rim of a big palm vase. Now, a caterpillar leaves a trail of silk behind it that acts as a lifeline to guide it back from the gazing grounds to the nest. But Fabre cut this line where it reached the rim, and the caterpillars, completing the circle of the rim of the vase, guided by the lifeline they had left unwittingly behind, started around again.
All day long they marched around and around, a solid ring of caterpillars, each with its head to the tail of the one who went before. Fabre says: “Far into the night they still journeyed on, slaves to their lifeline and bound to follow the one ahead.
The next day they resumed their patient march. The third, the fourth, the fifth day and night they went. The sixth night, the seventh day, the seventh night, and still the go-around that was far from merry, kept on, and with its marchers as footsore and weary as were ever members of Stonewall Jackson’s foot calvary or John J. Pershing’s heroes of the Argonne drive.
—Robert G. Lee
7051 Man Who Lost Both Ways
An old man of Chou, sitting by the roadside, was very downhearted and depressed. A passer-by, who wanted to know the cause of the old man’s state, asked, “Why do you look so sad and sorrowful?”
The old man replied, “It is because I have missed all the opportunities of my life. When I was young the trend of the time was to regard men who were scholars in high esteem and offer them the best positions, so I studied. But when I became a scholar, the custom of the time was then to prefer only old men rather than young ones. Yet again the age looked up to youth and ignored the old. Now I am old; it is impossible for me to regain my youth, and I am still out of place. These changes have been the cause of my exceeding sorrow.”
—Lun Heng
7052 Epigram On Vanities
• Those who live must die, those who meet must part.
—Japanese Proverb
• Meeting is the beginning of parting.
—Japanese Proverbs
• Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.
—Benjamin Disraeli
• Every day the world turns over on someone who had just been sitting on top of it.
• Napoleon summarized his own fading fame in a single sentence: “I am doing now what will fill thousands of volumes in this generation; in the next, one volume will contain it all; in the third, a paragraph; in the fourth, a single line.”
See also: Man ; Progress ; Uncertainty, Spirit of.