I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought

The Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology explains that the pictured cross shape is carried far back in tradition and myth and "represents to the Dakota the four winds, which issue from the four caverns in which the souls of men existed before their incarnation in the human body.  All medicine men, i.e., conjurers and magicians, recollect their previous dreamy life in those places and the instructions then received from the gods, demons, and sages.  They recollect and describe their preexistent life, but only dream and speculate as to the future life beyond the grave.

"The top of the cross is the cold all-conquering giant, the North-wind, most powerful of all.  It is worn on the body nearest the head, the seat of intelligence and conquering devices.

"The right arm covers the heart; it is the East-wind, coming from the seat of life and love.

"The foot is the melting burning South-wind, indicating, as it is worn, the seat of fiery passion.

"The left arm is the gentle West-wind, blowing from the spirit land, covering the lungs, from which the breath at last goes out, gently, but into unknown night.

"The center of the cross is the earth and man, moved by the conflicting influences of the gods and winds."

(Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, pp. 724-25.)

"Anything is possible, unless it is proved impossible.  And sometimes even then."  From the missing last chapter to Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, revealing the marvelous, eerie finale to the mystery of the story.  See The Secret of Hanging Rock.

Here's an emergency tip for writers.  If your confidence is ebbing, mention a better novel in your first sentence and note how a famous author would have handled your story better.  Yes, this is the actual opening to Plain Speaking by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, 1882.

"Eventually things fall back into a state of China." —Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus

"For it is never the individual but life itself which shatters its own magic mirror."  From "Reflected Radiance" in Wayside Tales, 1922.

We wonder if they make textbooks like this anymore.  (Besides the ones we write, of course.)  By only the fourth question, there's an elf.  From The Miller-Kinkead Lessons in English, 1914.   Also of interest: How to Believe in Your Elf.

It's all in a day's work around here: "There were abstract equations to be worked out; difficult analyses to be made; mystical keys to be fitted to still more mystical complications; and the whole so blended and woven together, that the loss of a single link of the marvellous chain would destoy all hope of ever attaining the wished-for result."  From Leonard Kip's "The Secret of Apollonius Septrio," Hannibal's Man and Other Tales, 1878.

M. asked us, "How can one become physically beautiful at least for a brief moment before death."  We find our four-pronged answer in E. N. Kirk's "How to Become Beautiful" (1846).

M. replied, "You did it!  Great answer.  You're some sort of magician with magic scrolls.  Thank you beautiful wiz!"

"It's never too late to be who you might have been." —George Eliot

"I did not say it was possible; I only said it was true." —Dumas, or Sir Astley Cooper, or "the Fool in the play," or a character in The Castle Spectre, or [in actuality] Florent Carton Dancourt, Le Chevalier à La Mode, 1687 (as popularly translated into English).

The phrase "what clowns drink" is a Googlewhack, but here's your answer.  And this is what it looks like to be "off the [circus] wagon."  From a 1908 ad in Jugend.

It's a brittle thing, to be sure.  Life Beyond the Grave: Described by a Spirit Through a Writing Medium, 1877.

Even if the Loch Ness Monster is an automaton, as Ure's Dictionary of 1846 suggests, "Does it then follow that the automaton possesses a freedom of action, a freedom of will?  Yes, we should think that it has a certain freedom of action (the freedom of will we had better leave aside because here the analogy is doubtful at present)" (I. G. Makarov, Cybernetics Today, 1984).

Perhaps for each and every doomsayer throughout history there has been a J. G. Broughton Pegg to remind us of The Improbability of the Destruction of the Earth (1829).

Can you make out the Dickens quotation that serves as the motto?  There was a time when even so-called pseudo-science sought nothing but "facts, facts, facts."  Today, we're hard pressed to name any institution that could in good faith adopt such a motto.  The media?  Political pollsters?  Climatologists?  Any other white-coat wearer of what Robert Anton Wilson dubbed the New Inquisition?  Selections from the Papers of the Phasmatological Society, 1882.

If there's a skull lock and you forgot your skeleton key, try working a beam of light into the mechanism.  Recall how "She springs a light, / Unlocks the door" (Dryden).  Similarly, "Morning with its key of light / Unlocks the dusky portals of the night" (Albert Laighton, Poems, 1878).  And "My light unlocks the stalls, / two dozen and one windows open— / all, except the window of the moon, / already painted on as shining" (Jane Shore, Eye Level, 1977).

"Golf is like billiards.  Do not confuse it with baseball." —Charles Evans, Jr., "My Daily Dozen," Golfers Magazine, 1922

Here we learn where a ghost's true reception chamber is, where a ghost draws its nectar, as well as why a sanitary engineer is your only exorcist: "There are many houses in Great Britain which have inherited evil reputations; there is a 'ghost's room,' or 'a ghost's corridor,' or 'a ghost's tower,' or 'a ghost's terrace.'  The true ghost's walk is, however, in the basement; amongst and through foetid drains and foul sewers, the ghost's reception-chambers are ancient cesspools, and the ghost's nectar is drawn from tainted wells and neglected water cicterns.  There are British ghosts; but there are also continental ghosts, if possible, more terrible: the chilling palaces of Italy, the gilded splendours of Paris, are alike ghost-haunted.  Your only exorcist is the sanitary engineer."  From All the Year Round, 1861.