Futility Closet - 263-Memories of Proust

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a keyboard calendar to some transplanted confederates. This is episode 263. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Confined in a Soviet prison camp in 1941, Polish painter Józef Chomsky chose a unique way to cope. He lectured to the other prisoners on Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time. In today's show, we'll describe Chomsky's ambitious

Starting point is 00:00:41 project and the surprising importance of literature to the prisoners of oppressive regimes. We'll also raise some lemons and puzzle over a woman's birthdays. Josef Chomsky's early circumstances were so cosmopolitan that he scarcely had a nationality. He was born in Prague in 1896 to an aristocratic family in Belarus, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He identified with his father's Polish heritage, but his mother was Austrian, he spoke French with his governess, and he became fluent also in Russian. He had a fine sensibility and developed an early interest in painting. After studying law in St. Petersburg

Starting point is 00:01:25 and serving as a cavalry officer in World War I, he studied fine arts in Krakow and moved to Paris to paint. He spent seven formative years there, circulating in a heady society of artists and writers in the 1920s, then returned to Warsaw, where he was finally establishing himself as an artist and critic when the world turned upside down. Both Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939, starting World War II. Chomsky rejoined the cavalry as a reserve officer, but was captured and found himself a captive in a series of Soviet prison camps. He learned later that nearly all the 22,000 officers and cadets who had been captured with him had been executed summarily by the Soviet secret police. They were part of the Polish intelligentsia, the educated classes that preserved the culture, and Hitler and Stalin wanted to decapitate Polish society so that it could be ruled easily.

Starting point is 00:02:13 For reasons that still aren't clear, Chomsky and 395 others were spared and sent to Gradsowiec, the site of a demolished Orthodox convent 250 miles from Moscow, where they were held by the NKVD, the state security police. They were nearly all that remained of Poland's military leadership. Chomsky's story was almost unknown to speakers of English until just last year, when the painter and author Eric Karpelis published a biography, which includes a remarkable episode that took place at that camp. At Grozowiec, the prisoners were interrogated ruthlessly and forced to work outside in bitterly cold conditions. They were freezing, starving, and exhausted from overwork. But they reacted to this in a curious way. They organized an ongoing series of evening lectures. This must

Starting point is 00:02:56 have seemed strange to their guards. Organizing the lectures cost them time and effort that they could scarcely spare, and it had no immediate practical benefit. But they had done the same thing clandestinely at another prison camp, Starobilsk, a year earlier. Chopsky wrote, there we tried to take up a kind of intellectual work that would help us overcome our depression and anguish, and to protect our brains from the rust of inactivity. At Krasovets, the prison was constantly trying to break them down and convert them to Bolshevism. The men were miserable, but they were well-educated and intellectually curious, and they wanted to fight back against the deadening effects of their incarceration. Chomsky wrote,

Starting point is 00:03:31 The joy of participating in an intellectual undertaking that gave us proof that we were still capable of thinking and reacting to matters of the mind, things then bearing no connection to our present reality, cast a rose-colored light on those hours spent in the former convent's dining hall, that strangest of schoolrooms, where a world we had feared lost to us forever was revived. Each evening before they retired to their bunks, the men heard from a speaker who chose a subject close to his heart. None of them had access to books or other research materials, so each of them spoke about what he remembered best. A former Polish newspaper editor lectured on the history of human migration. A mountaineer remembered his expeditions in South America. A Warsaw professor discussed the history of architecture. All of them were looking for topics that might expand their minds, lift

Starting point is 00:04:15 their spirits, and distract them from their wretched circumstances and uncertain future. Chomsky proposed at first to talk about the evolution of French painting, but as he set about preparing for those talks, he changed his mind and decided to discuss the French writer Marcel Proust and his novel In Search of Lost Time. In Paris, Chopsky had begun reading French literature barely a year after Proust had passed away, and his network of acquaintances in the city included several of Proust's old friends. He had been put off at first by the novel, but tried again a few months later and fell deeply in love with it. That was in the spring of 1926. He was suffering from typhoid fever.

Starting point is 00:04:50 He wrote later, I would spend all day stretched out on a chaise longue baking in the sun. There I opened Proust, beginning with Albertine disparu, and plunged into his work. I read him all the time. That experience had changed him forever, and he wanted to share it. But to explain this now to an audience of starving, louse-infested, frostbitten prisoners of war seemed impossible. The two most famous things about Proust's novel are that it's long, more than a million words, and that it concerns memory, involuntary memory, or what's sometimes called Proustian memory. In the most famous scene, the main character eats a tea-soaked cake. Its flavor summons a childhood memory of eating tea-soaked cake with his aunt.

Starting point is 00:05:37 At first, the memory is fleeting, quote, as though all Combré had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night. But gradually he finds that more details reveal themselves until he can recall the whole of the village and its surroundings. Chopsky didn't have any of Proust's text available to him, so now, ironically, in a freezing prison camp 2,000 miles from Paris, he found himself summoning it from memory. As with the tea-soaked cake, he learned not to force himself to remember the book, but to let it come it from memory. As with the tea-soaked cake, he learned not to force himself to remember the book, but to let it come back to him. He wrote,

Starting point is 00:06:09 After a certain length of time, facts and details emerge on the surface of our consciousness, which we had not the slightest idea were filed away somewhere in our brains. These memories, rising from the subconscious, are fuller, more intimately, more personally tied one to the other. I came to understand why the importance and the creativity of Proust's involuntary memory is so often emphasized. I observed how distance, distance from books, newspapers, and millions of intellectual impressions of normal life, stimulates the memory. Far away from anything that could recall Proust's world, my memories of him, at the beginning so tenuous, started growing stronger, and then suddenly with even more power and clarity, completely independent of my will. To prepare for the talks, he mapped out the universe of Proust on the pages of some

Starting point is 00:06:49 cheap exercise books. He had decided to give his talks in French, but he prepared his notes in Polish, and we still have these, a map of the galaxy of Chomsky's cultured impressions of a sprawling seven-volume novel. He wrote not in text, but in complex diagrams invoking writers, philosophers, musicians, painters, historical figures, and literary characters. He said that preparing all this brought him pleasure. Quote, from those gloomy depths, the hours spent with memories of Proust, Delacroix, Degas seemed to me among the happiest of hours.

Starting point is 00:07:18 At last he was ready. He wrote later, I recall with gratitude that around 40 of my companions gathered for my French lectures. They came into that chamber at twilight, dressed in fufaika and wet shoes. Fufaika are quilted cotton jackets that the prisoners were given. I can still see them packed together underneath the portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, worn out after having worked outdoors in temperatures dropping as low as minus 45 degrees, listening intently to lectures on themes very far removed from the situation where we currently found ourselves. I thought then, with emotion, about Proust, in his overheated, cork-lined room. He would certainly have been surprised, and maybe even moved, to learn that

Starting point is 00:07:53 some Polish prisoners, following a whole day spent in the snow and the freezing cold, would be listening with keen interest, twenty years after he died, to the story of the Duchesse de Guermont, the death of Bergote, and anything else I could bring myself to recall from this world of precious psychological revelation and literary beauty. His audience had a limited familiarity with the novel, so he had to simplify it for them. He made comparisons to Russian literature and discussed the difficulties of translation, particularly into Polish. He explored the question whether Marcel the narrator is the same as Marcel the creator. Gradually, he introduced the main themes, relationships within families and between classes, love and jealousy, art, music, painting, and poetry, Henri Bergson, memory, death, and time. He used a light conversational tone, but the officers were exceedingly well-educated, so he could discuss Proust's translation of John Ruskin and the influence of Latin on his syntax.

Starting point is 00:08:44 he could discuss Proust's translation of John Ruskin and the influence of Latin on his syntax. Chopsky had recalled from memory this novel about memory, and our records of the lectures show that wherever he had quoted Proust in French, he was largely or entirely accurate. And in giving the lectures, he was himself making new memories. He said afterward that, for him, Proust was now enmeshed with Kratsovets. These men weren't discussing Proust's novel because they thought it was in danger of disappearing and that somehow it fell to them to preserve it. That wasn't the case, and in fact they themselves feared that they might be executed at any moment. They discussed the novel in order to exercise their minds, to think freely, to hold onto their individuality and personal memories, and to reject the ideology that their captors were pressing on

Starting point is 00:09:21 them. One of the aims of a totalitarian regime is to stop people from thinking altogether. Much later, in supporting the launch of a Polish magazine in 1977, Chomsky endorsed the aims of its editors, who were promoting an organ of progressive thought in the face of a repressive regime. They gave three reasons. One, the lack of freedom of speech and criticism paralyzes the growth of culture,

Starting point is 00:09:42 destroys its richness and its variety. Two, both the coerced silence and the coerced declarations at odds with inner convictions destroy the sense of personal dignity of a writer and a human being. And three, the thwarting of opportunity for public expression of thought and free discussion thwarts also the inclination and will to think. Fundamentally, Chomsky thought, the life of the mind, intellectual curiosity, and discourse was the essence of humanity. It was the flame of culture he was trying to keep alive at Krasovets. He saw this himself in his own reaction to books that sometimes circulated through the prison camps. He would find unexpected opportunities to read Thomas Hardy, Tolstoy, or Balzac, and said later,

Starting point is 00:10:18 I don't think I ever read with such attention. I admit with shame it was as if those experiences of literature for which I was so hungry were often more powerful than the fall of Paris or the bombing of London, which the Soviet radio reported with evident satisfaction. Other intellectuals have described sustaining themselves in captivity by feeding and sharing their love of literature. In a remote Siberian gulag, the Russian short story writer Varlam Shalamov unexpectedly found a volume of Proust's novel at the bottom of a package of clothing that had been sent to a doctor at the camp. He read it possessively, keeping it to himself until another prisoner stole it from him. He said later that Proust had been more valuable than sleep. The Russian author Yevgenia Ginzburg spent 18 years in the Gulag and credited Alexander

Starting point is 00:10:58 Pushkin with giving her strength. The Spanish writer Jorge Semprun was deported to Buchenwald for his role in the resistance. He said that reading books there, particularly Goethe and Jean Giraudot, had saved his life. At Auschwitz, Primo Levi strove to remember Dante's Inferno so he could recite it for an Alsatian companion. He found that while searching for the words, he could forget where he was. The Hungarian poet Georg Faludi was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp from 1949 to 1952. Like Chopsky, he gave evening seminars to other inmates on history, literature, and philosophy, quoting the primary texts from memory. One day, one of his listeners, Yoshka Borostoby, told him that he no longer wanted to participate.

Starting point is 00:11:37 He said, last night, while you were talking about the Platonic ideas, I suddenly realized that I had lost interest in intellectual matters. I think that in the future, I shall sleep more and think less. I shall live the life of the algae. Faludi wrote that at that moment he realized that Borastobi was close to death, not for physical reasons, but because he'd resigned himself to the thought of death. He asked himself, was it true that he who would not talk about Plato had to die? Did reciting Keats' poems immunize one against the bacilli?

Starting point is 00:12:03 Exactly a week later, Borostoby collapsed and died. Faludi survived the camp and lived to age 95. The Polish poet Alexander Vought was imprisoned in Moscow's Lubyanka prison while Chomsky had been at Kozowiec. Vought said that the essence of Stalinism is the poisoning of the inner man, but he wrote that reading books in prison had been, quote, one of the greatest experiences of my life, not because they allowed me an escape,

Starting point is 00:12:27 but because to a certain extent they transformed me, influenced, and shaped me greatly. It was the way I read those books. I came at them from a completely new angle, and from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything. He said that reading Proust had helped him to see that his entire value system had not been destroyed. And the German philologist Friedrich Olli was interned in a Russian work camp for nine years. When he managed to steal a Russian-German dictionary, he spent his time translating Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov into German. And he collaborated with a fellow prisoner, the classicist Heinrich Doria, on a poetic anthology. They gathered contributions from the memories of other prisoners who recited poetry ranging from Homer to contemporary German satire.

Starting point is 00:13:04 Olli and Doria then transcribed those verses onto paper sacks that had held cement, and using that as an original, made manuscript copies, writing them on cigarette paper and binding them with scraps of prison clothes. They circulated these as small, handheld volumes among the prisoners. Oli would later say that during his imprisonment it was poetry as much as food, water, and shelter that had kept him alive. We know about Chomsky's talks because after he presented them to the prisoners in early 1941, he gave them again in private to two friends who wrote them down. At some point, those two manuscripts were typed up,

Starting point is 00:13:37 and the typescripts somehow escaped the Soviet Union and made their way to Krakow, where they reside today in Chomsky's archive at the Prince's Chartorysky Library. made their way to Krakow, where they reside today in Chomsky's archive at the Prince's Chartorysky Library. Chomsky's original notebook with the diagrams has been lost, but fortunately it was photographed in 1987, so we have images. Together, these typescripts and photographs are the only surviving records of an act of obscure but extraordinary humanity that took place in a Soviet prison camp almost 80 years ago. If you're interested, Eric Karpeles, who wrote the English-language biography of Chomsky, also published a translation of the lectures themselves, including the images of Chomsky's notes. I'll put both of those books in the show notes. Shortly after Chomsky delivered the lectures, Germany invaded Russia and the prisoners were freed so they might help in the fight.

Starting point is 00:14:16 Afterward, Chomsky was tasked with finding out what had happened to his 22,000 fellow officers and learned that they'd been shot in the back of the head and dumped in mass graves in the Katyn forest and elsewhere. After he delivered that finding, he moved on to write for Polish army newspapers in Baghdad. When the war ended in 1945, he returned to France, where he continued painting, sketching, and writing until he was nearly blind. He died in 1993 at age 96, having witnessed nearly the whole of the 20th century. In the end, he seemed unwilling to leave it. A special coffin had been built to accommodate his tall frame, and it took four tries to lower it into the grave. What had supported him throughout that woeful century was what had supported him at Grazavets, the life of his own mind. Once in his later years, a relative found

Starting point is 00:15:00 him on the floor. He'd fallen and had lain there for hours, unable to get up. When she asked him how he'd occupied himself, he said, oh, no need to worry about me. I just lay there, perfectly happy, thinking about Proust. The puzzle in episode 257 was about, spoiler alert, a disaster that befell the excursion ship the SS Eastland, when, due to the weight of legally required lifeboats, it rolled onto its side at a dock in the Chicago River in 1915, leading to the death of 844 of its passengers. I had marveled at how I'd never heard of this disaster, and Greg agreed that you would think it would be much better known than it is. Martin Spencer wrote, I was surprised when you described the Eastland disaster as not well known, but I live in Chicago and I think a majority of people

Starting point is 00:16:01 here know about it. I think people are taken aback by the size of the disaster and the incredibly sad story behind it. One of the best things to do when visiting Chicago is the architectural boat cruise from the Chicago Architecture Foundation. It begins on the Chicago River near the site of the Eastland disaster. One of the first things you will hear about on the cruise is the Eastland. And Paul Chavone, loyal minion to feline overlords Al and Trip, wrote to our feline commander, Dear Sasha, At your convenience, would you please tell Greg and Sharon that,

Starting point is 00:16:33 as a longtime resident of Chicago, I was shocked that they hadn't heard of the SS Eastland disaster, which was, spoiler alert, the inspiration for the lateral thinking puzzle in episode 257. While it doesn't surprise me that the story of the Eastland isn't super well known outside of the Chicago area, I was surprised that you were both unaware of it since the accident took place at the Clark Street docks, which is exactly where the Christmas tree ship, discussed in episode 227, used to dock. Listening to that episode, I kept expecting to hear a mention of the Eastland since the Clark Street bridge where the dock used to be is usually connected with that ship. I kept expecting to hear a mention of the Eastland, since the Clark Street Bridge, where the dock used to be, is usually connected with that ship.

Starting point is 00:17:08 I'm sure it's not universal, but I think most Chicagoans have some familiarity with the Eastland's capsizing, which just marked its centennial in 2015. Stories of ghostly screams at the site of the disaster, or apparitions at the building, now a nightclub, that had to serve as a makeshift morgue due to the high death toll are very common here. The macabre irony is that unlike the well-known Eastland, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a Chicagoan who knows about the Christmas tree ship, despite it having once been such an institution. Even my partner, who owns and operates the Chicago Tour Company and is very well-versed in local history, had never heard of it. Ultimately, I guess it just adds credibility to your podcast intro, since you're about forgotten history, which, for better or worse, seems to be a more applicable label for the Christmas tree ship

Starting point is 00:17:55 than the Eastland. Please tell Greg and Sharon to keep up the good work. And Kay Sauer in Fort Myers, Florida wrote, Hello to everyone. Thought you might like to see this article from the AP that was in this morning's paper regarding the SS Eastland. Love the show. It provides one of the few safe family topics of discussion in these charged political times. And Kay sent a scan of a little article about a memorial for the victims of the Eastland disaster. The ship was intending to carry employees from the Western

Starting point is 00:18:25 Electric Company to a company picnic in Michigan City in northern Indiana, and the old lighthouse museum in Michigan City held a memorial for the victims in July. The article prompted me to look up a little more about this, and I learned that the Eastland was actually one of several ships that was hired to carry about 7,000 employees and family members of the Western Electric Company to the annual picnic that day. The Eastland, with over 2,000 passengers, was to have been the first ship to leave when it rolled over. The old Lighthouse Museum constructed a monument in 2015 for the 100th anniversary of the disaster, an anchor chain of 844 links ending at the Trail Creek Wharf where the ship had been intended to arrive.

Starting point is 00:19:06 I could see that articles about this monument and the memorials that the museum holds do end up in many local newspapers in that area, so this event is definitely still being remembered and written about there. But not so much in our area, though, at least, that I've seen, which is unfortunate. Yeah, for such a huge event, it's surprising that most of the memory of it, from what anecdotally we're hearing from people, it seems to be centered in the Midwest. Yeah. I do think it showed up, now that I think about it, in my research for the Christmas tree ship episode, but I was so intent on that story that I didn't-

Starting point is 00:19:36 Want to go off on a digression. Yeah. Well, plus it would have spoiled the lateral thinking puzzle. That's true. In his email, Martin also asked about an update in episode 257 to the puzzle from episode 216, which included a mention of the 24 Hours of Lemons auto race, thinking that I must have meant the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. The latter race is a lot more famous, and I certainly can mispronounce things sometimes, so this was a natural assumption, but there really

Starting point is 00:20:05 is a 24 Hours of Lemons race, whose name is a deliberate parody of the prestigious French race. The 24 Hours of Lemons is a series of endurance races held across the U.S. that started in 2006 and more recently has spread to Australia and New Zealand. The races are held on paved race courses with teams of at least two drivers and any number of crew members for each car. The gimmick of the race is that not including safety equipment and wheels or tires, each vehicle must be bought and prepped for the race for $500 or less in the U.S. with a cap of $999 in Australian or New Zealand dollars. This is a ridiculously low amount of money to

Starting point is 00:20:46 be able to spend on a car that is going to have to race for 14 to 24 hours, depending on the specific event, and from what I read, it seems like if you hope to finish this race, you'd better have a great deal of mechanical ability so that you can be constantly fixing your clunker or lemon when it breaks down. As the cars do have to keep stopping for repairs, the number participating in an event at any given moment is constantly changing. Nick Pond, one of the creators of the race, is quoted in sports news as saying, as far as how many of those survive until the end, it's such a moving target. Let's say the race ends at four on Sunday. If you stretched it to five, you might actually have more cars running

Starting point is 00:21:25 because whoever was working on it fixed it. Or less, there could have been a car on its last legs. It's a very fluid thing. There are usually several gag entries in the race and the cash limit that you can spend on your car notably doesn't include the cost of what Sporting News called ridiculous non-advantageous props. So if you deck out your car to look like the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, you don't have to count the cost of the giant fake hot dog on top. Although much about the 24 Hours of Lemons is deliberately zany, they do take safety seriously. Penalties are liberally awarded for driving in an aggressive or an unsafe manner,

Starting point is 00:22:06 ignoring the race rules, or for having parts falling off of your car. The punishments given for infractions, though, are in keeping with the overall humorous spirit of the race. A blog post from someone who was a race judge for one of the events in 2009 described some of the punishments used in that race, such as the Marcel Marceau Mime Your Crime penalty, where offending drivers had to put on a French stripe sailor shirt and a beret, paint their faces white, and act out the incident that had earned them the penalty. That's apparently a fairly standard penalty for the race, but the judges often improvised penalties on the spot,

Starting point is 00:22:42 such as when an incident involving seven cars filled the judging area with misbehaving drivers, and one of the judges had them all follow the judge mobile in single file around the area and shout, we're bad drivers, whenever the judges honked their horn. Other penalties included offending teams having to write the rule they broke on their car 100 times, and sometimes they might be required to write it in German, or making a team paint a landscape from the Paint with Bob Ross book onto the hood of their car. If a team whines too much to the judges, the whole team can be duct taped to their car or have to suck on pacifiers for the duration of the penalty.

Starting point is 00:23:21 One of the official rules of the race is it's always your fault and says Lemons is an all-fault environment. You are 100% responsible for what happens while you're at the wheel. Think you're the hitty, not the hitter? We don't care. Think you've been wrongly accused? See the part where it says we don't care. Your job is to stay out of trouble. So don't whine at lemons. Now I want to see that. There are some little videos on YouTubes if you try. Oh, really? Yeah, you can see somebody trying to mime out his infraction

Starting point is 00:23:55 after he puts on his little Marcel Marceau costume and stuff. I like the idea of the race because that means the maintenance crew has to be ready for anything. I mean, anything at all could go wrong and they have to fix it on the spot. Yeah. That's a neat idea. They also, they say the point of the race is that they didn't want it to be that auto racing could only be for rich idiots. They wanted all idiots to be able to auto race. So all you need is $500 for your car.

Starting point is 00:24:21 Several different awards are given at the race, including a winner for each of three or four different classes. The grand prize is the Index of Effluency, a play on the Le Mans race's Index of Efficiency, which used to be awarded based on fuel mileage and the word effluent, meaning sewage. This top prize goes to whichever team is perceived to have done the most with the worst car. The winners get a trophy and $1 more than done the most with the worst car. The winners get a trophy and one dollar more than whatever the next highest prize amount is. 501 and 601 were the dollar amounts that I was seeing for recent years. Because this is such a prestigious award, the winner will get a regular check. But at least in the U.S., winners of the other awards are typically

Starting point is 00:25:02 paid with boxes of nickels, weighing about 25 pounds total, although sometimes they receive an even more inconvenient payment method, such as a check written on a bed sheet or a chunk of concrete or a toilet seat. In 2011, some winners received several trash bags full of $500 worth of crumpledup Russian rubles. Several trophies are also given out, such as the Most Heroic Fix and the Organizer's Choice, which you get by impressing the organizers by showing unusually good conduct or by competing with a really outlandish car, such as one that looks like a helicopter or Santa's sleigh, complete with a large Santa Santa or a pickup truck being driven backwards. I'm assuming that the trophies are not made out of concrete or toilet seats.

Starting point is 00:25:51 And now a bear story. For a while on the show, I was really marveling at all the surprising things that it turns out bears can do. But then I discovered that there was apparently no end to bear stories and I didn't want to perseverate too much on the same topic, especially as I have many other topics to cover. So I haven't read on the show many of the emails people have sent on bears continuing to do funny bear things, but one email that we got recently did stand out to me. Esmeralda Roop Spangle sent a link to a post on the Facebook page of the Estes Park Police Department. Estes

Starting point is 00:26:25 Park is in Colorado, which does seem to have more than its share of bear stories. And we've even actually covered Estes Park bear stories before in episodes 194 and 215. I'm going to guess that many of the police departments in Colorado have quite a number of bear stories that they could tell. In this case, a bear broke into a house in Estes Park. It's not said how, but when the police showed up to deal with it, the bear literally smashed through a wall to escape the house. Esmeralda wrote, greetings Felis Cadis Overlordicus and her Homo sapiens underlings. Regarding the long-standing debate over which variety of doorknob is more resistant to bears,

Starting point is 00:27:05 well, I suppose in this case it doesn't actually matter, because a bear can also choose to take an alternate route, the wall. This renders the whole debate moot as far as I'm concerned, because if a bear can burst a hole through the wall like the Kool-Aid man, who really cares what kind of doorknobs you have? A cat may be more devious, but a bear certainly would be more distressing to have come through your door, not to mention your wall. I am a long time, since episode three, listener and proud supporter of your show, and even one-time lateral thinking puzzle submitter. I cannot tell you how much and how often I've enjoyed your appreciation

Starting point is 00:27:39 for small history, weird asides, peculiar tidbits, and engaging oddities. Thanks for doing what you do. And a number of news agencies picked up the story of a bear smashing through a wall, even international ones such as the BBC, and everyone seemed to use the Kool-Aid man analogy. For those who don't know, that refers to an anthropomorphic picture of the Kool-Aid brand drink that smashes through walls to get Kool-Aid to thirsty kids. Maybe that's what inspired the bear. Yeah, I was going to say, how did the bear know that would work?

Starting point is 00:28:10 I don't know. It just threw itself at a wall and got away with it? I don't know. I'm not expecting you to know the answer to that. I'm just perplexed. I can't explain bear psychology. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to Sasha and to those who remember to include us too. If you have anything that you'd like to add to our

Starting point is 00:28:32 discussion, you can email any or all of us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange situation, and I have to try to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Romy Higgins. A woman has celebrated 160 birthdays, but does not hold the title of world's oldest living person. Why?

Starting point is 00:29:02 She's celebrating birthdays with other people. Like she's a birthday clown, and she goes and celebrates little kids' birthdays with them. That's an excellent answer, but that's not what I'm looking for. Okay. There probably is someone who has done that. Yes. Okay. So you're saying she celebrated 160 of her own birthdays.

Starting point is 00:29:22 Yes. Were they her actual birthday? Like maybe she celebrates a birthday a week because she just likes birthdays. No, they weren't. They weren't her actual birthday. Can't answer that. Can't answer whether they were her actual birthday or not. Does she not know what her birthday is?

Starting point is 00:29:38 So she celebrates random days. It's like, let's say it's today. No, that's not it. Okay. Does she know what her birthday is? Yes. Okay. Does she know what her birthday is? Yes. Okay. Does this have something to do with time zones or something?

Starting point is 00:29:52 She's moving around a lot. No. No, it doesn't. She keeps going back and forth between time zones. It's like, oh, it's my birthday again. She's an astronaut. Yeah. Would you say that she celebrates at least sometimes more than one birthday in what I would consider to be a calendar year?

Starting point is 00:30:10 Yes. Okay. So why is she celebrating more? Is she celebrating based on two different calendar systems? No. Another good guess. No. Is she using the calendar system that I used?

Starting point is 00:30:23 Yes. And that's it? Yes. And that's it? Yes. No other calendar system? That's right. Okay. I'm sorry, did you say she knows what her birthday is? She does, yes.

Starting point is 00:30:31 She knows what her birthday is. But you're saying that sometimes she's celebrating her birthday on a day that's not her birthday? That's right. But she's celebrating her birthday? Yes. In fact, she does this every year. So every year she celebrates two birthdays? Yes.

Starting point is 00:30:50 Was she born like across two days or something? No, they're two entirely different days. Two entirely different days. And she observes them regularly. Both as her birthday. Yeah. Is she like a born-again Christian? And so she's got a second birthday or something like that?

Starting point is 00:31:14 Her identity might help. Oh, is she somebody I would know? Yes. Is she still alive? Yes. But she's a famous person. Yes. Is she in the entertainment field?

Starting point is 00:31:24 No. Politics? I'd say yes. She's a famous political figure who has two birthdays. A famous ruler, let's say. Queen Elizabeth? Yes. She has two birthdays.

Starting point is 00:31:43 She has like an official birthday and then a state birthday? Basically, that's it. Romy writes, the woman in the puzzle is Queen Elizabeth II, who celebrated her 93rd real birthday in April 2019 and her 67th official birthday in June 2019. Probably the monarch gets an official birthday. An official birthday. The tradition was started in 1748 by King George II. He was born in November, which is generally cold and rainy, so established an official birthday in the summer when a public celebration would have been better. Oh my. Can I do that? Can I change my birthday to a better time?

Starting point is 00:32:13 Oh, cool. Thank you, Romy. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. If you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com, or you can join our Patreon campaign to give us some ongoing support and to also get more discussions on

Starting point is 00:32:45 some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and updates on Sasha, the Futility Closet Commander-in-Chief. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see our website for the link. At our website, you'll also find over 10,000 trivia tidbits, the Futility Closet store, information about the Futility Closet books, and the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the incomparable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 263-Memories of Proust

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