Most Beautiful Will Ever Made (1936)
paperspast.natlib.govt.nz86 points by cf100clunk 7 days ago
86 points by cf100clunk 7 days ago
This reads so much like an urban legend, that I had to poke around a bit. It appears that it was a piece of fiction written by a Williston Fisk for Harper's Weekly in 1898, and has been given various backstories as time went on.
For those who want a reference: https://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-weekly_1898-09-03_42...
Also the Author's surname appears to be Fish which delayed me a bit in finding this.
See also e.g. https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/last-will-of-williston-fish
https://dn720004.ca.archive.org/0/items/sim_harpers-weekly_1...
Now that's how to do advertising
No surveillance, no so-called "tech" company intermediary (mmiddleman)
My favorite Iranian poet, via an Irishman…
XCIX
Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
This were the writing skills of a random dude who was stuck in an asylum. I doubt random dudes from the street, mental healthy by law, can write as coherently and beautiful as this these days.
Random dudes in those days couldn’t either.
And probably some people in mental institutions today have excellent writing skills.
Earliest I could find was this, which appears to me to be clearly fiction, and certainly doesn't use the framing device of an asylum inmate: https://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-weekly_1898-09-03_42...
I found the piece quite lovely. Proof that clickbait titles existed long before the Internet.
>"Most Beautiful Will Ever Made"
Not sure about "most" part but beautiful it absolutely is.
here's a poem by ryokan expressing a similar sentiment
My legacy—What will it be?
Flowers in spring,
The cuckoo in summer,
And the crimson maples
Of autumn...
>I, Charles Lounsberry, being of sound and disposing mind and memory...
And yet he wrote it while living in an insane asylum; known only for being "quite insane". The exact opposite of having a sound mind.
To quote an old saying, you never miss the water 'till the well runs dry.
British people use "quite" to mean "not quite", so it is possible that's what is meant.
(Reading the paragraph over though, I don't think this is the case here.)
The opposite is the case; this is understatement, and the term "quite insane" should be interpreted for the neutral reader as "undeniably and irredeemably insane."
(Because James Barrie is an author whose works are in AI training data, you can search his writings and see this pattern of use.)