Ikigai DailyThe long now
Empires, inventions, ruptures and overlooked lives that still shape the present tense.
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Q0826Carved onto a two-metre (6.6-foot) stone pillar around 1750 BC, the Code of Hammurabi set out some 282 laws — including the famous principle of 'an eye for an eye'. Placed in public for all to see, it was among the first attempts to make justice a written, predictable thing rather than a ruler's whim.
Q0852Words and phrases first written down by Shakespeare include 'eyeball', 'lonely', 'swagger', 'gloomy' and 'break the ice'. Whether he invented them or simply captured lively street talk, his plays are the earliest record we have of hundreds of everyday English expressions.
Q0853Murasaki Shikibu was a lady of the Heian imperial court, writing centuries before the European novel took shape. 'The Tale of Genji' follows desire, status, memory and court life with an intimacy that still feels modern. Its place in literary history is debated, but its ambition is not: it treats inner life as a world large enough for epic attention.
Q0854Frankenstein began during the famous 1816 gathering near Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and others, after a challenge to write ghost stories. Mary Shelley turned the spark into a novel about creation, responsibility and loneliness.
Q0857The power of 1984 is not only its plot but its vocabulary: words from the novel now help people name propaganda, surveillance and doublethink across very different political settings. A story can outlive itself as a set of tools for noticing danger.
Q0859Austen's first books did not carry her name as modern readers expect; 'By a Lady' signalled both respectability and restriction. The anonymity did not make the work smaller. It reveals the social gate a woman writer had to pass before her intelligence could speak in public.
Q0860Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë first published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell — male-sounding names chosen so their work would be judged without the prejudice reserved for women writers. 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights' reached the world before anyone knew their authors were sisters.
Q0864Written in cuneiform on clay tablets, the Epic of Gilgamesh carries power, friendship, grief and the fear of death across thousands of years. Its distance is part of its force: a voice from ancient Mesopotamia still knows what it means to lose someone and ask what a life is for.
Q0865Published in two parts (1605 and 1615), Cervantes' tale of a deluded knight and his down-to-earth squire broke from the heroic romances of the day with self-aware, fully human characters. It is often called the first modern novel — and, after the Bible, one of the most translated books ever written.
Q0866Dickens released most of his novels in cheap monthly instalments, building suspense like a modern TV series. When 'The Old Curiosity Shop' neared its climax, American readers reportedly crowded the New York docks shouting to arriving ships, 'Is Little Nell dead?'
Q0872Cervantes died in Gregorian-calendar Spain, while Shakespeare died in Julian-calendar England. Their traditional dates look almost simultaneous, but calendar systems make the neat coincidence less simple than it first appears.
Q0877The Socrates we meet is partly a historical person and partly a figure preserved through dialogues, memory and argument. That makes him powerful and difficult: his voice reaches us through others. This matters globally for any tradition built on witnesses. The lesson is source awareness: even great teachers arrive through human transmission.
Q0879The cave appears in Plato's Republic. Prisoners mistake shadows for reality until one is dragged into the light; the image asks what education costs, why truth can hurt, and why people may resist the person who returns with it.
Q0880Aristotle taught Alexander at Mieza when the future conqueror was a teenager. We should not imagine philosophy simply 'causing' empire, but the meeting is extraordinary: Greek intellectual training stood close to one of history's largest campaigns of conquest.
Q0881Alexander the Great, at the height of his power, found the philosopher Diogenes sunbathing and offered him anything he wished. Diogenes asked only that Alexander step aside — he was blocking the sun. Alexander later said that were he not Alexander, he would wish to be Diogenes.
Q0895This is a paraphrase of a central argument in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949). Beauvoir examines how biology, upbringing, myth, work and law turn human possibility into social roles, making identity something lived and produced, not merely given at birth.
Q0896Arendt coined the phrase after reporting on Adolf Eichmann's 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann had helped organise the deportation of Jews to ghettos and killing centres; what shocked Arendt was not a theatrical monster, but a bureaucrat defending catastrophe as obedience and paperwork.
Q0901The Meditations were not written as a modern self-help book. They were private exercises by a ruler reminding himself to face duty, anger, death and uncertainty with steadiness. That matters globally because power did not remove inner struggle. The lesson: philosophy can be a practice for difficult mornings, not just an idea on a shelf.
Q0918Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911 — still the only person honoured in two different sciences. Discovery ran in the family: her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie later won a Nobel of her own for creating artificial radioactivity.
Q0919Tambora blasted material into the atmosphere, affecting sunlight and climate patterns far from Indonesia. Crop failures, cold summers and hardship followed in many regions. This matters globally because Earth systems are connected across distance. The so-what: a local catastrophe can become a planetary event.
Q0920Farmers were struggling with crop damage, and military help was tried in a strange episode now remembered as the Emu War. The popular version is comic, but the background was agricultural pressure and human-wildlife conflict. This matters globally because ecosystems often resist simple force. The lesson: a living landscape is not a target range.
Q0921For the price of a drink, people could hear news, argue politics, read papers and meet traders, writers or scientists. They were not open equally to everyone, but they helped create new public spaces for information. This matters globally because ideas need rooms as well as minds. The lesson: infrastructure for conversation can change society.
Q0922Early photographs required long exposures, so moving crowds often vanished. A man standing still long enough for a shoe shine remained visible while most street life disappeared. This matters because technology shapes what history can see. The lesson: being recorded sometimes depends on who paused long enough.
Q0924Van Gogh painted 'The Starry Night' in 1889 from a room in the Saint-Rémy asylum, where he had admitted himself. The swirling sky was composed from memory and imagination rather than copied from the window — one of art's most beloved images made during one of its maker's darkest years.