About 5,000 years ago, someone decided to paint a battle scene between archers in a cave in Spain — perhaps one of the first instances of what we’d call “war graffiti” today. That person was probably an early grunt who had just finished griping that the chow was bad and that he’d had to march too far that day. Because as long as there has been war, there have been soldiers leaving behind their doodles, names or other markings for historians to muse on why they did so.
In combat, full lives can be snuffed out with no notice paid to the person behind a name. As a veteran of Afghanistan and now a company commander in the National Guard, I am well acquainted with the impermanence of life. Like the American-style graffiti that dominated cities across the country in the 1970s and 1980s, the drawings of war are part of a culture that comes with its own vocabulary, characters and aesthetics. “Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing,” the street artist Banksy wrote in 2001. “And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty, you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.” If he replaced “cure world poverty” with “win the war,” he would have perfectly captured the sentiment behind soldiers’ doodles. These drawings, scratchings and markings serve a far greater purpose than merely offering a glimpse into the past: They are a defiant and public proclamation of a human being’s existence.
In the past few years, researchers have found them in unexpected places scattered around the world: modern beaches. Finding ancient footprints in such a dynamic environment seems counterintuitive. Is there anything more ephemeral, after all, than footprints in the sand? You’d think that the action of waves and wind would wipe footprints away quickly. But, in 2012, massive storms in Wales revealed fossilized forests—and the footprints of a child, facing a prehistoric sea. In 2013, researchers stumbled across the 800,000-year-old tracks left behind by children and adults, a small family perhaps, playing on a windswept English beach. The following year, researchers working on British Columbia’s Calvert Island found footprints dating back to the earliest days of human presence in the Americas. The one thing they all have in common is proximity to the ocean.
On 7 October 1967, the Financial Times, then the most buttoned-up newspaper in Britain and quite possibly the world, discreetly added a regular new page to its Saturday edition. Buried deep inside the paper, behind the usual thicket of articles about share prices and companies and pensions, the page was introduced to readers a little euphemistically, as “a guide to good living”. In small letters across the top of the page, the FT spelled out what “good living” meant. The page was called How to Spend It.
In the still slightly austere postwar Britain of 1967, where the great majority of the FT’s prosperous readership of 150,000 lived, spending opportunities were limited. The new, monochrome page had an article about installing home central heating, then a relative luxury; about a new electric coffee maker; and about how to select and cook a pheasant: “Choose carefully. Hens are always best.” The most expansive piece was on an old-fashioned Scottish hotel owned by state-run British Rail. “The visitor is received with all the ceremony of an arrival at a country house,” wrote the reviewer. “You go into the immense hall and no one takes any notice.”
Having customers order a ‘toasted teacake’ in the West Yorkshire sandwich shop where I worked as a teenager wasn’t unusual, yet even this simple request always necessitated a follow-up question: ‘plain or currant?’.
While to me a ‘teacake’ naturally implies a plain, savoury bread roll, most of the country outside West Yorkshire believes a teacake to be a sweet bread laden with plump currants. I’d say, logically, that that should be known as a ‘currant teacake’, but what can you do?
It’s a shame that not everyone can read this book, but Cheng claims it is incumbent on those of us who can to use compassion and logic to argue productively with those who can’t. In this way, advanced mathematics could make a meaningful contribution to creating a better society as well as happier conversations and relationships. There is a sense in which this book is proof it can.