Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Popular Science Monthly

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Few hours (we have no accurate statement in the matter) were devoted to sleep. He ate comparatively little because he worked better: he slept less than many men because he worked better in consequence. Partly for protection against cold, partly perhaps for economy of time, he sometimes left his high dog-skin boots on for so long that when he removed them the scarf skin came away like the skin of a moulting serpent. He dressed for comfort and not to mortify the flesh. Upon the receipt of a present of some shirts from his nephew he writes: 'I am very much surprised ye should have sent them to me, for they are so coarse that there is not a farm laborer here who would not be ashamed to wear them.' He is much pleased with a finer lot selected later by his nephew's new wife. Perhaps he did not come up to modern notions of cleanliness (he was early advised by his father never to bathe but to have his body rubbed instead) but he was clean inside, which can not be said of all who make much of a well-washed skin. His intensity of purpose and fiery energy expressed themselves in his features and form. "His face was round, his brow square, ample," and deeply furrowed: "the temples projected much beyond the ears"; his eyes were "small rather than large," of a dark (some said horn) color and peered, piercingly, from under heavy brows. The flattened nose was the result of a blow from a rival apprentice. He evidently looked the part, though for such mental powers one of his colossal statues would seem a more fitting mold. Michelangelo experienced some illnesses, all but two of them of minor moment. In 1531 he "became alarmingly ill, and the Pope ordered him to quit most of his work and to take better care of his health." That the illness was a storm merely of the surface is evidenced sufficiently in that his fresco of the "Last Judgment," probably the most famous single picture in the world, was begun years later and completed in his sixty-sixth year. In the work of this epoch there is more than ever the evidence of a pouring forth of energy amounting almost to what the critics call violence--to terribleness of action. It was not until the age of seventy that an illness which seemed to mark any weakening of his bodily powers came upon him. At seventy-five, symptoms of calculus (a disease common in that day at fifty) appeared, but, though naturally pessimistic, he writes, "In all other respects I am pretty much as I was at thirty years." He improved under careful medical treatment, but the illness and his age were sufficient to cause him to "think of putting his spiritual and temporal affairs in better order than he had hitherto done." He wielded the brush and the chisel with consummate skill in his seventy-fifth year. With the later loss of cunning his energy found vent more in the planning and supervising of architectural works, culminating in the building of St. Peter's, but even in these later years he took up the chisel as an outlet for superfluous energy and to induce sleep. Though the product of his hand was not good, his health was the better for this mutual exercise of mind and body. In his eighty-sixth year he is said to have sat drawing for three consecutive hours until pains and cramps in his limbs warned him that he had not the endurance of youth. For exercise, when manual labor proved a disappointment, he often took horseback rides. There was no invalidism about this great spirit, and it was not until the day before his death that he would consent to go to bed. In a poem of his last years he burlesques his infirmities in his usual vigorous manner. 'I live alone and wretched, confined like the pith within the bark of the tree.... My voice is like a wasp imprisoned within a sack of skin and bone. ... My teeth rattle like the keys of an old musical instrument.... My face is a scarecrow.... There is a ceaseless buzzing in my ears--in one a spider spins his web, in the other a cricket chirps all night.... My catarrh, which causes a rattle in my throat, will not allow me to sleep.--Fatigue has quite broken me, and the hostlery which awaits me is Death.' Few men at his age have had less reason to find in themselves other than the changes to be expected with the passing of years and in prose he acknowledged that he had no more affections of the flesh than were to be expected at his age. Codiva pictures him in his last years as "of good complexion; more muscular and bony than fat or fleshy in his person: healthy above all things, as well by reason of his natural constitution as of the exercise he takes, and habitual continence in food and sexual indulgence." His temperance and manual industry and his "extraordinary blamelessness in life and in every action" had been his source of preservation. He was miserly, suspicious, quarrelsome and pessimistic, but the effects of these faults were balanced by his better habits of thought and action. That he, like most great men, felt keenly the value of health, is evidenced not only by his own practice, but by his oft repeated warnings to his nephew when choosing a wife to see that whatever other qualities she might have she be healthy. The blemish of nearsight he considered a no small defect and sufficient to render a young woman unworthy of entry into the proud family of the Buonarroti. To his own father he wrote: "Look to your life and health, for a man does not come back again to patch up things ill done." One of those who look beneath unusual human phenomena for signs of the pathologic finds Michelangelo "affected by a degree of neuropathy bordering closely upon hysterical disease." What a pity that more of us do not suffer from such degrees of neuropathy--and how much better for most of us if we had such enthusiasm for perfection, and such mania for work, at least of that health-bringing sort in which there is absorbing colabor of brain and hand. True it is that "there is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than by being mad." THE CONSERVATION OF TALENT THROUGH UTILIZATION BY PROFESSOR JOHN M. GILLETTE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA TO raise the question of how to conserve talent is not an idle inquiry. We are in no immediate danger of famine. Yet there is an enormous interest being devoted to what is known as the conservation of soil. Our forests contain an abundance of

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