Half a dozen EMPIRES had to join hands to stand a chance against him
Yet his wife slept with other men
The tragic love story of one of the greatest men of all time:
1/ Joséphine
An aristocrat’s daughter, a widow, mother of 2
Also 6 years older than Napoleon
On the marriage certificate she increased Napoleon’s age by 1.5 years and decreased hers by 4
Wedding was officiated by an illegitimate priest
Napoleon was just an army officer
2/ Napoleon’s love for her - despite her age, previous children, and his family’s great disapproval - could only be described as wild and profound. From a love letter: “The remembrance of last night’s delirium have robbed my senses of repose. My waking thoughts are all of thee.”
3/ Joséphine hardly ever wrote back
In 1796 Napoleon wrote:
“You do not write me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters afford him, and you do not write him six lines of even haphazard scribble.”
Future Emperor, left on “read”
4/ As Napoleon led his men to impossible victories, his spirit stayed agitated and morose
He wrote to Joséphine, telling her he can’t muster a response to “How did you sleep?” without knowing how she slept
5/ The thought of Joséphine kept Napoleon sane in the middle of INHUMAN emotional and physical turmoil:
“When I’m weary of the worries of my profession, when men disgust me, when I’m ready to curse my life, I put my hand on my heart where your portrait beats in unison.”
6/ Napoleon was haunted by the suspicion that Joséphine loved him “less” with each passing day
This idea, he wrote, “blights my soul, stops my blood, makes me wretched without even leaving me the courage of fury”
He was right
She was cheating on him immediately after marriage
7/ Napoleon to Joséphine:
“I haven't drunk one cup of tea without cursing the pride and ambition which force me to remain apart from the moving spirit of my life. If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days our meeting."
8/ Joséphine had the GALL to come visit Napoleon with the man she was cheating on him with
And when Napoleon came for her, she was nowhere to be seen:
“I arrive at Milan, I rush into your apartment, I have left everything to see you, to press you in my arms…you were not there”
9/ Napoleon’s last words: “France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine”
He divorced her
But never got over her
Affairs didn’t help
The pain of not being loved back by her lingered on
I’m reminded of a line from a letter he wrote in 1796: “I had the right to be spared this”
“I had the right to be spared this”
Besides being a heartbroken lover...
Napoleon was an obsessive workaholic, a voracious reader, an incredible ruler, and the scariest general of his time
A literary rockstar at 24. Almost executed by a firing squad at 28...
Exiled to Siberia. Returns to write some of the greatest books ever...
In his lesser-known letters and essays, we get a more intimate look at what he loved, hated, fiercely believed in
Dig in👇🏻
1/ Dostoevsky believed life is only possible when you have a philosophical north star you swear by:
"Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea"
Dostoevsky: "In order to maintain itself and live, every society must necessarily respect someone & something"
2/ In his essay against Environmental determinism, Dostoevsky writes:
"The doctrine of the environment reduces man to an absolute nonentity, exempts him totally from every personal moral duty and from all independence, reduces him to the lowest form of slavery imaginable..."
Elon Musk reminds me of Carlyle's 1841 book on heroes. Carlyle wrote the single most important quality in great men is their sincerity. They stand directly upon reality, not upon the consensus, the status quo, the norms. Elon calls it first principles thinking, but same thing
Short-term incentives always tell you to ignore baseline reality and respond to office politics, interpersonal drama, status games. You require a strange combination of high IQ, low agreeableness, high openness, low neuroticism, to ignore the short-term & deal with reality as is
Elon Musk is also a lesson in why we need ostentatious wealth. Thank God he made $150 million on PayPal. Without that windfall...no SpaceX, no Tesla, no Starlink, no free speech on the internet. Someone will always wield power. Better driven men than faceless bureaucracies...
Yesterday, Elon Musk unveiled the Robovan, and it was Art Deco
Why is this dead 1920s movement making a comeback?
And who killed it in the first place?
A thread with all the answers...
1/ Art Deco began with a breakup. Now called the "Vienna Secession" a bunch of visionaries resigned from the "Association of Austrian Artists" in 1897 to chart new territory. The hero's journey begins. Their first project - the "Secession Building" in Vienna (still standing)
2/ The Vienna Secession had painters (Klimt), advertisers (Josef Maria Auchentaller), architects ( Josef Hoffmann), and more. Their vision was to promote "Total Art," combining music, geometry, interior decor, architecture, painting, and other forms in dizzying new ways...
59 years ago, a French theologian tried to warn the world about it...
12 insights from Jacques Ellul's Propaganda (1965)👇🏻
1/ Modern man can "never stop to reflect." He's not allowed to synthesize his information. Rather, Ellul writes: "One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones..."
2/ Clear thought has been replaced by vague feeling...
Ellul: "Modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them."
Issac Newton was an alchemist. Alan Turing thought telepathy is real. It's undeniable at this point that people at the upper bounds of intelligence are quasi-mystics. A material universe made of inert atoms is for midwits only
William James was a parapsychology researcher
Wolfgang Pauli, who Einstein called his "spiritual heir," thought he could break lab equipment from a different city
Past geniuses did not, infact, "trust the experts"
Jack Parsons invented the first rocket engine...while being a member of an occult group founded by magician Crowley
Arthur Conan Doyle created fiction's most logical man, Sherlock Holmes...while trying to contact spirits in his private life