Category: Inspiration

John Leake writes:
Christopher Nolan’s recent film, The Odyssey, reminded me of Heinrich Schliemann (the man who is credited with discovering the ancient city of Troy in 1873. I’d always heard he was an enterprising man, but I had no idea—until I read his biography today—about the extraordinary life he led. Everything about it strikes me as so wildly improbable that no writer of fiction would dare make it up.

Schliemann was born in Neubukow, Mecklenburg in 1822, the son of an impoverished Lutheran pastor. According to his autobiographical accounts, when he was a boy of eight, he read Homer’s Iliad. When his father told him that the city of Troy might have actually existed in ancient times, he resolved to find it when he grew up.

When he was a teenager, his mother died and his father ran off with another woman, leaving him to fend for himself. For years he worked as a laborer and then as a grocer’s apprentice before seeking his fortune abroad.

In 1841, he boarded a ship bound for Venezuela, but the vessel was wrecked off the Dutch coast. He survived and made his way to Amsterdam, where he learned to speak Dutch with astonishing speed and got a job in a trading house. He spent all his spare time studying foreign languages, never going to the pub, socializing with friends, or pursuing girls. He eventually acquiring proficiency in Russian, French, English, Spanish, and several other languages, including ancient Greek.

Finish reading: https://open.substack.com/pub/petermcculloughmd/p/the-greatest-adventurer-in-history

The day would soon arrive when I could not ignore the rash.
I was obviously ill and so I called on Doctor Nash.

This standard consultation would adjudicate my fate.
I walked into his surgery and gave it to him straight:

`Doc, I wonder if you might explain this allergy of mine,
I get these pins and needles running up and down my spine.

From there, across my body, I will suddenly extend –
My neck will feel a shiver and the hairs will stand on end.

And then there is the symptom that only a man can fear –
A choking in the throat, and the crying of a tear.’

Well, the Doctor scratched his melon with a rather worried look.
His furrowed brow suggested that the news to come was crook.

`What is it Doc?’ I motioned. `Have I got a rare disease?
I’m man enough to cop it sweet, so give it to me, please.’

`I’m not too sure,’ he answered, in a puzzled kind of way.
`You’ve got some kind of fever, but it’s hard for me to say.

When is it that you feel this most peculiar condition?’
I thought for just a moment, then I gave him my position:

`I get it when I’m standing in an Anzac Day parade,
And I get it when the anthem of our native land is played,

And I get it when Meninga makes a Kiwi-crunching run,
And when Border grits his teeth to score a really gutsy ton.

I got it back in ’91 when Farr-Jones held the Cup,
And I got it when Japan was stormed by Better Loosen Up.

I get it when Banjo takes me down the Snowy River,
And Matilda sends me waltzing with a billy-boiling shiver.

It hit me hard when Sydney was awarded the Games,
And I get it when I see our farmers fighting for their names.

It flattened me when Bertrand raised the boxing kangaroo,
And when Perkins smashed the record, well, the rashes were true blue.

So tell me, Doc,’ I questioned. `Am I really gonna die?’
He broke into a smile before he looked me in the eye.

As he fumbled with his stethoscope and pushed it out of reach,
He wiped away a tear and then he gave me this stirring speech:

`From the beaches here in Queensland to the sweeping shores of Broome,
On the Harbour banks of Sydney where the waratah’s in bloom.

From Uluru at sunset to the Mighty Tasman Sea,
In the Adelaide cathedrals, at the roaring MCG.

From the Great Australian Bight up to the Gulf of Carpentaria,
The medical profession call it “green and gold malaria”.

But forget about the text books, son, the truth I shouldn’t hide.
The rash that you’ve contracted here is “good old Aussie pride”.

I’m afraid that you were born with it and one thing is for sure –
You’ll die with it, young man, because there isn’t any cure.’

“Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero – Orator and Statesman (106 – 43 BC)

“The reward of a thing well done is having done it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Poet (1803 – 1882)

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
John Lennon Singer, Songwriter (1940 – 1980)

“Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power; but character, health, knowledge and good judgment will always be in demand under all conditions.”

Imagine a supermarket chain that dominates its national market and yet won’t sell you a beer or a pack of cigarettes, pays no dividends to outside investors, and actively cuts its prices whenever it decides it has made too much money. That describes Migros, the largest retailer in Switzerland, and it has run on roughly this logic for nearly a hundred years.

The key to understanding how Migros works is its unusual ownership. Rather than answering to shareholders, the company is organized as a cooperative belonging to around two million members, a huge share of the Swiss population. That reorients the whole enterprise away from maximizing returns for investors and toward serving the people who both own and shop at it.

That cooperative structure produces some genuinely unusual policies in day-to-day practice. Migros caps the profit it is willing to keep, and when the business earns beyond that limit it lowers prices to give the surplus back to customers rather than banking it. It also commits one percent of its total revenue to cultural and social causes, funding schools, courses, concert halls and community projects. That long-standing program has made it a major patron of Swiss cultural life.

The refusal to sell alcohol and tobacco goes right back to the founder, Gottlieb Duttweiler, who built the company in the 1920s and 1930s around ideas of affordable goods and social responsibility. That principle has survived into the present day even as the chain grew into a sprawling retail empire. Migros insists throughout that it is a commercial operation rather than a charity, one that simply measures success differently from most of its competitors.

The result is a paradox that has worked for generations, a hard-nosed, market-leading business whose stated goal is to give as much of its success as possible straight back to the members who own it.