Palimpsest: A Brief Chrestomathy* of the 1960s

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.—Max Beerbohm

• General de Gaulle escaped assassination, but two other noted leaders, H. F. Verwoerd and JFK, did not.

• In Cape Town, Christiaan Barnard transplanted a human heart for the first time, then met with Gina Lollobrigida and the Pope (who wondered if it might not also be possible to transplant human souls).

• Mao Zedong launched a Cultural Revolution, successfully eliminating large sections of Chinese culture.

• The USSR launched a cosmonaut called Little Laika into earth orbit, who reported back that Earth from that perspective "looked a lot like a blue dog ball."

• Men walked on the moon, glimpsing its landfill potential for the first time.

• Elvis Presley met with US President Richard Nixon to discuss how best to get rid of the hippy "Counterculture," which they both loathed.

• Poets frequently saw their muse in actual women—but only from afar, and she invariably turned out to be someone else.

• In their last third, according to French existentialist philosophers, the "thirty glorious years"† were already running out of gloire.

* A selection of useful notes. Latin chrestomathia, from Greek chrēstomatheia, from chrēstos useful + manthanein to learn.—Merriam Webster.

† See Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 ["The Glorious Thirty, or the Invisible Revolution from 1946 to 1975"] (Paris: Fayard, 1979).