Quicksilver (10 page)

Daniel leaves America, becoming part of that country’s stock of memories—the composted manure from which it’s sending out fresh green shoots. The Old World reaches down to draw him in: a couple of lascars, their flesh and breath suffused with saffron, asafœtida, and cardamom, lean over the rail, snare his cold pale hands in their warm black ones, and haul him in like a fish. A roller slides under the hull at the same moment—they fall back to the deck in an orgiastic tangle. The lascars spring up and busy themselves drawing up his equipage on ropes. Compared to the little boat with the creaking and splashing of its oars and the grunting of the slaves,
Minerva
moves with the silence of a well trimmed ship, signifying (or so he hopes) her harmony with the forces and fields of nature. Those Atlantic rollers make the deck beneath him accelerate gently up and down, effortlessly moving his body—it’s like lying on a mother’s bosom as she breathes. So Daniel lies there spreadeagled for a while, staring up at the stars—white geometric points on a slate, gridded by shadows of rigging, an explanatory network of catenary curves and Euclidean sections, like one of those geometric proofs out of Newton’s
Principia Mathematica.

1663

An Ideot may be taught by Custom to Write and Read, yet no Man can be taught Genius.

—
Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708

D
ANIEL HAD GONE OUT
for a time in the evening, and met with Roger Comstock at a tavern, and witnessed to him, and tried to bring him to Jesus. This had failed. Daniel returned to his chamber to find the cat up on the table with its face planted in Isaac’s dinner. Isaac was seated a few inches away. He had shoved a darning needle several inches into his eyeball.

Daniel screamed from deep down in his gut. The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac’s meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away. Isaac did not flinch, which was probably a good thing. Daniel’s scream had no other effects on business as usual at Trinity College—those who weren’t too impaired to hear it probably assumed it was a wench playing hard-to-get.

“In my dissections of animals’ eyes at Grantham, I often marveled at their perfect sphericity, which, in bodies that were otherwise irregular grab-bags of bones, tubes, skeins and guts, seemed to mark them out as apart from all the other organs. As if the Creator had made those orbs in the very image of the heavenly spheres, signifying that one should receive light from the other,” Isaac mused aloud. “Naturally, I wondered whether an eye that was
not
spherical would work as well. There are practical as well as theologic reasons for spherical eyes: one, so that they can swivel in their sockets.” There was some tension in his voice—the discomfort must have been appalling. Tears streamed down and spattered on the table like the exhaust from a water-clock—the only time Daniel ever saw Isaac weep. “Another practical reason is simply that the eyeball is pressurized from within by the aqueous humour.”

“My God, you’re not bleeding the humour from your eyeball—?”

“Look more carefully!” Isaac snapped. “Observe—don’t imagine.”

“I can’t bear it.”

“The needle is not
piercing
anything—the orb is perfectly intact. Come and see!”

Daniel approached, one hand clamped over his mouth as if he were abducting himself—he did not want to vomit on the open Waste-Book where Isaac was taking notes with his free hand. Upon a closer look he saw that Isaac had inserted the darning needle not into the eyeball itself but into the lubricated bearing where the orb rotated in its socket—he must’ve simply pulled his lower eyelid way down and probed between it and the eyeball until he’d found a way in. “The needle is blunt—it is perfectly harmless,” Isaac grunted. “If I could trouble you for a few minutes’ assistance?”

Now supposedly Daniel was a student, attending lectures and studying the works of Aristotle and Euclid. But in fact, he had over the last year become the one thing, aside from the Grace of God, keeping Isaac Newton alive. He’d long since stopped asking him such annoying, pointless questions as “Can you remember the last time you put food into your mouth” or “Don’t you suppose that a nap of an hour or two, once a night, might be good?” The only thing that really worked was to monitor Isaac until he physically collapsed on the table, then haul him into bed, like a graverobber transporting his goods, then pursue his own studies nearby and keep on eye on him until consciousness began to return, and then, during the moments when Isaac still didn’t know what day it was, and hadn’t gone off on some fresh train of thought, shove milk and bread at him so he wouldn’t starve all the way to death. He did all of this voluntarily—sacrificing his own education, and making a burnt offering of Drake’s tuition payments—because he considered it his Christian duty. Isaac, still in theory his sizar, had become his master, and Daniel the attentive servant. Of course Isaac was completely unaware of all Daniel’s efforts—which only made it a more perfect specimen of Christlike self-abnegation. Daniel was like one of those Papist fanatics who, after they died, were found to’ve been secretly wearing hair shirts underneath their satin vestments.

“The diagram may give you a better comprehension of the design of tonight’s experiment,” Isaac said. He’d drawn a cross-sectional view of eyeball, hand, and darning needle in his Waste Book. It was the closest thing to a work of art he had produced since the strange events of Whitsunday last year—since that date, only equations had flowed from his pen.

“May I ask
why
you are doing this?”

“Theory of Colors is part of the Program,” Isaac said—referring (Daniel knew) to a list of philosophical questions Isaac had recently written out in his Waste Book, and the studies he had pursued, entirely on his own, in hopes of answering them. Between the two young men in this room—Newton with his Program and Waterhouse with his God-given responsibility to keep the other from killing himself—neither had attended a single lecture, or had any contact with actual members of the faculty, in over a year. Isaac continued, “I’ve been reading Boyle’s latest—
Experiments and Considerations Touching Colors
—and it occurred to me: he uses his eyes to make all of his observations—his eyes are therefore instruments, like telescopes—but does he really understand how those instruments work? An astronomer who did not understand his lenses would be a poor philosopher indeed.”

Daniel might have said any number of things then, but what came out was, “How may I assist you?” And it was not just being a simpering toady. He was, for a moment, gobsmacked by the sheer presumption of a mere student, twenty-one years old, with no degree, calling into question the great Boyle’s ability to make simple observations. But in the next moment it occurred to Daniel for the first time: What if Newton was right, and all the others wrong? It was a difficult thing to believe. On the other hand, he
wanted
to believe it, because
if
it were true, it meant that in failing to attend so many lectures he had missed precisely
nothing,
and in acting as Newton’s manservant he was getting the best education in natural philosophy a man could ever have.

“I need you to draw a reticule on a leaf of paper and then hold it up at various measured distances from my cornea—as you do, I’ll move the darning needle up and down—creating greater and lesser distortions in the shape of my eyeball—I say, I’ll do that with one hand, and take notes of what I see with the other.”

So the night proceeded—by sunrise, Isaac Newton knew more about the human eye than anyone who had ever lived, and Daniel knew more than anyone save Isaac. The experiment could have been performed by anyone. Only one person had actually done it, however. Newton pulled the needle out of his eye, which was bloodred, and swollen nearly shut. He turned to another part of the Waste Book and began wrestling with some difficult math out of Cartesian analysis while Daniel stumbled downstairs and went to church. The sun turned the stained-glass windows of the chapel into matrices of burning jewels.

Daniel saw in a way he’d never seen anything before: his mind
was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening horns, gathering observations that had been distorted along the way, as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light that passed through it. A man who peered out at the world through a telescope would assume that the aberration was
real,
that the stars actually
looked
like that—what false assumptions, then, had natural philosophers been making about the evidence of their senses, until last night? Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like,
all the time,
to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.

OCTOBER
1713

D
ANIEL BECOMES AWARE
that someone is standing over him as he lies on the deck: a stubby red-headed and -bearded man with a lit cigar in his mouth, and spectacles with tiny circular lenses: it’s van Hoek, the captain, just checking to see whether his passenger will have to be buried at sea tomorrow. Daniel sits up, finally, and introduces himself, and van Hoek says very little—probably pretending to know less English than he really does, so Daniel won’t be coming to his cabin and pestering him at all hours. He leads Daniel aft along
Minerva
’s main deck (which is called the upperdeck, even though, at the ends of the ship, there other other decks above it) and up a staircase to the quarterdeck and shows him to a cabin. Even van Hoek, who can be mistaken for a stout ten-year-old if you see him from behind, has to crouch to avoid banging his head on the subtly arched joists that support the poop deck overhead. He raises one arm above his head and steadies himself against a low beam—touching it not with a hand, but a brass hook.

Even though small and low ceilinged, the cabin is perfectly all right—a chest, a lantern, and a bed consisting of a wooden box containing a canvas sack stuffed with straw. The straw is fresh, and its aroma will continue to remind Daniel of the green fields of Massachusetts all the way to England. Daniel strips off just a few items of clothing, curls up, and sleeps.

When he wakes up, the sun is in his eyes. The cabin has a small window (its forward bulkhead is deeply sheltered under the poop deck and so it is safe to put panes of glass there). And since they are sailing eastwards, the rising sun shines into it directly—along the way, it happens to beam directly through the huge spoked wheel by which the ship is steered. This is situated just beneath the edge of that same poop deck so that the steersman can take shelter from the weather while enjoying a clear view forward down almost the entire length of
Minerva
. At the moment, loops of rope have been cast over a couple of the handles at the ends of the wheel’s spokes and tied down to keep the rudder fixed in one position. No one is at the wheel, and it’s neatly dividing the red disk of the rising sun into sectors.

1664

I
N THE GREAT COURT
of Trinity there was a sundial Isaac Newton didn’t like: a flat disk divided by labeled spokes with a gnomon angling up from the center, naïvely copied from Roman designs, having a certain Classical elegance, and always wrong. Newton was constructing a sundial on a south-facing wall, using, as gnomon, a slender rod with a ball on the end. Every sunny day the ball’s shadow would trace a curve across the wall—a slightly different curve every day, because the tilt of the earth’s axis slowly changed through the seasons. That sheaf of curves made a fine set of astronomical data but not a usable timepiece. To tell time, Isaac (or his
faithful assistant, Daniel Waterhouse) had to make a little crosstick at the place the gnomon’s shadow stood when Trinity’s bell (always just a bit out of synchronization with King’s) rang each of the day’s hours. In theory, after 365 repetitions of this daily routine, each of the curves would be marked with ticks for 8:00
A.M.
, 9:00
A.M.
, and so on. By connecting those ticks—drawing a curve that passed through all of the eight o’clock ticks, another through all of the nine o’clock ticks, and so on—Isaac produced a second family of curves, roughly parallel to one another and roughly perpendicular to the day curves.

One evening, about two hundred days and over a thousand crossticks into this procedure, Daniel asked Isaac why he found sundials so interesting. Isaac got up, fled the room, and ran off in the direction of the Backs. Daniel let him be for a couple of hours and then went out looking for him. Eventually, at about two o’clock in the morning, he found Isaac standing in the middle of Jesus Green, contemplating his own long shadow in the light of a full moon.

“It was a sincere request for information—nothing more—I want you to convey to me whatever it is about sundials I’ve been too thickheaded to find very interesting.”

This seemed to calm Isaac down, though he did not apologize for having thought the worst about Daniel. He said something along the lines of: “Heavenly radiance fills the æther, its rays parallel and straight and, so long as nothing is there to interrupt them, invisible. The secrets of God’s creation are all told by those rays, but told in a language we do not understand, or even hear—the direction from which they shine, the spectrum of colors concealed within the light, these are all characters in a cryptogram. The gnomon—look at our shadows on the Green!
We
are the gnomon. We interrupt that light and we are warmed and illuminated by it. By stopping the light, we destroy part of the message without understanding it. We cast a shadow, a hole in the light, a ray of darkness that is shaped like ourselves—some might say that it contains no information save the profile of our own forms—but they are wrong. By recording the stretching and skewing of our shadows, we can attain part of the knowledge hidden in the cryptogram. All we need to make the necessary observations is a fixed regular surface—a plane—against which to cast the shadow. Descartes gave us the plane.”

And so from then onwards Daniel understood that the point of this grueling sundial project was not merely to plot the curves, but to understand
why
each curve was shaped as it was. To put it another way, Isaac wanted to be able to walk up to a blank wall on a
cloudy day, stab a gnomon into it, and draw all of the curves simply by
knowing
where the shadow
would
pass. This was the same thing as knowing where the sun would be in the sky, and that was the same as knowing where the earth was in its circuit around the sun, and in its daily rotation.

Though, as months went on, Daniel understood that Isaac wanted to be able to do the same thing even if the blank wall happened to be situated on, say, the moon that Christian Huygens had lately discovered revolving around Saturn.

Exactly how this might be accomplished was a question with ramifications that extended into such fields as: Would Isaac (and Daniel, for that matter) be thrown out of Trinity College? Were the Earth, and all the works of Man, nearing the end of a long relentless decay that had begun with the expulsion from Eden and that would very soon culminate in the Apocalypse? Or might things actually be getting
better,
with the promise of
continuing
to do so? Did people have souls? Did they have Free Will?