Authors: Benjamin Markovits
The Syme Papers (7 page)
If only the physician had healed himself.
But I could not guess at the time what revolution in his circumstances drew Sam home, for a far greater term than a single summer, and prevented his return. The next mention of his name, in official records, occurs not at the college induction in the fall of 1813, in the allied courses of Geology, Chemistry, Mineralogy, etc. There Sam is conspicuous by his absence; but he appears again, in the spring of 1814, enlisted in the 53rd Infantry, stationed in Richmond, under the sponsorship of one Benedict Smythe. He had turned with his customary short-lived explosion of enthusiasm to a new task entirely.
His regiment was promptly called north to prosecute the war with Britain; and Sam, after only three months in the service, found himself at the heart of the battle of Lundy’s Lane on 25 July, where he conducted himself ‘with great honour’. On 17 September Syme volunteered for a sortie against one of the British batteries surrounding Fort Erie and not only led the charge over the entrenchments, but with his own hand ‘spiked the first cannon’, in a raid that took the British completely by surprise, and effected their eventual retreat. On the recommendation of Captain Miller, Syme was forthwith promoted to lieutenant, for ‘his almost total disregard for personal well-being in his Deprivation of the enemy and attentions to his Comrades in the field’. He had been a soldier less than a year – his courage smacked somewhat of the recklessness of a young man not unwilling to die.
That recklessness was undiminished by peacetime. On his return to Richmond, Syme immediately became entangled in a duel with the chief surgeon of the company, ‘Dr John Fowles, who’, as Sam informed his mother, ‘insinuated that I had acted dishonourably in giving him a furlough, claiming that I had myself assumed the emoluments of his office while caring for the sick he left behind him. I immediately declared his allegation false, demanding satisfaction on the field of honour – trusting that his skill with the pistol could not improve much on his infelicity with the surgeon’s knife. (In which faith, I was completely vindicated.)’
Sam had of course tailored this account to appease the palpitations of his mother. His messmate, Tippy Adams, recalls a clumsier and messier affair, more miserable on the whole and touched with despair.
That day I mounted guard with him, and Sam informed me, in the tedium of our watch, that he planned to fall in with Dr Fowles and ‘wring his nose’. I laughed at the time, for Sam jested often in such fashion, being full of a kind of vengeful humour, neither entirely angry nor at ease, but a something in between, restless, and disposed to ranting. He personified, as he himself declared to me, the ‘mock-heroic, as my father would say’. Accordingly, after our watch, I turned to a brief sleep, believing his boasts to be nothing more than the savageness of an idle hour.
I was awakened shortly after by a commotion, and, dressing quickly, discovered a small gathering in the street outside our barracks. Sam paraded grandly, puffing his chest, and aping the air of the doctor – who, to speak plainly, was a foolish fellow, delighting greatly in a false erudition Sam constantly put to shame. At length, stirred by some remark I could not hear to a livelier anger, Sam, taking a step backward, cried involuntarily, ‘Draw, and defend yourself’. The doctor did not answer the challenge directly, but strode toward him, hoping no doubt to grapple his adversary, being a much larger fellow than the lieutenant, and strong as a bear. Sam interrupted his intentions by holding his sword between them, until the Doctor retreated and demanded the affair be prosecuted in an orderly fashion, convening at the Gallery as soon as possible in the presence of seconds.
To this Sam assented at once, and
glided
– I can use no better word – to his quarters to prepare, like a man intoxicated with some pleasurable passion. In feet, I asked him if he had taken wine, and when he assured me that he had not, I consented to be his second.
We met at the appointed time, and, at a distance of ten paces, standing sideways, the duellists awaited the word. I called out,
Are you ready?
and they, at the same instant, answered yes. I then said,
Fire?
and they raised their arms together deliberately, from a hanging position. Sam appeared to aim at the Doctor’s hip, and consequently fired first, striking him squarely in the leg and upsetting the motion of the Doctor’s hand, who directed his shot at Sam’s breast. The bullet whistled by, piercing only the corner of his shirt tail and pantaloons. Sam, unhurt, asked if the Doctor desired a second shot, and being informed in the negative, retired to his room – with the air of a man, I thought, whose blood had soared, more at the prospect of his own death than that of his adversary.
This affair seemed to have doused the fire in him. At least, Sam spent the rest of his time at the 53rd peacefully enough, rising no further in the ranks, and engaging, as much as possible, in the fieldwork and cartography that exercised a portion of the peacetime army. He grew in the meantime from an angry young man into an
ambitious
one; but, like most internal revolutions of our spirit, the transformation left no indication of itself until it was complete.
In 1818, Syme entered upon the career that would occupy him for the rest of his life, and published his first geological essay, in the journal of his old professor, Sober Ben Silliman, the founder and editor of the
American Journal of Science.
This success convinced him to quit the army and pursue full time the theories he had thereby announced to the world. I was getting warmer.
The essay itself, entitled ‘A Theory of Concentric Spheres’, took up the suggestions of Loomis’s catalogue of magnetic variation in the state of Virginia and offered an ingenious if somewhat improbable explanation:
The Fact of a moving magnetic First Cause is difficult, if not impossible, to be reconciled with a solid Globe. Yet
that
the magnetic needle
does
vary, not only with latitude
but the passage of Time,
and according to a regular and
predictable pattern,
is confirmed beyond all doubt by Loomis’ excellent Map of magnetic Readings in Virginia. Still, no one, I believe (certainly not Loomis himself), has urged the
variableness
of the magnetic Cause against the possibility of a solid globe; neither the Neptunists nor the Plutonists address this
fundamental
Evidence of the consistency of the Earth’s core. We have been given a keyhole to the inner Chamber, but we avert our eyes, and refuse to look.
According to the doctrine
of Hollow Spheres
this whole Mystery of the variation of the compass can be satisfactorily explained …
There follows an intricate model of the internal globe, an onion of concentred metallic spheres, whose revolutions combine with astonishing complexity to produce the readings Loomis recorded in Virginia. At this stage in his thinking, Syme seems to have converted from his early Neptunism into the adoption of some at least of the tenets of
Plutonism,
the doctrine of Hutton – who argues the existence of a molten core and an endlessly evolving geological process,
sans
beginning,
sans
end, an eternal fire. Syme’s great innovation is to posit a
conclusion
of the Plutonist process, in which the molten core cooled and separated according to the composition of its metals. As the metals hardened, the rotation of the globe spun them into distinct spheres, compressing a
socket
(Syme’s word) of gaseous fluid between each one. These sockets allowed the spheres themselves to rotate freely in the whirl of the world, accounting, in their variations, for the movement of a compass needle over time and space.
A mouthful of a theory, and, as they say in the charming lingo of this island,
mad as a box of spiders
at first glance. And yet, and yet, there was
something
in it, as Sober Ben Silliman must have spotted himself when he published it – an attention to detail (for Syme was nothing if not meticulous), but more than that, a
genius
of connection.
Nobody before Syme had explored the question of magnetic variation as a means of determining the composition of
the core – an obvious step, it might seem today, but Syme was the first to take it. Nobody had adopted the Plutonist account in order to press it to a conclusion. Hutton himself insisted that all journeys (no matter how speculative) to the beginning or end of World and Time were
fruitless.
The best you could do was discover the process of modification along the way; and, for the most part, his followers accepted this restriction. Syme did not.
Yet there was no mention, not the slightest hint, of those ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’ that would inspire Wegener a century on. Dig, Pitt, dig! I cried, and wrung the venerable pages of the
American journal of Science,
March 1818, for the last drop of madness, astonishing the stooped and silent readers in the Rare Books and Music chamber of the British Library by the agony of my researches. Dig and dig, to the bottom of this thing, the liquid, shifting core!
But there was nothing there, no hint as yet of the theory that
begot
the theory that changed our world, no sign. And soon a hushed voice, issuing from a balding curly-haired young man, bearing the proud badge of ‘BL Staff’ swinging about his neck, above a cracked black T-shirt sporting the ensign Metal Head in agonized italics, asked me ‘not to
badger
the books so much, I was upsetting the readers’.
So I forbore to badger and read over (in commendable quietude) Syme’s magnificent conclusion, which began to frighten me for its very plausibility:
That a disposition to hollow cylinders
does
exist in nature, we think must be admitted; and that a similar principle exists in the planetary system, at least in some degree, appears to us certain. Every person has seen or heard of Saturn and his rings. At certain periods of time the appearance of this Planet, viewed through a stout telescope, represents him to be surrounded with two luminous Rings or Loops of matter, concentric with each other, and with the body of the planet. These rings nowhere adhere to that Body, but float distinct and separate,
some considerable distance from him, and from each other, leaving a portion of vacant Space, through which we see the fixed stars beyond.
The appearance of Saturn, we conceive, establishes the
Fact,
that the principle of concentric spheres, or Hollow Planets, does exist, at least in one instance, in the solar system. And if the fact be established in one case, is it not fair, nay, is it not almost a certain and necessary consequence, that the same Laws of Matter which formed a
part
of the Universe have operated upon the Whole?
I began to wonder if I had gone too deep to look around me, having lost the light of common sense above, left only with those far dimmer guides – the intellect on one hand and my own ambition on the other – to feel my way through these deep passages of history, of cause and effect, error and inspiration. Yet I had ventured too far to turn back; the end of my grant stood before me, like the glow of an oncoming train, and I had nothing to show for a busy year as yet. All I could do was rush, as quickly as possible, through the darkness of the tunnel.
*
I found little record of Sam’s four years in the army. He seems to have enjoyed the routine; the early rising benefited his health, and the exercise composed his sleep without too great a burden of dreams. Though Syme possessed a robust physique, a barrel-chested, rosy-cheeked bravado of the constitution (somewhat, I flatter myself, after the fashion of his humble biographer), he suffered from a peculiar susceptibility of the imagination, which could grow sick at a suggestion – a liability which, owing to his ordinary vigour, rendered his periods of debilitation particularly painful. We often find in specimens of great natural good health a proportional rebellion of the constitution, as if their native strength were thrust upon them, and their psyches were too weak to bear the mass of so much vitality.
But the routines of army life assuaged this susceptibility, and the four years appear to have passed, after the violence of his initiation,
in a general contentment, if the silence of this period is anything to go by. (Silence, in my experience, being a great indicator of happiness. A restless spirit writes, confronts, obstructs, composes, entangles, and trails in its wake a thousand marks of its tumultuous passage; a happy nature passes smoothly over the years, barely touching the surface and leaving no mark as it glides.) The fury of whatever decision drove him from Yale College to the 53rd Infantry abated; the winds calmed, and Syme seemed bent on the course of an ordinary prosperity.
Yet out of this prosperous calm was born his strange fixation on the ‘theory of concentric spheres’. We have no record of the circumstances that precipitated such an eruption, of the moment of inspiration, of the mounting degrees of his obsession. The essay was published in the March issue of the
Journal of American Science;
Syme effected his discharge from the army two months later, wandering from the well-trod path before him into such impressionable ground that history still bears the prints of his diversions. I could only
guess
– hunched over the mottled paper of the
Journal,
turning the delicate leaves with my ham fists, still strapped, and bound and forbidden the use of a pen – the
tyranny
of inspiration that drove Syme, from the comfortable progress of a fashionable career to such strange prospects: a life of disappointment and betrayal, and an early, desired death.
But a century of winds dispersed his theories, until, like a piece of grit (as I hoped to prove), one stuck in the thoughts of Alfred Wegener and produced a pearl. A pearl that eventually cost the German scientist his life, a pearl whose perfect brilliance drove me,
another
century on, to carve within it and discover the source of the original infection. We are at the mercy of our own inspiration and helpless to prevent the spread of a faith, once started, even in ourselves. Who can say where or when the notion will strike?
