The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

Invocation State your intentions, Muse. I know you’re there. Dead bards who pined for you have said You’re bright as flame, but fickle as the air. My pen and I, submerged in liquid shade, Much dark can spread, on days and over reams But without you, no radiance can shed. Why rustle in the dark, when fledged with fire? Craze the night with flails of light. Reave Your turbid shroud. Bestow what I require. But you’re not in the dark. I do believe I swim, like squid, in clouds of my own make, To you, offensive. To us both, opaque. What’s constituted so, only a pen Can penetrate. I have one here; let’s go.

Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations…may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. —ROGER COTES, PREFACE TO SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S Principia Mathematica, SECOND EDITION, 1713

Boston’s a dollop of hills in a spoon of marshes.

He hadn’t really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things—hangings included—with a blunt, blank efficiency that’s admirable and disappointing at the same time.

skin weathered and marred like a blacksmith’s ox-hide apron.

ambuscades

Spaniards would have built a single great cathedral here, of stone, with gold on the inside, but the colonists cannot agree on anything and so it is more like Amsterdam: small churches on every block, some barely distinguishable from barns, each no doubt preaching that all of the others have it wrong.

The stallion mistrusted Ben at first for being small, darting, and smelling of long-dead beasts. Now he has accepted the boy as an animated hitching-post, capable of performing a few services such as nose-scratching and fly-shooing.

The horse has, overall, taken a dim view of the Ferry and the Faculty, and bangs across the plank as soon as it has been thrown down.

It puts Enoch strongly in mind of another swampy, dirty, miasma-ridden burg full of savants: Cambridge, England.

taking the empiricist bit in his teeth.

and here, if he’d been telling the story to adults, Enoch would’ve listed a few of the ways they had spent their time.

criminally fraudulent nincompoopery?”

They anointed him with angel-balm, a thousand years old.” “Eeeyew, it must have stunk to high heaven!” “Hard to say, in France.”

The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting.

He’d stayed a week or two in Wilkins’s chambers, and attended meetings of the Experimental Philosophical Clubb. This had been a revelation to him, for during the Civil War, practically nothing had been heard out of England. The savants of Leipzig, Paris, and Amsterdam had begun to think of it as a rock in the high Atlantic, overrun by heavily armed preachers.

It was too slender to bear his weight, but he phant’sied he could bend it low enough to bring it within the tallest boy’s jumping-range.

Birches - Frost

Some pugnacity in the lad would be useful. Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

more or less wearing ruts in the sea-lanes—

For a moment Enoch’s afraid that some sort of apoplectic climax is in progress, and that Dr. Waterhouse’s final contribution to the Royal Society, after nearly a lifetime of service, will be a traumatically deranged cardiac muscle, pickled in spirits of wine in a crystal jug.

or a hasty maneuver to conceal, beneath his coat, a shirt so work-stained as to cast aspersions on his young wife’s diligence.

how will Enoch characterize this structure to the Royal Society? “Log cabin,” while technically correct, calls to mind wild men in skins. “Sturdy, serviceable, and in no way extravagant laboratory making ingenious use of indigenous building materials.” There.

“It is purely an anomaly of fate,” Enoch says, “that Gottfried, as a young man, lacking means, seeking a position—anything that would give him the simple freedom to work—landed in the court of an obscure German Duke. Who through intricate and tedious lacework of marryings, couplings, dyings, religious conversions, wars, revolutions, miscarriages, decapitations, congenital feeblemindedness, excommunications, et cetera among Europe’s elite—most notably, the deaths of all seventeen of Queen Anne’s children—became first in line to the Throne of England and Scotland, or Great Britain as we’re supposed to call it now.”

“You hold judicial proceedings in drinking-houses!?” “Poh! That judge is no more drunk than any magistrate of the Old Bailey.” “It is perfectly logical when you put it that way.”

“Firebrands to furniture-makers in a single generation. I wonder what old Knott would think.” “Firebrands and furniture-makers,” Waterhouse corrects him.

I’d be happy to live anywhere that was beyond the reach of Tories and Archbishops.”

tavern-keeper, who cracks two eggs into two mugs and then begins throwing in rum and bitters and molasses. It is sticky and complicated—as is the entire situation here that Enoch’s gotten himself into.

It’s like using watered silk to make grain sacks—

“Nothing here is going according to plan. The music. The furniture. It’s all contrary to expectations.”

History of America. Human history redux.

Copies were known to have circulated as far as Peking, Lima, Isfahan, Shahjahanabad.

It wasn’t a serious fire, but it accomplished what Wilkins wanted it to: wrecked the mask of etiquette that Drake had set over me, and set my tongue a-run. I must have looked as if I’d gazed upon the face of God.

Daniel Waterhouse thinks about whether or not to go back to England while keeping one eye, through a half-closed door, on his son: Godfrey William, the fixed stake that Daniel has driven into the ground after many decades’ wanderings.

Daniel wants to say that Wait Still’s best arguments would be about as influential as boogers flicked against the planking of a Ship of the Line in full sail, but sees no reason to be acrimonious

the whole point of the exercise is to be remembered well by those who’ll stay in the New World, on the theory that as the sun rises on the eastern fringe of America, small things cast long shadows westwards.

Daniel leaves America, becoming part of that country’s stock of memories—the composted manure from which it’s sending out fresh green shoots.

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.

The horizon is a perfect line, the sun a red circle tracing a neat path in the sky and proceeding through an orderly series of color-changes, red-yellow-white. Thus Nature.

Daniel had been there many times with father Drake or half brother Raleigh, and knew what not to do, anyway.

Natural Philosophers may talk that way in 1713, but they didn’t fifty years ago. He has to translate it back into the sort of language that Descartes would have used.

Therefore at this Fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.

Should share with ren faire friends

All that mattered henceforth, apparently, was what form they adopted when translated into the language of analysis.

Indeed powerful discovery but I fear weve spent much time in the abstract that we've forgotten to come to reality or have replaced it

But this wholesale trade wanted to be invisible, and was. What Isaac saw was a retail fair whose size and gaudiness was all out of proportion to its importance, at least if you went by the amount of money that changed hands.

Owing to those modifications that had been made to his head at the behest of Archbishop Laud, Drake Waterhouse made curious percolating and whistling noises when he chewed and swallowed his potatoes and herring.

“That much is obvious, Daniel. I wonder, though, whether there is any point in furthering your studies when we are so close.” “Would you admire a farmer who let his fields be overrun with weeds, simply because the End was near?” “No, of course not. Your point is well taken.”

A rather small number of books—tiny student octavo volumes of the usual Continental savants, their margins and interlinear spaces now caulked with his notes. A letter he’d received from Wilkins,

there were sound reasons to look impoverished and carry a big stick.

“I want that you should take care that the plague should not infect you—not the Black Plague, but the plague of Skepticism so fashionable among Wilkins’s crowd. In some ways your soul might be safer in a brothel than among certain Fellows of the Royal Society.”

It is an irony of our time how few people are truly skeptical, of both the bombastic lies and simplifications of "conservative" (or "libertarian") ideology AND the insidious assumptions and bad faith of "the left"

“Good day, Uncle Thomas.” “Half-brother-in-law actually,” said Thomas Ham, out of a stubborn belief that pedantry and repetitiveness could through some alchemy be forged into wit.

By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge, to examine the definitions of former authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down, or to make them himself. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning. —HOBBES, Leviathan

bumbling after them.

After the bees...good wordplay