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

by Neal Stephenson

To dally in gardens was some people’s life-work,

Finally they turned the head over to Charles Comstock, to continue his anatomy-lesson, and Daniel went to bed for a series of rich nightmares.

FROM ISAAC’S INSTRUCTIONS (“Turn left at Grimethorpe Ruin”) he’d been expecting a few hovels gripping the rim of a wind-burned scarp, but Woolsthorpe was as pleasant a specimen of English countryside as he’d ever seen.

Daniel had noticed that there were some families (like the Waterhouses) skilled at presenting a handsome façade to the world, no matter what was really going on; it was all lies, of course, but at least it was a convenience to visitors. But there were other families where the emotional wounds of the participants never healed, never even closed up and scabbed over, and no one even bothered to cover them up—like certain ghastly effigies in Papist churches, with exposed bleeding hearts and gushing stigmata.

He was startled by a heavy rustling directly above them, in the attic, a scrabbling of claws. “What was that?” “There is a tiny window up there—an invitation for owls to build nests in the attic,” Isaac said. “So vermin don’t eat the grain stored up there.” Daniel laughed at it. For a moment he and Isaac were boys up past bedtime playing with their toys, the complications of their past forgotten and the perils of the future unthought of.

All in all, there was a failure of events to match up with the program laid out in the Books of Daniel and of Revelation, which forced Drake to re-read them almost every day, working out interpretations new and ever more strained. For Daniel’s part, he sometimes went for days without thinking about the End of the World at all.

porches of his ears, were collecting black grit,

Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.

like a living demonstration of Hooke’s ideas about heat.

tooth-looseningly unpleasant,

But as Daniel sat and pretended to read his newspaper, the sun swung up over York House and then Scotland Yard, the place became comfortable, and Personages began to occupy seats nearby, and to pretend to read their newspapers.

Mr. POWELL offered to be employed by the society in any capacity whatever.

whether the society might undertake to perform the like operation on his Wife, as she was most afflicted with splenetic distempers.

Well now

“Hold—I was not finished—I was launching a metaphor. Please remember that I’ve been preaching to rapt congregations, or at least they are pretending to be rapt—in any case, they sit quietly while I develop my metaphors.” “I beg forgiveness, and am now pretending to be rapt.”

here’s a light, easy-to-read analysis of how the bad Latin used by Continental scholars leads to faulty thinking, and in turn to religious schism, war, bad philosophy…”

then a blackness containing, among other things, Europe.

Mayflower Ham, neé Waterhouse—tubby, fair, almost fifty, looking more like thirty—gave him a hug that pulled him up on tiptoe. Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion. Mayflower had (fortunately for her!) been born with that ability, peculiar to certain women, of being able to talk about her womb in any company without it seeming inappropriate, and not only that but you never knew where in a conversation, or a letter, she would launch into it, plunging everyone into a clammy sweat as her descriptions and revelations forced them to consider topics so prim...

it is the blood in the veins of Commerce.”

“I have given up hope, tonight, of ever understanding money.” “It’s simple, really…” “And yet it’s not simple at all,” Daniel said. “It follows simple rules—it obeys logic—and so Natural Philosophy should understand it, encompass it—and I, who know and understand more than almost anyone in the Royal Society, should comprehend it. But I don’t. I never will…if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules…”

Hooke could not do it because his vertigo had been acting up, and if it struck while he was on top of the College, he would plunge to the ground like a wormy apple from a tree, his Last Experiment a study into the mysterious power of Gravitation.

This one spun, forced a path through the others, took the stairs four at a time, broke loose onto the Square, vaulted over a wagon, spun a fishwife, and then began to build speed up the bridge. From here to the London shore was a hundred and some yards, from there to the ’Change was six hundred—he’d be there in three minutes.

“You have been to London before, Dr. Leibniz?” “I have been studying London-paintings.” “I’m afraid most of those became antiquarian curiosities after the Fire—like street-plans of Atlantis.” “And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way,” Leibniz said. “Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle—all on the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe—for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”

Daniel decided to step back and let Leibniz’s words reverberate, as organ-chords must do in Lutheran churches.

“Ten years ago I might have been offended,” Daniel said. “Now, there’s nothing I’ll not believe.”

“Your father was mathematickally inclined?” “Difficult to say. As a traveler comprehends a city only by viewing pictures of it drawn from differing standpoints, I know my father only by having read the books that he read.”

They were milling in the street around a black coach blazoned with the arms of Count Penistone.

Knott Bolstrood, Count Penistone—his father founded a sect called the Barkers, normally lumped in with many others under the pejorative term of Puritans. The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however—for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.”

“All I am saying is that we happen to enjoy farces.”

bearing the same relationship to Wilkins’s signature as a ghost to a man.

“I was trained as a lawyer. Don’t look so horrified, Mr. Waterhouse, it is respectable enough, for an educated man in Germany.

After I was awarded my Doctor of Jurisprudence, I went to work for the Archbishop of Mainz, who gave me the job of reforming the legal code—which was a Tower of Babel—Roman and Germanic and local common law all mangled together.

“Is he like Spinoza, then?” “You mean, one who says God is nothing more than Nature? I doubt it.” “What does Hooke want?” “He is busy all day and night designing new buildings, surveying new streets—” “Yes, and I am busy overhauling the German legal code—but it is not what I want.”

“Mr. Hooke, by contrast, is convinced that Nature’s ways are consonant to man’s reason. As the beating of a fly’s wings is consonant to the vibration of a plucked string, so that the sound of one, produces a sympathetic resonance in the other—in the same way, every phenomenon in the world can, in principle, be understood by human ratiocination.”

“Oh, most difficult for such a man to make his way in the world without a patron!”

Indeed

“Consider it under consideration, Sir.” “And even if there is no time in your life for houses—perhaps I could beg a few hours for my theatre—” “Did you say theatre?” “I’ve bought part interest in one, yes—the King’s Comedians play there—we produced Love in a Tub and The Lusty Chirurgeon. From time to time, we need help making thunder and lightning, as well as demonic apparitions, angelic visitations, impalements, sex-changes, hangings, live births, et cetera.” “Well, I don’t know what my family would think of my being involved in such things, Roger.” “Poh! Look at what they have been up to! Now that the Apocalypse has failed to occur, Daniel, you must find something to do with your several talents.”

Love this exchange

“In that both have to do with spiritual essences being infused into bodies that are in essence mechanical,”

“Whatever acts, cannot be destroyed,” said the Doctor.

A fifth doctrine, that tendeth to the dissolution of a commonwealth, is, that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods; such, as excludeth the right of the sovereign. —HOBBES, Leviathan

mannered, hollow, and false, and all who took part in it secretly wanted to strike the show and move on to something new. Thus London during this the Third Dutch War, waiting for news of the Fall of Holland.

He invented a new thunder-engine, consisting of a cannonball rolling down a Spiral of Archimedes in a wooden barrel, and he abused his privileges at the world’s leading alchemical research facility to formulate a new variant of gunpowder that made more flash and less bang. The pyrotechnics lasted for a few minutes, at the beginning of the play. The rest of the time he got to sit backstage and watch Tess, who always dazzled him like a fistful of flash-powder going off right in the face, and made his heart feel like a dented cannonball tumbling down an endless hollow Screw.

David Jones’s Locker.

“Yes, ’twas a black year, and made rebels of many who only wanted to be merchants.”

Exasperating to his mind but comforting to his soul.

“That reminds me of something you said on your first day in London, Doctor. You mentioned that the question of free will versus predestination is one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What, pray tell, is the other?” “The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space? Euclid assures us that we can divide any distance in half, and then subdivide each of them into smaller halves, and so on, ad infinitum. Easy to say, but difficult to understand…”

“But to me, they do not resolve our confusion, so much as give us a way to think about how confused we are. For example—”

you sum this series, it will slowly converge on pi. So we have a way to approach the value of pi—to reach toward it, but never to grasp it…much as the human mind can approach divine things, and gain an imperfect knowledge of them, but never look God in the face.”

From any other Continental lawyer these words would have been laughably arrogant; but they had come from the mouth of the monster. I laid the reins upon the neck of my lusts. —JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

thump, like the period at the end of a book.

“I understood his state of mind too well. Some of us, Daniel, are prone to a sort of melancholy, wherein we are tormented by phant’sies that other men are secretly plotting to do us injury. It is a pernicious state for a man to fall into.

“I haven’t clothes fit to wear to a whorehouse—to say nothing of Whitehall Palace.” “There is very little practical difference,” Roger said absent-mindedly.