Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard

When your Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world.

She started with an equation and turned it into a graph. I’ve got a graph—real data—and I’m trying to find the equation which would give you the graph if you used it the way she’s used hers. Iterated it.

Nature manipulates the x and turns it into y.

It’s not about the behaviour of fish. It’s about the behaviour of numbers. This thing works for any phenomenon which eats its own numbers—measles epidemics, rainfall averages, cotton prices, it’s a natural phenomenon in itself. Spooky.

There’s more noise with grouse.

VALENTINE . . . There’s more noise with grouse. HANNAH Noise? VALENTINE Distortions. Interference. Real data is messy. There’s a thousand acres of moorland that had grouse on it, always did till about 1930. But nobody counted the grouse. They shot them. So you count the grouse they shot. But burning the heather interferes, it improves the food supply. A good year for foxes interferes the other way, they eat the chicks. And then there’s the weather. It’s all very, very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it’s playing your song, but unfortunately it’s out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk—I mean, the noise! Impossible!

You start guessing what the tune might be. You try to pick it out of the noise. You try this, you try that, you start to get something—it’s half-baked but you start putting in notes which are missing or not quite the right notes . . . and bit by bit . . .

HANNAH What do you do? VALENTINE You start guessing what the tune might be. You try to pick it out of the noise. You try this, you try that, you start to get something—it’s half-baked but you start putting in notes which are missing or not quite the right notes . . . and bit by bit . . . (He starts to dumdi-da to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’.) Dumdi-dum-dum, dear Val-en-tine, dumdi-dum-dum to you—the lost algorithm! HANNAH (Soberly) Yes, I see. And then what? VALENTINE I publish.

The game books. My true inheritance. Two hundred years of real data on a plate.

a method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone.’

Hannah picks up the algebra book and reads from it. HANNAH ‘. . . a method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone.’ This feedback, is it a way of making pictures of forms in nature? Just tell me if it is or it isn’t. VALENTINE (Irritated) To me it is. Pictures of turbulence—

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

The future is disorder.

VALENTINE . . . We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can’t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder.

A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Six thousand years in the Sahara looks like six months in Manchester,

I’ve always been given credit for my unconcern.

‘Deny what cannot be proven for Charity’s sake!’

But he fought a duel with Byron!

BERNARD But he fought a duel with Byron! HANNAH You haven’t established it was fought. You haven’t established it was Byron. For God’s sake, Bernard, you haven’t established Byron was even here!

He’s in the game book. I think he shot a hare.

VALENTINE Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet? BERNARD No, you fucking idiot, we’re talking about Lord Byron the chartered accountant. VALENTINE (Unoffended) Oh well, he was here all right, the poet. (Silence.) HANNAH How do you know? VALENTINE He’s in the game book. I think he shot a hare.

Lending one’s bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there is.

What I don’t understand is . . . why nobody did this feedback thing before—it’s not like relativity, you don’t have to be Einstein.

HANNAH What I don’t understand is . . . why nobody did this feedback thing before—it’s not like relativity, you don’t have to be Einstein. VALENTINE You couldn’t see to look before. The electronic calculator was what the telescope was for Galileo.

We’re going to get out the dressing-up box.

HANNAH Do you mean that was the only problem? Enough time? And paper? And the boredom? VALENTINE We’re going to get out the dressing-up box.

Well, the other thing is, you’d have to be insane.

But, as we know now, the drama of life and death at Sidley Park was not about pigeons but about sex and literature.’

BERNARD . . . But, as we know now, the drama of life and death at Sidley Park was not about pigeons but about sex and literature.’ VALENTINE Unless you were the pigeon.

Where was I?

BERNARD Where was I? VALENTINE Pigeons. CHLOË Sex. HANNAH Literature. BERNARD Life and death. Right.

Where was I?

BERNARD . . . Where was I? VALENTINE Game book. CHLOË Eros. HANNAH Borrowed. BERNARD Right. ‘—borrowed from Septimus Hodge. Is it conceivable that the letters were already in the book when Byron borrowed it?’ VALENTINE Yes. CHLOË Shut up, Val. VALENTINE Well, it’s conceivable.

P.S. Burn this.’

Well, only if you stop feeding tortoises!

VALENTINE Yes, go on, Bernard—we promise. BERNARD (Finally) Well, only if you stop feeding tortoises! VALENTINE Well, it’s his lunch time.

You’ve left out everything which doesn’t fit.

You’ve gone from a glint in your eye to a sure thing in a hop, skip and a jump.

you’re like some exasperating child pedalling its tricycle towards the edge of a cliff,

Look to the mote in your own eye!—you

Genius isn’t like your average grouse.

don’t confuse progress with perfectibility.

Don’t feed the animals.

If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.’

Too much noise. There’s just too much bloody noise!

It’s no fun when it’s not among pros, is it?

‘Analysed it’, my big toe!

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.

The world is going to hell in a handcart.

a hermitage occupied by a lunatic since twenty years without discourse or companion save for a pet tortoise, Plautus by name, which he suffers children to touch on request.’

It’s only performance art, you know. Rhetoric. They used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It’s not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show.

Bernard goes. HANNAH Don’t let Bernard get to you. It’s only performance art, you know. Rhetoric. They used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It’s not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard’s indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

what earthly use is a love letter from beyond the grave?

LADY CROOM Pah!—what earthly use is a love letter from beyond the grave? SEPTIMUS As much, surely, as from this side of it. . . .

Lord Byron’s want of delicacy is a grief to his friends,

SEPTIMUS Very improper, I agree. Lord Byron’s want of delicacy is a grief to his friends, among whom I no longer count myself. I will not read his letter until I have followed him through the gates.

That may excuse the reading but not the writing.

SEPTIMUS . . . I will not read his letter until I have followed him through the gates. She considers that for a moment. LADY CROOM That may excuse the reading but not the writing.

Your ladyship should have lived in the Athens of Pericles! The philosophers would have fought the sculptors for your idle hour!

SEPTIMUS Your ladyship should have lived in the Athens of Pericles! The philosophers would have fought the sculptors for your idle hour! LADY CROOM (Protesting) Oh, really! . . . (Protesting less.) Oh really . . .

Now there’s a thing—a letter from Lord Byron never to be read by a living soul.

It is a defect of God’s humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan. VALENTINE Ah. The attraction that Newton left out. All the way back to the apple in the garden. Yes. (Pause.) Yes, I think you’re the first person to think of this.

CHLOË That’s what I think. The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan. VALENTINE Ah. The attraction that Newton left out. All the way back to the apple in the garden. Yes. (Pause.) Yes, I think you’re the first person to think of this. Hannah enters, carrying a tabloid paper, and a mug of tea.

Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.