The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, #3)

by Neal Stephenson

In time he worked his way back to merry, but only after perilous detours through confused, astonished, and outraged.

“As my life is already staked, ’twere false œconomy to quibble over ten guineas.

She had told visitors that Dr. Waterhouse was deathly ill, and physicians that he was doing much better now, and thereby stopped all of them from crossing his threshold.

’Twas as if the combination in one city of too many printing presses; a bloody and perpetual atmosphere of Party Malice; and an infinite supply of coffee; had combined, in some alchemical sense, to engender a monstrous prodigy, an unstanchable wound that bled Ink and would never heal.

How self-absorbed for him to cower in bed, for fear of mysterious enemies, here in the center of a metropolis that was to Hostility what Paris was to Taste?

So, inasmuch as it made him feel better, Daniel began to look forward to his daily ink-toilette.

That God hears the prayers of Lutherans, is a proposition hotly disputed by many, including many Lutherans.

It is this pattern of relationships that coheres in space and persists in time and endows the smoke-ring with an identity.

for if Natural Philosophy is to explain the world, it must do so in terms of the things that make up the world, without recourse to occult intrusions from some external, unknowable Realm Beyond.

It is not that Peter is a brute. Extremely violent and dangerous to be sure, but more in the style of a highly effective Roman Emperor than of a cave-bear. It is simply that he likes to accomplish things, preferably with his own hands, and tends to view conversations as impediments. He would rather do something of an essentially stupid and pointless nature, than talk of something beautiful or momentous.

“Russia is big. I can make savants. Just as I can make soldiers. But a soldier without a gun is only a fire that burns food. I think the same is true of a savant without his tools.”

“I am Dr. Waterhouse of the Royal Society,” Daniel confessed, “a high and mighty title for a sinner, which brings me never so much respect and honor among those who have been seduced by the pleasures and illusions of Vanity Fair.”

“I am a horologist gone bad.”

“You deal in stolen time—”

Technology ages, dunnit?”

I grew weary of transitory knowledge, and decided to seek knowledge of a more æternal nature.”

I said to this buz, my business here has fallen on hard times because I cannot run it without transitory knowledge. And yet my brain has had its fill of the same, and all I wish to do is to sit in my shop reading books, to acquire knowledge æternal, which benefits me in ways intangible, but in no way helps me to receive and sell stolen property of a horologickal nature, which is the raison d’être of the shop.

“Anecdotes serve to illustrate the ideas he’s getting at,”

Technology is a sort of religious practice to me, a way of getting at the æternal by way of the mundane.

The only way I can think of to find my way closer to God is through the strange ministry I spoke of earlier, whereof Hooke and Spinoza were prophets. It is not a way I recommend to any man, for I am as ’stranged from the main line of religion as a stylite monk, sitting on a pillar in a waste.”

“I am nominating myself your parishioner, Doc. As you lack a church, we shall have to worship peripatetically, ambling about the streets, as now, and making Hockley-in-the-Hole our Agora.

Faces could beguile, enchant, and flirt. But clearly this woman was inflicting major spinal injuries on men wherever she went, and only a body had the power to do that.

But Englishmen, given a choice, would always prefer the faintly ridiculous over the painfully direct.

“Isaac, you have a habit of under-estimating the intelligence of anyone who is not you.

“On the contrary, my lord,” Dappa said, “there is nothing quite so civilized as to be recognized in public places as the author of books no one has read.”

“When another begins a conversation with a cryptickal outburst on odalisques, what is there for a polite gentleman to do?”

“England being a nation of clam-diggers and sheep-shearers, must forever be a net importer of fantastickal tales. Silk, oranges, perfume, and strange yarns must all be supplied from across the seas.”

Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time.

“I suppose that whenever one speaks in the abstract—which is to say, most of the time—what one is really doing is interacting with some sort of image that is held in the mind,”

“You mean, native speakers of High-Dutch, or Hochdeutsch? Alas, they are a rare breed ’mong pirates, for the Germans fear water, and love order.

It was true of beasts and humans alike that when they were terrified—literally scared out of their wits, beyond the pale of reason—they either froze, or ran away.

“True, ’twas sometime different under my lord Marlborough, but since he was stripped of command, why, it has been Black-guards all the way to the top.”

“The moon’s behind the world, the sun’s behind clouds. Yet the water that buoys us is obeying the dictates of both, is it not?”

“But is to describe something to understand it?” “I should think it were a good first step.”

’Twas as if England, when she had worn out certain words, threw them into the gutter—like a man discarding his clay-pipe when its stem was broke down to a nub—and the Thames carried those words down-country along with litter, turds, and dead cats, and strewed them up and down the estuarial flats and bars.

Hope. According to myth, the last thing to emerge from Pandora’s Box. Feeling Fear’s clammy arms reaching around him, Daniel had an almost physical longing for Hope. And perhaps Hope was no less contagious than Fear. He wanted to be infected with Hope

Perhaps what Pandora had was really just a jack-in-the-box, and Hope had never been anything more than a clock-work clown, a deus ex machina.

False, machine-made Hope could make real Hope—that was the true Alchemy, the turning of lead into gold.

“Beg pardon, we have been up to view Heaven,” sang one of the latter, “and found it ever so boring, and now we are in a great hurry to reach Hell.”

Favors are harder to get than money. Faith, what I am doing here now is like shoveling guineas into the sea.

If a want of hope made men desperate, a surfeit of it made them stupid in a wholly other way. Hope was tricky business, it seemed, and ought to be managed by someone with more experience of it than Daniel.

As a boy he had thought ships wonders. As a veteran he saw them differently, each vessel a coagulated Motive, a frozen Deed.

But at such a distance a musket-ball would merely accept suggestions—not obey orders.

The tactic worked, as cheap simple tactics commonly did:

When horse attacked foot the outcome was never in doubt, unless the foot had pikes, and were well drilled.

As the sloop pulled away from them he saw his wig spinning in a vortex, its long white ponytail pointing this way and that, like a compass needle that has lost its fix on true north.

That they existed at all was merely a comforting assumption, like that there was a God and that He meant well.

Jack was a bastard who had ascended to a great height and hob-nobbed with Heroes and Titans and seen things he was never meant to see. This might be the last time in many a generation that a Shaftoe might gaze down from such a vantage-point and see so much so clearly.

“All objects that perform the essential functions of a box, are unavoidably boxy,”

“But Saturn was Time’s lord, not its servant.”