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November 19 - November 26, 2018
For it is when men become old and important, and peevish over the odd ambuscade, that they become most vulnerable to just such tactics.
And it was as silent as a parish-church when the vicar has lost his place in the middle of the sermon.
“Sometimes I think that I am the sum of my losses,” Caroline finally said. “And if so, then every loss that I suffer enlarges me. I hope my discourse does not strike you as too grim,”
“Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself.
“Dusk and dawn come so close to kissing at this time of year I never know which is which.”
every time you smoke tobacco, you are prefiguring your own death.”
“Because though I have not done violence I have seen rather a lot of it. Not all of the men who employ it are stupid, or evil. Only most of them. The rest use it reluctantly, as a way, when all else has failed, of seizing the main chance.
But like a man who imbibes tobacco-smoke, you have died a little death tonight. I do not recommend that you become addicted to it.”
for more men desire power than desire gold.
“It has been my view for some years that a new System of the World is being created around us. I used to suppose that it would drive out and annihilate any older Systems. But things I have seen recently, in the subterranean places beneath the Bank, have convinced me that new Systems never replace old ones, but only surround and encapsulate them, even as, under a microscope, we may see that living within our bodies are animalcules, smaller and simpler than us, and yet thriving even as we thrive.
But Drake also taught me the value of money. I may not love money as much as some, but I do respect it. Do you?”
“But if you bring them urine, and they pay you money, how can you not know?”
One measure of soldierly experience, he had found, was how long it took for a man to wot that an engagement had commenced.
“I do not concern myself so much,” said Caroline, turning toward Leibniz and Newton, “with bankers, merchants, clock-makers, or Longitude-finders, and their rôles in the creation of this System. Or even with Astronomers and Alchemists. But I am terribly concerned with my Philosophers, for if they get it wrong, then the System is flawed, and shall burn, in the end. Stop your bickering and get to work.”
But I’d have you know that my Stupidity and my Skepticism are two sides of the same coin, and are of a very particular kind, which is carefully thought out. John Locke was of the same mind, and set
The imbalance between the grand mysteries of the Universe as opposed to our own feeble faculties, leads us to set very modest expectations as to what we shall and shan’t be able to understand—and makes us passing suspicious of anyone who propounds dogma or seems to phant’sy he has got it all figured out.
“If I may say so, highness,” said Daniel, “Sir Isaac learned early that anything he openly professed was liable to come under attack, to his great aggravation and embarrassment, and so became chary of professing anything until he had got it perfect, and made it impervious. Praxis is not ready yet.”
“I understand that,” said Daniel, “and I say it is all pistons and cylinders, weights and springs, to the very top. And that’s all I need to explain how I inform ink on a page, and how a bird informs the air with its wings.”
For the relationship that our souls bear to our bodies, is akin to the relationship that God bears to the entire Universe. If God is to be something more than an Absentee Landlord—something more than the perfect watch-maker, who sets His clock a-run, and walks away from it—then we must account for how He influences the movements of things in the world.
And when we discourse of animal motion we must in the end address a like problem, namely of how the soul that inhabits a body may influence the operation of what is in the end just a big soggy clock.”
Couched in the willfully obscure jargon of the Alchemists, this cause, or principle, or whatever one wants to call it, is known as the Philosopher’s Stone, or other terms such as the Philosophic Mercury, the Vital Agent, the Latent or Subtile Spirit, the Secret Fire, the Material Soul of Matter, the Invisible Inhabitant, the Body of Light, the Seed, the Seminal Virtue.”
“To my ears, all of this sounds like a rear-guard action fought by a good Christian retreating before the onslaught of Mechanical Philosophy.”
“The answer is yes. But it is a question of timing, sir. It is not for you, or me, or our Princess, to dictate how long it shall take, and when it shall be accomplished! She would have it settled now—today! You are likewise in a great hurry. For you are an old man—we are all old men—and fearful of running out of time. But this is neither here nor there. Nature will reveal her secrets at times of her own choosing, and has no thought of our convenience. Principia Mathematica might never have come about had Nature not sent a spate of comets our way in the 1680s, and so arranged their trajectories
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for you, Gottfried, there is Enoch Root, and for you, Isaac, that ancient Jew who works for the Tsar and calls himself Solomon.”
“Geographically, yes, you shall return to the same latitude and longitude,” said Eliza, after thinking about this one for a moment. “But you will no longer be incognito. And so socially you shall be coming to a city you have never before visited, and to a different life altogether.”
He was at a pole. Van Hoek had explained to him once that if you went to the South Pole, then east and west and south would cease to exist, and any direction you went would be north. Thus Jack’s current status in the world.
I do not think one can ever own the quicksilver spirit that circulates among the minds of philosophers and ingénieurs. It is like trying to catch in a bucket the electrickal fluid of Mr. Hauksbee.”
One child in Boston today is a million descendants at some time in the future.”
“Don’t only brood on it, if you please. Work it out. See what you have done.”
“As Roger liked to say, ’tis a good thing to be educable.”
He and Bob had learnt very early that the Nation of the Insane comprised diverse classes, sects, and parties, each of which must be treated with in a different way.
He preferred to take a dim view of everything they said, rather than picking and choosing.
“We are all up to something,”
The cervical vertebrae of the Great and the Good pop and creak all round as they vie to see what’s in it:
The feeling is of entering a house without a roof, a home whose ceiling is Heaven.
“I, Jack Shaftoe, also known as L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak, Quicksilver, Lord of Divine Fire, Jack the Coiner, do hereby repent of all my sins and commend my soul to God,”
The sky, which was blue a moment ago, has turned uniformly gray, and its compass is narrowing. It shrinks to a lead coin with two white birds and a black one minted on its face.
He sort of glided. Like a leaf, floating on a turbulent and swirling stream, dodging and spinning in unseen Mobb-currents, but ever moving in the same general direction: away from me.”
“Yes,” says Daniel Waterhouse, “it is a most fitting end for such a villainous man. And this—the new King, the strong Bank, the sound coinage, and all the works of Natural Philosophers and ingénieurs—are a fine beginning for a new System of the World.”
At some point the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have been wrought into it in spite of the best efforts of Caroline and Daniel. Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But—and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there’s a longboat waiting to take him away—he has to admit that having some kind of a System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.
