The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, #2)

by Neal Stephenson

“When a thing such as wax, or gold, or silver, turns liquid from heat, we say that it has fused,” Eliza said to her son, “and when such liquids run together and mix, we say they are con-fused.”

“For confusion is a kind of bewitchment—a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature.”

We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness.

“I love riddles, too, Jack, but I hate guessing-games.

Like Frenchmen, crocodiles were what they were, and did what they did, and saw no point in making pretenses or apologies, and therefore possessed a sort of aplomb that Jack found admirable in a way.

but as Jack had demonstrated in diverse settings, sometimes it sufficed to be annoying.

But to play fast and loose with quantities numerical is, of course, a perquisite—some would say, a necessity—of your office.”

People hated listening to Daniel and Roger converse, for they’d known each other much longer than was decent, proper, or good for them, and so were able to communicate in a stunted zargon of private allusions. Bloody ears was here a reference to Charles White, the Jacobite Tory who had made a habit of biting Whigs’ ears off, and (or so ’twas rumored) later displaying them, in private, to like-minded friends, as trophies.

“Some, Daniel, would say that the regrettable phænomena to which you allude were consistent, or persistent, or constant menaces to our liberties as Englishmen, and thus naturally to be confronted and subdued with manly vigor. For you to roll your eyes in this way, and deride them as merely repetitious—as if you were watching a play—is very strange.”

“This is really a matter of derivatives, is it not?” “Financial derivatives?” “No, mathematical ones! For any quantity—say, position—there is a derivative, representing its rate of change. As I see it, England’s stock of land represents a fixed quantity of wealth. But commerce I see as a derivative—it is the slope, the speed, the rate of change of the nation’s wealth. When commerce stagnates, this rate of change is small, and money founded upon it is worthless. Hence the lopsided exchange rate you told me of. But when commerce thrives, all goes into rapid movement, the derivative jumps up, and money founded on it becomes of much greater value. Once Newton goes to work at the Mint, the supply of coin in England can only improve. Commerce, which has been frozen for lack of money, will surge, at least briefly. The exchange rate between these two currencies will swing the opposite way, long enough at least for me to take a profit.”

“They say necromancers hold in thrall those whom they have brought back to life,” he said, “but I never thought it would work this way.”

God has chosen the world that is the most perfect, that is to say, the one that is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena. —LEIBNIZ

“Stability is not always a good thing. Think of lead and quicksilver. Lead makes good ballast, rooves, and pipes, but is sluggish, while quicksilver has marvelous properties of speed, flexibility, fluidity…”

Alchemists think in metaphors that are sometimes instructive.”

“Why do England’s greatest savants spend so much time arguing about coins?”

For if God made the world according to understandable, consistent laws—and if nothing else, Newton has proved that—then it must be consistent through and through, top to bottom. If it is made of atoms, then it is made of atoms, and must be explained in terms of atoms; when we get into a difficulty, we cannot suddenly wave our hands and say, ‘At this point there is a miracle,’ or ‘Here I invoke a wholly new thing called Force which has nothing to do with atoms.’ And this is why neither Dr. Waterhouse nor I loves the Atomic theory, for we cannot make out how such phænomena as light and gravity and magnetism can possibly be explained by the whacking and sticking of hard bits of stuff.”

it would appear that monads perceive, think, and act. And this is where the idea comes from, that a monad is a little soul. For perception, cogitation, and action are soul-like, as opposed to billiard-ball-like, attributes. Does this mean that monads have souls in the same way that you and I do? I doubt it.”

“Quickly then: a few moments in Taunton market-square, eleven years ago, helping you with that silly banner, when the wind had gusted, and blown it down—you remember? Those moments are to my life what this hinge-pin is in the case of the door; which is to say that all pivoted, and pivots, about it; it is what I am about, as it were, and at the same time, it holds all together. Take it away—”

“we enjoy a dash of quixotic, as long as it is not boring. She is never boring about it, is she?”

“Less sarcasm, more philosophy.”

“The mind cannot work with things themselves.

This is the ‘I need an infinite amount of money’ project,”

Once you’ve made up your mind to speak in ridiculous figures, instead of saying things straight out, why bother with making it all consistent?”

“Funny how no one ever makes up legends concerning wretchedly poor kingdoms—”

“It is in the nature of men cooped up together aboard ship that they fall to infighting at some point,”

“And that is what we are working toward. Learn from the Armenians, Jack. We do not care for titles and we do not have armies nor castles. Noble folk can sneer at us all they like—when their kingdoms have fallen into dust, we will buy their silks and jewels with a handful of beans.”

Does a farmer measure his wealth in pails of milk? No, for pails spill, and milk spoils in a day. A farmer measures his wealth in cows. If he has cows, milk comes forth almost without effort.”

“Sometimes a man must accept a great loss.”

We do what we have to do, Moseh, and are not frequently given diverse choices. What are you getting at?”

“THE BEST TIME TO NEGOTIATE is before negotiations have begun,”

“If you are talking to God, why are you speaking Sabir?” shouted Jack, who was watching from the poop deck of Minerva. “God is far away,” Moseh explained, “and I must rely on men to keep me honest.”

An apology may be heartfelt without being rational.”

“Why indeed should we not view the world as a cage in which our spirit has been imprisoned?”

“Ridding a country of Jews is easier than purging every last phant’sy and suspicion from an Inquisitor’s mind,”

“Disciples can be dangerous—especially when they are not right in the head to begin with.

Jack had never had much use for Spaniards, having always tended to view them as Englishmen gone spectacularly wrong, grapes that had turned to vinegar, a reasonably promising folk who’d been made utterly deranged by being trapped between la France and dar al-Islam.

They came back to discover that they were developing a legend, which Jack had come to believe was a good thing to leave behind but a bad thing to have.

The one or two broad simple concerns of Jack’s early life, like the light and dark portions of a wootz-ingot, had been hammered out and folded over, hammered out and folded over, so many times that they had become involved and inter-tangled into a swirl of swirls, something too intricate to follow, or to be given the name of “pattern” or “design.” It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like “complicated.” But he would tell Jimmy and Danny and Tomba that it was complicated, and they would not have the faintest understanding of what he meant. Jack could only pray that its complexity gave it the strength and keenness of a watered-steel blade. Much later he might be able to discern whether there was beauty in it, too.

The Seamen returned enriched with the Plunder, not of Ships, but of Fleets, Loaden with Silver; they went out Beggars, and came home Gentlemen; nay, the Wealth they brought Home, not only enrich’d themselves, but the whole Nation. —DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce

Jack’s chief source of discomfort, then, was a feeling well known to soldiers of low rank, to doctors’ patients, and to people getting their hair cut; namely, that he was utterly in the power of an incompetent.