Clippings

…Klein’s life had not been without its inner tragedy. The power of synthesis had been granted to him to an extraordinary degree. The other great mathematical power of analysis had been to a certain extent withheld. His ability to bring together the most distant, abstract parts of mathematics had been remarkable, but the sense for the formulation of an individual problem and the absorption in it had been lacking. “He was like a flier who, soaring high over the world, discovers and looks over new fields … but cannot land his plane in order to take actual possession, to plow and to harvest.” Perhaps Klein had himself been unaware of this deep schism… Certainly he had perceived “that his most splendid scientific creations were fundamentally gigantic sketches, the completion of which he had to leave to other hands.”

[Newton’s] papers began to appear in the early twentieth century, when cash-poor nobility sold them at auction and they scattered to collectors in Europe and across the Atlantic. … Interest was slight, but the economist and Cantabrigian John Maynard Keynes, disturbed, as he said, by the impiety, managed to buy some at the auction and then gradually reassembled more than a third of the collection. What he found there amazed him: the alchemist; the heretical theologian; not the cold rationalist Blake had so despised but a genius more peculiar and extraordinary. An “intense and flaming spirit.” …

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes told a few students and fellows in a shadowed room at Trinity College. “He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

The Royal Society had never actually agreed to print the book. Indeed, it had only underwritten the publication of one book before, a lavish and disastrously unsuccessful two-volume History of Fishes. After much discussion the council members did vote to order the Principia printed—but by Halley, at his own expense. They offered him leftover copies of History of Fishes in place of his salary.

He comes from the dense forests of the wild boar and the urus; he is white, courageous, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe—not to the universe. Wars bring him to Ravenna, and there he sees something he has never seen before, or never fully seen. He sees daylight and cypresses and marble. He sees an aggregate that is multiple yet without disorder; he sees a city, an organism, composed of statues, temples, gardens, rooms, tiered seats, amphoræ, capitals and pediments, and regular open spaces. None of those artifices (I know this) strikes him as beautiful; they strike him as we would be struck today by a complex machine whose purpose we know not but in whose design we sense an immortal intelligence at work. Perhaps a single arch is enough for him, with its incomprehensible inscription of eternal Roman letters—he is suddenly blinded and renewed by the City, that revelation. he knows that in this city there will be a dog, or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but he knows as well that this city is worth more than his gods and the faith he is sworn to and all the marshlands of Germany. Droctulft deserts his own kind and fights for Ravenna. He dies, and on his gravestone are carved words that he would not have understood:

Convalescent, immobilized in the nut tree, he plunged into serious study. At that time he began to write a Project for the Constitution of an Ideal State in the Trees, in which he described the imaginary Republic of Arborea, inhabited by just men. He began it as a treatise on laws and governments; but as he wrote, his impulse to invent complicated stories intervened and out poured a rough sketch of adventures, duels and erotic tales, the latter inserted in a chapter on matrimonial rights…. He sent a précis to Diderot, signing it simply: “Cosimo Rondò, Reader of the Encyclopaedia.” Diderot thanked him with a short note.