–Gemelli Careri
PASSING THROUGHthe Great Gate, he borrowed a lantern from a porter and exited onto a walkway that led to the street, hemmed in by crenellated walls. The wall to his left had a narrow gate let into it. Using his old key, Daniel opened the lock on this gate and stepped through into a sizable garden. It was laid out as a grid of gravel walkways with squares of greenery between. Some of the squares were planted with small fruit trees, others with shrubs or grass. To his left a line of taller trees screened the windows of the row of chambers that filled the space between the Great Gate and the Chapel. The buds in their branches were just evolving to nascent leaves, and where light shone from Isaac’s windows they glowed like stopped explosions, phosphorus-green. But most of the windows were dark, and the stars above the muzzles of the chimneys were sharp and crystalline, not blurred by heat or dimmed by smoke. Isaac’s furnaces were cold, the stuff in their crucibles congealed. Their heat had all gone into his skull.
Daniel let his lantern-hand fall to his side so that the light shone across the gravel path from the altitude of his knee. This made Isaac’s chicken-scratchings stand out in high relief.
Every one had started the same way: with Isaac slashing the toe of his shoe, or the point of his stick, across the ground to make a curve. Not a specific curve-not a circle or a parabola-but a representative curve. Everything in the universe was curved, and those curves were evanescent and fluxional, but with this gesture Isaac snatched a particular curve-it didn’t matter which-down from the humming cosmos, like a frog flicking its tongue out to filch a gnat from a swarm. Once trapped in the gravel, it was frozen and helpless. Isaac could stand and look at it for as long as he wanted, like Sir Robert Moray gazing at a stuffed eel in a glass box. After a while Isaac would begin to slash straight lines into the gravel, building up a scaffold of rays, perpendiculars, tangents, chords, and normals. At first this would seem to grow in a random way, but then lines would intersect with others to form a triangle, which would miraculously turn out to be an echo of another triangle in a different place, and this fact would open up a sort of sluice-gate that would free information to flood from one part of the diagram to another, or to leap across to some other, completely different diagram-but the results never came clear to Daniel’s mind because here the diagram would be aborted and a series of footsteps-lunar craters in the gravel-would plot Isaac’s hasty return to his chambers, where it could be set down in ink.
Daniel followed these footsteps into the chambers he had once shared. The ground floor was cluttered with alchemical droppings, but not as dangerous as usual, since everything was cold. Daniel shone his lantern around one quiet room and then another. Everything that gave light back was hard mineral stuff, the inert refractory elements to which nature always returned: crusty crucibles, sooty retorts, corroded tongs, black crystals of charcoal, globs of quicksilver trapped in floor-cracks, a box of golden guineas left open next to a window as if to prove to all passers-by that the man who lived here cared nothing for gold.
On a desk he saw letters in Latin from gentlemen in Prague, Naples, St.-Germain, addressed to JEOVA SANCTUS UNUS. Through gaps between them Daniel saw parts of a large drawing that had been pinned down to the surface of the table. It looked like a floor plan of a building. Daniel moved some papers and books out of the way to expose more of it. He was wondering whether Isaac-like Wren, Hooke, and Daniel himself-had gone into Architecture.
Isaac appeared to be designing a square, walled court with a rectangular structure in the middle. Sweeping a trapezoid of lantern-light over a block of writing, Daniel read the following: The same God gave the dimensions of the Tabernacle to Moses and Temple with its Courts to David amp; Ezekiel amp; altered not the proportion of the areas but only doubled them in the Temple… So then Solomon and Ezekiel agree, and are double to Moses.
“I am only trying to recover what Solomon knew,” Isaac said.
Knowing that the lantern would blind Isaac’s burnt eyes, Daniel raised it up and blew it out before turning around. Isaac had come in silence down a stone staircase. His atelier on the first story had candles burning, and these warmed the stone behind Isaac with orange light. He was a black silhouette robed in a dressing-gown, his head cloaked with silver. He had not grown any heavier since College days, which was no surprise if the rumors about his dining habits were to be credited.
“I can’t help but wonder if you-perhaps even I- don’t know a hell of a lot more about practically every subject than Solomon ever did,” Daniel said.
Isaac said nothing for a moment, but something about his silhouette looked wounded, or sad.
“It’s right there in the Bible, Daniel. First chapter: the Garden of Eden. Last chapter: the Apocalypse.”
“I know, I know, the world started out perfectly good and has gotten worse and worse since then, and the only question is how bad will it get before God brings down the curtain. I was raised to believe that this tendency was as fixed and unavoidable as gravity, Isaac. But the Apocalypse did not come in 1666.”
“It will occur not long after 1867,” Isaac said. “That is the year when the Beast will fall.”
“Most Anglican cranks are guessing 1700 for the demise of the Catholic Church.”
“It is not the only way that the Anglicans are wrong.”
“Could it be, Isaac, that things are getting better, or at worst remaining more or less the same, rather then getting worse all the time? Because I really think you may know certain things that never entered Solomon’s head.”
“I am working out the System of the World upstairs,” Isaac said offhandedly. “It is not beyond reason to think that Solomon and other ancients knew that System, and encrypted it in the design of their Temples.”
“But according to the Bible those designs were given to them directly by God.”
“But go outside and look up at the stars and you see God trying to give you the same thing, if only you will pay attention.”
“If Solomon knew all of this, why didn’t he just come out and say, ‘The sun is in the middle of the solar system and planets go round about it in ellipses?’”
“I believe he did say so, in the design of his temple.”
“Yes, but why are God and Solomon alike so damned oblique in everything? Why not just come out and say it?”
“It is good that you do not waste my time with tedious letters,” Isaac said. “When I read a letter I can follow the words, but I cannot fathom the mind, of him who sent it. It is better that you come to visit me in the night-time.”
“Like an alchemist?”
“Or an early Christian in pagan Rome…”
“Scratching curves in the dust?”
“… or any Christian who dares oppose the idolators. If you were to use me thus in a letter, I would conclude you were in the employ of the Beast, as some say you are.”
“What, merely for suggesting that the world does something other than rot?”
“Of course it rots, Daniel. There is no perpetual motion machine.”
“Except for the heart.”
“The heart rots, Daniel. Sometimes it even begins to rot while its owner still lives.”
Daniel dared not follow that one up. After a silence Isaac continued, in a throatier voice: “Where do we find God in the world? That is all I want to know. I have not found Him yet. But when I see anything that does not rot-the workings of the solar system, or a Euclidean proof, or the perfection of gold-I sense I am drawing nearer to the Divine.”
“Have you found the Philosophick Mercury yet?”
“In ’77, Boyle was certain he had it.”