Ian Caldwell - The Rule of Four

Still favoring the notion of a Venetian Colonna, he explained the strongest piece of evidence in favor of the Pretender.

The Hypnerotomachia was published in 1499, Taft said, when the Roman Colonna was forty-five years old; that much was unproblematic. But the final page of the actual story, which Colonna composed himself, states that the book was written in 1467-when my father's Francesco would only have been fourteen. However unlikely it was that a criminal monk had written the Hypnerotomachia , then, it was outright impossible for a teenager to have done it.

And so, like the curmudgeonly king inventing new labors for young Hercules, Taft left it to Paul to shoulder the burden of proof. Until his new protege could shrug off the problem of Colonna's age, Taft refused to assist any research premised on a Roman author.

It nearly defies explanation, the way Paul refused to buckle under the logic of those facts. He found inspiration not only in Taft's challenge, but in Taft himself: though he rejected the man's rigid interpretation of the Hypnerotomachia , he brought the same relentlessness to his sources. Whereas my father had let inspiration and intuition guide him, searching mainly in exotic locales like monasteries and papal libraries, Paul adopted Taft's more thorough approach. No book was too humble, no location too dull. From top to bottom, he began to scour the Princeton library system. And slowly his early conception of books, like a boy's conception of water who has lived his whole life by a pond, was dethroned by this sudden exposure to the ocean. Paul's book collection, the day he left for college, numbered slightly under six hundred. Princeton's book collection, including more than fifty miles of shelves in Firestone Library alone, numbered well over six million.

The experience daunted Paul at first. The quaint picture my father had painted, of happening across key documents sheerly by accident, was instantly exploded. More painful, I think, was the questioning it forced onto Paul, the introspection and self-doubt that made him wonder if his genius was simply a provincial talent, a dull star in a dark corner of the sky. That upperclassmen in his courses admitted he was far beyond them, and that his professors held him in almost messianic esteem, was nothing to Paul if he couldn't make headway on the Hypnerotomachia .

Then, during his summer in Italy, all that changed. Paul discovered the work of Italian scholars, whose texts he was able to wade through thanks to four years of Latin. Digging into the definitive Italian biography of the Venetian Pretender, he learned that some elements of the Hypnerotomachia were indebted to a book called Cormicoptae, published in 1489. As a detail in the Pretender's life, it seemed unimportant-but Paul, coming at the problem with the Roman Francesco in mind, saw much more in it. No matter when Colonna claimed to have written the book, there was now proof that it was composed after 1489. By then, the Roman Francesco would've been at least thirty-six, not fourteen. And while Paul couldn't imagine why Colonna might lie about the year he wrote the Hypnerotomachia , he realized that he'd answered Taft's challenge. For better or worse, he had entered my father's world.

What followed was a period of soaring confidence. Armed with four languages (the fifth, English, being useless except for secondary sources) and with an extensive knowledge of Colonna's life and times, Paul leapt into the text. He gave more and more of each day to the project, taking a stance toward the Hypnerotomachia that I found uncomfortably familiar: the pages were a battleground where he and Colonna would match wits, winner take all. Vincent Taft's influence, dormant in the months before his trip, had returned. As Paul's interest slowly took the color of obsession, Taft and Stein became increasingly prominent in his life. If it hadn't been for the intervention of one man, I think we might've lost Paul to them entirely.

That man was Francesco Colonna, and his book was hardly the pushover Paul had hoped. Though Paul flexed his mental muscle, he found that the mountain wouldn't move. As his progress slowed, and the fall of junior year darkened into winter, Paul became irritable, quick with sharp comments and rude mannerisms he could only have learned from Taft. At Ivy, Gil told me, members began to joke about Paul when he sat alone at the dinner table, surrounded by stacks of books, talking to no one. The more I watched his confidence dwindle, the more I understood something my father had said once: the Hypnerotomachia is a siren, a fetching song on a distant shore, all claws and clutches in person. You court her at your risk.

And so it went. Spring came; coeds in tank tops tossed Frisbees beneath his window; squirrels and blossoms stooped the tree branches; tennis balls echoed in play; and still Paul sat in his room, alone, shade drawn, door locked, with a message on his whiteboard saying do not disturb. All that I loved about the new season, he called a distraction-the smells and sounds, the sense of impatience after a long and bookish winter. I knew that I myself was becoming a distraction to him. Everything he told me started to sound like the weather report from a foreign land. I visited him little.

It took a summer alone to change him. In early September of senior year, after three months on an empty campus, he welcomed us all back and helped us move in. He was suddenly open to interruptions, eager to spend time among friends, less fixated on the past. In the opening months of that semester, he and I enjoyed a renaissance in our friendship better than anything I could've expected. He shrugged off the onlookers at Ivy who hung on his words, waiting for something outrageous; he spent less time with Taft and Stein; he savored meals and enjoyed walks between classes. He could even see the humor in the way garbage men emptied the Dumpster beneath our window each Tuesday morning at seven o'clock. I thought he was better. More than that: I thought he was reborn.

It was only when Paul came to me in October of senior year, late one night after our last fall midterms, that I understood the other thing our theses had in common: both of our subjects were dead things that refused to stay buried.

Is there anything that could change your mind about working on the Hypnerotomachia ?” Paul asked me that night-and from his tense expression, I knew he'd found something important.

No, I told him, half because I meant it, but half to get him to tip his hand.

I think I made a breakthrough over the summer. But I need your help to understand it.

Tell me, I said.

And however it began for my father, whatever galvanized his curiosity in the Hypnerotomachia , this was how it started for me. What Paul said that night gave Colonna's long-dead book new life.

Vincent introduced me to Steven Gelbman from Brown last year when he saw I was getting frustrated, Paul began. Gelbman does research with math, cryptography, and religion, all in one. He's an expert at the mathematical analysis of the Torah. Have you heard of this stuff?

Sounds like kabala.

Exactly. You don't just study what the scriptural words say; you study what the numbers say. Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a number assigned to it. Using the order of the letters, you can look for mathematical patterns.

Well, I was doubtful at the beginning. Even after sitting through ten hours of lectures on the Sephirothic correspondences, I didn't buy it. It just didn't seem to relate to Colonna. But by the summer I'd finished the secondary sources on the Hypnerotomachia , and I started working on the book itself. It was impossible. I would try to force an interpretation onto it, and it would throw everything back in my face. As soon as I thought a few pages were moving in one direction, using a certain structure, making a certain point, suddenly the sentence would end, and in the next one everything would change.