NEAL STEPHENSON - Quicksilver

Then, of course, he had to suffer advice from his elders. First, Drake took him aside.

Drake had long ago adjusted to the loss of his nose and ears, but all he had to do was turn his face in Daniel’s direction to remind him that what he was going through at Trinity wasn’t so bad. So Daniel hardly took in a single word of what Drake said to him. But he gathered that it was something along the lines of that coming into one’s chambers every night to find a different whore, services already paid for, slumbering in one’s bed, constituted a severe temptation for a young man, and that Drake was all in favor of it-seeing it as a way to hold said young man’s feet to the eternal fire and find out what he was made of.

Implicit in all of this was that Daniel would pass the test. He could not bring himself to tell his father that he’d already failed it.

Second, Raleigh and Sterling took Daniel to an extremely rural alehouse on the way back into town and told him that he must be some kind of half-wit, not to mention an ingrate, if he was not in a state of bliss. Drake and his first clutch of sons had made a very large amount of money despite (come to think of it, because of ) religious persecution. Among that ilk, the entire point of going to Cambridge was to rub elbows with the fine and the mighty. The family had sent Daniel there, at great expense (as they never tired of reminding him), and if Daniel occasionally woke up to find the Duke of Monmouth passed out on top of him, it only meant that all of their dreams had come true.

Implicit was that Raleigh and Sterling did not believe that the world was coming to an end in 1666. If true, this meant that Daniel’s excuse for not ratting on Upnor was void.

The whole incident was then apparently forgotten by everyone at Trinity except Waterhouse and Jeffreys. Jeffreys ignored Daniel for the most part, but from time to time he would, for example, sit across from him and stare at him all through dinner, then pursue him across the lawn afterwards: “I can’t stop looking at you. You are fascinating, Mr. Waterhouse, a living and walking incarnation of cravenness. You saw a man murdered, and you did nothing about it. Your face glows like a hot branding-iron. I want to brand it into my memory so that as I grow old, I may look back upon it as a sort of Platonic ideal of cowardice.

“I’m going into law, you know. Were you aware that the emblem of justice is a scale? From a beam depend two pans. On one, what is being weighed-the accused party. On the other, a standard weight, a polished gold cylinder stamped with the assayer’s mark. You, Mr. Waterhouse, shall be the standard against which I will weigh all guilty cowards.

“What sort of Puritanical sophistry did you gin up, Mr. Waterhouse, to justify your inaction? Others like you got on a ship and sailed to Massachusetts so that they could be apart from us sinners, and live a pure life. I ween you are of the same mind, Mr. Waterhouse, but sailing on a ship across the North Atlantic is not for cowards, and so you are here. I think that you have withdrawn into a sort of Massachusetts of the mind! Your body’s here at Trinity, but your spirit has flown off to some sort of notional Plymouth Rock-when we sit at High Table, you phant’sy yourself in a wigwam ripping drumsticks from a turkey and chewing on Indian corn and making eyes at some redskinned Indian lass.”

THIS SORT OF THING LEDto Daniel’s spending much time going for walks in Cambridge’s gardens and greens, where, if he chose his route carefully, he could stroll for a quarter of an hour without having to step over the body of an unconscious young scholar, or (in warmer weather) make apologies for having stumbled upon Monmouth, or one of his courtiers, copulating with a prostitute al fresco . More than once, he noticed another solitary young man strolling around the Backs. Daniel knew nothing of him-he had made no impression upon the College whatsoever. But once Daniel got in the habit of looking for him, he began to notice him here and there, skulking around the edges of University life. The boy was a sizar-a nobody from the provinces trying to escape from the lower class by taking holy orders and angling for a deaconage in some gale-chafed parish. He and the other sizars (such as Roger Comstock) could be seen descending on the dining-hall after the upper classes-pensioners (e.g., Daniel) and fellow-commoners (e.g., Monmouth and Upnor)-had departed, to forage among their scraps and clean up their mess.

Like a pair of comets drawn together, across a desolate void, by some mysterious action at a distance, they attracted each other across the greens and fells of Cambridge. Both were shy, and so early they would simply fall into parallel trajectories during their long strolls. But in time the lines converged. Isaac was pale as star-light, and so frail-looking that no one would’ve guessed he’d live as long as he had. His hair was exceptionally fair and already streaked with silver. He already had protruding pale eyes and a sharp nose. There was the sense of much going on inside his head, which he had not the slightest inclination to share with anyone else. But like Daniel, he was an alienated Puritan with a secret interest in natural philosophy, so naturally they fell in together.

They arranged a room swap. Another merchant’s son eagerly took Daniel’s place, viewing it as a move up the world’s ladder. The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity did not segregate the classes as rigidly as other colleges, so it was permitted for Isaac and Daniel to chum together. They shared a tiny room with a window looking out over the town-for Daniel, a great improvement over the courtyard view, so fraught with bloody memories. Musket-balls had been fired in through their window during the Civil War, and the bullet-holes were still in the ceiling.

Daniel learned that Isaac came from a family prosperous by Lincolnshire standards. His father had died before Newton was even born, leaving behind a middling yeoman’s legacy. His mother had soon married a more or less affluent cleric. She did not sound, from Isaac’s description, like a doting mum. She’d packed him off to school in a town called Grantham. Between her inheritance from the first marriage and what she’d acquired from the second, she easily could have sent him to Cambridge as a pensioner. But out of miserliness, or spite, or some hostility toward education in general, she’d sent him as a sizar instead-meaning that Isaac was obliged to serve as some other student’s boot-polisher and table-waiter. Isaac’s dear mother, unable to humiliate her son from a distance, had arranged it so that some other student-it didn’t matter which-would do it in her stead. In combination with that Newton was obviously far more brilliant than Daniel was, Daniel was uneasy with the arrangement. Daniel proposed that they make common cause, and pool what they had, and live together as equals.

To Daniel’s surprise, Isaac did not accept. He continued to perform sizar’s work, without complaint. By any measure, his life was much better now. They’d spend hours, days, in that chamber together, spending candles by the pound and ink by the quart, working their separate ways through Aristotle. It was the life that both of them had longed for. Even so, Daniel thought it strange that Isaac would help him in the mornings with his clothing, and devote a quarter of an hour, or more, to dressing his hair. Half a century later, Daniel could remember, without vanity, that he had been a handsome enough young man. His hair was thick and long, and Isaac learned that if he combed it in a particular way he could bring out a certain natural wave, up above Daniel’s forehead. He would not rest, every morning, until he had accomplished this. Daniel went along with it uneasily. Even then, Isaac had the air of a man who could be dangerous when offended, and Daniel sensed that if he declined, Isaac would not take it well.