It takes better than an hour to catch Minerva, just clearing the Spectacle Island shallows. Her hull is barrel-shaped and curves out above them. A pilot’s ladder is deployed. The ascent isn’t easy. Universal gravitation is not his only opponent. Rising waves, sneaking in from the North Atlantic, bounce him off the hull. Infuriatingly, the climb brings back all manner of Puritanical dogma he’s done his best to forget-the ladder becomes Jacob’s, the boat of sweaty black slaves Earth, the Ship Heaven, the sailors in the moonlit rigging Angels, the captain none other than Drake himself, ascended these many years, exhorting him to climb faster.
Daniel leaves America, becoming part of that country’s stock of memories-the composted manure from which it’s sending out fresh green shoots. The Old World reaches down to draw him in: a couple of lascars, their flesh and breath suffused with saffron, asaf?tida, and cardamom, lean over the rail, snare his cold pale hands in their warm black ones, and haul him in like a fish. A roller slides under the hull at the same moment-they fall back to the deck in an orgiastic tangle. The lascars spring up and busy themselves drawing up his equipage on ropes. Compared to the little boat with the creaking and splashing of its oars and the grunting of the slaves, Minerva moves with the silence of a well-trimmed ship, signifying (or so he hopes) her harmony with the forces and fields of nature. Those Atlantic rollers make the deck beneath him accelerate gently up and down, effortlessly moving his body-it’s like lying on a mother’s bosom as she breathes. So Daniel lies there spreadeagled for a while, staring up at the stars-white geometric points on a slate, gridded by shadows of rigging, an explanatory network of catenary curves and Euclidean sections, like one of those geometric proofs out of Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
An Ideot may be taught by Custom to Write and Read, yet no Man can be taught Genius.
-Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708
DANIEL HAD GONE OUTfor a time in the evening, and met with Roger Comstock at a tavern, and witnessed to him, and tried to bring him to Jesus. This had failed. Daniel returned to his chamber to find the cat up on the table with its face planted in Isaac’s dinner. Isaac was seated a few inches away. He had shoved a darning-needle several inches into his eyeball.
Daniel screamed from deep down in his gut. The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac’s meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away. Isaac did not flinch, which was probably a good thing. Daniel’s scream had no other effects on business as usual at Trinity College-those who weren’t too impaired to hear it probably assumed it was a wench playing hard-to-get.
“In my dissections of animals’ eyes at Grantham, I often marveled at their perfect sphericity, which, in bodies that were otherwise irregular grab-bags of bones, tubes, skeins and guts, seemed to mark them out as apart from all the other organs. As if the Creator had made those orbs in the very image of the heavenly spheres, signifying that one should receive light from the other,” Isaac mused aloud. “Naturally, I wondered whether an eye that was not spherical would work as well. There are practical as well as theologic reasons for spherical eyes: one, so that they can swivel in their sockets.” There was some tension in his voice-the discomfort must have been appalling. Tears streamed down and spattered on the table like the exhaust from a water-clock-the only time Daniel ever saw Isaac weep. “Another practical reason is simply that the eyeball is pressurized from within by the aqueous humour.”
“My God, you’re not bleeding the humour from your eyeball-?”
“Look more carefully!” Isaac snapped. “Observe-don’t imagine.”
“I can’t bear it.”
“The needle is not piercing anything-the orb is perfectly intact. Come and see!”
Daniel approached, one hand clamped over his mouth as if he were abducting himself-he did not want to vomit on the open Waste-Book where Isaac was taking notes with his free hand. Upon a closer look he saw that Isaac had inserted the darning-needle not into the eyeball itself but into the lubricated bearing where the orb rotated in its socket-he must’ve simply pulled his lower eyelid way down and probed between it and the eyeball until he’d found a way in. “The needle is blunt-it is perfectly harmless,” Isaac grunted. “If I could trouble you for a few minutes’ assistance?”
Now supposedly Daniel was a student, attending lectures and studying the works of Aristotle and Euclid. But in fact, he had over the last year become the one thing, aside from the Grace of God, keeping Isaac Newton alive. He’d long since stopped asking him such annoying, pointless questions as “Can you remember the last time you put food into your mouth” or “Don’t you suppose that a nap of an hour or two, once a night, might be good?” The only thing that really worked was to monitor Isaac until he physically collapsed on the table, then haul him into bed, like a grave-robber transporting his goods, then pursue his own studies nearby and keep on eye on him until consciousness began to return, and then, during the moments when Isaac still didn’t know what day it was, and hadn’t gone off on some fresh train of thought, shove milk and bread at him so he wouldn’t starve all the way to death. He did all of this voluntarily-sacrificing his own education, and making a burnt offering of Drake’s tuition payments-because he considered it his Christian duty. Isaac, still in theory his sizar, had become his master, and Daniel the attentive servant. Of course Isaac was completely unaware of all Daniel’s efforts-which only made it a more perfect specimen of Christlike self-abnegation. Daniel was like one of those Papist fanatics who, after they died, were found to’ve been secretly wearing hair-shirts underneath their satin vestments.
“The diagram may give you a better comprehension of the design of tonight’s experiment,” Isaac said. He’d drawn a cross-sectional view of eyeball, hand, and darning-needle in his Waste Book. It was the closest thing to a work of art he had produced since the strange events of Whitsunday last year-since that date, only equations had flowed from his pen.
“May I ask why you are doing this?”
“Theory of Colors is part of the Program,” Isaac said-referring (Daniel knew) to a list of philosophical questions Isaac had recently written out in his Waste Book, and the studies he had pursued, entirely on his own, in hopes of answering them. Between the two young men in this room-Newton with his Program and Waterhouse with his God-given responsibility to keep the other from killing himself-neither had attended a single lecture, or had any contact with actual members of the faculty, in over a year. Isaac continued, “I’ve been reading Boyle’s latest- Experiments and Considerations Touching Colors-and it occurred to me: he uses his eyes to make all of his observations-his eyes are therefore instruments, like telescopes-but does he really understand how those instruments work? An astronomer who did not understand his lenses would be a poor philosopher indeed.”
Daniel might have said any number of things then, but what came out was, “How may I assist you?” And it was not just being a simpering toady. He was, for a moment, gobsmacked by the sheer presumption of a mere student, twenty-one years old, with no degree, calling into question the great Boyle’s ability to make simple observations. But in the next moment it occurred to Daniel for the first time: What if Newton was right, and all the others wrong? It was a difficult thing to believe. On the other hand, he wanted to believe it, because if it were true, it meant that in failing to attend so many lectures he had missed precisely nothing, and in acting as Newton’s manservant he was getting the best education in natural philosophy a man could ever have.