(something of a repost, but with new-ness included)
To say that I have loved, is as saying the sea is a series of formless waves. It is fundamental, and though I choose often to forget it, I do not stray far from its jagged truth. I find that to search out who I am admidst all the chatter and white noise of life is ultimately fruitless; not because I am distracted or made uncertain by it, but because all that static is as much a part of me as my face and hands, as Bletchley Park and Avialle’s cold and alien beauty.
In the year 1688, William of Orange began his march upon London to reclaim England for Protestantism and, somewhat less spectacularly, I was born. Of course I do not remember either my own birth or that of the Glorious Revolution, but I do not need to in order to know what came of it. My father called it the lesser of two evils at first, but as the laws against Dissenters grew stricter, he regretted those words. Not that he himself had cause for worry. His line of work and associations kept him out of the Anglican’s eyes, for the most part.
But the events of a tumultuous world to not even register to me. For my part, I have no memory of my early life. I do not recall much at all, save that I never had a mother and that my father and I lived in modest apartments in the outer reaches of London.
Looking back on our home, it seems almost ridiculous to me. The place was a hive, a series of elaborate warrens that ran over- and under-ground and converged upon a series of laboratories filled with philosophical implements. This was where many of the cleverest fellows in England ensconced themselves, and also where I was first exposed to the shifting mania of genius. It is where I first met Sir Isaac Newton.
I instinctually feared Sir Isaac, the way other children might shrink from a natural predator. He was of course unfathomably brilliant, and often I phant’sied that he could divine my thoughts based on a complicated string of equations that only he knew or used. After all, if he could figure the currents of the Thames or the trajectory of the Earth, the uncomplicated emotions of a child were likely as transparent as Venetian glass.
I never hunted snakes and tadpoles as the others my age did, never wallowed in riverside muck searching for fragmented shells or smooth worn stones. My days were generally spent indoors with books and chalk. My father had not himself been gifted with the mind of a scholar, and so he saw opportunity in me to make up for whatever failings he might have perceived in himself. My days were devoted to the reading of Descartes and of Sir Isaac himself, and the application of whatever I tended to learn. This was not typically much. I read the Principia Mathematica several times over before it began to make sense to me. Of course, I was only seven years old, so perhaps a certain amount of misunderstanding was warranted.
But I have gotten far ahead of myself, for this part of the story takes place long before I began to unlock the secrets of the Calculus (which we then called Fluxions and Fluents, but that is a story much greater than my own).
In the year 1688, William of Orange began his march upon London to reclaim England for Protestantism and, somewhat less spectacularly, I was born. Of course I do not remember either my own birth or that of the Glorious Revolution, but I do not need to in order to know what came of it. My father called it the lesser of two evils at first, but as the laws against Dissenters grew stricter, he regretted those words. Not that he himself had cause for worry. His line of work and associations kept him out of the Anglican’s eyes, for the most part.
But the events of a tumultuous world to not even register to me. For my part, I have no memory of my early life. I do not recall much at all, save that I never had a mother and that my father and I lived in modest apartments in the outer reaches of London.
Looking back on our home, it seems almost ridiculous to me. The place was a hive, a series of elaborate warrens that ran over- and under-ground and converged upon a series of laboratories filled with philosophical implements. This was where many of the cleverest fellows in England ensconced themselves, and also where I was first exposed to the shifting mania of genius. It is where I first met Sir Isaac Newton.
I instinctually feared Sir Isaac, the way other children might shrink from a natural predator. He was of course unfathomably brilliant, and often I phant’sied that he could divine my thoughts based on a complicated string of equations that only he knew or used. After all, if he could figure the currents of the Thames or the trajectory of the Earth, the uncomplicated emotions of a child were likely as transparent as Venetian glass.
I never hunted snakes and tadpoles as the others my age did, never wallowed in riverside muck searching for fragmented shells or smooth worn stones. My days were generally spent indoors with books and chalk. My father had not himself been gifted with the mind of a scholar, and so he saw opportunity in me to make up for whatever failings he might have perceived in himself. My days were devoted to the reading of Descartes and of Sir Isaac himself, and the application of whatever I tended to learn. This was not typically much. I read the Principia Mathematica several times over before it began to make sense to me. Of course, I was only seven years old, so perhaps a certain amount of misunderstanding was warranted.
But I have gotten far ahead of myself, for this part of the story takes place long before I began to unlock the secrets of the Calculus (which we then called Fluxions and Fluents, but that is a story much greater than my own).