this somewhere in his book, get it off his chest, though he’d written all the way through to page 21 before he did so:
Since I shall devote quite a few pages to Newton’s alchemical interests, I feel the need to make a personal declaration…I am not myself an alchemist, nor do I believe in its premises. My modes of thought are so removed from those of alchemy that I am constantly uneasy in writing on the subject, feeling that I have not fully penetrated an alien world of thought. Nevertheless, I have undertaken to write a biography of Newton, and my personal preferences cannot make more than a million words he wrote in the study of alchemy disappear. It is not inconceivable to most historians that twentieth-century criteria of rationality may not have prevailed in every age. Whether we like it or not, we have to conclude that anyone who devoted much of his time for nearly thirty years to alchemical study must have taken it very seriously—especially if he was Newton.
“My personal preferences cannot make more than a million words he wrote in the study of alchemy disappear.” In those words Westfall admitted to wishing that he
could
make those million words disappear; if he could he would excise all that hocus-pocus from the collected works of the English hero of the Enlightenment. A million words.
In putting a floodlight on Westfall’s scepticism, drawn out of the shadows of his footnotes, Elizabeth was declaring her own position. She would go where angels and sceptical biographers had previously feared to tread; she would look where they had not wanted to look, at Newton the alchemist—not the scientist who dabbled in dark arts but the man who practised them. Elizabeth Vogelsang would not avert her eyes from Newton the magus.
Then without further comment—for her book worked by a kind of bizarre juxtaposition; she’d put things together as an alchemist would and let them do their own work, make their own chemistry—Elizabeth plunged straight into her first chapter, “Glass Works.” The phrase evoked Venice and optical instruments and sand and fragility, stained glass, blues and reds and golds. It made me think of rainbow reflections from Victorian chandeliers.
You would have liked the colour and light of her writing, the ease of her sentences.
The Alchemist
would not have grieved you as you feared it would. You looked for Elizabeth in Wallace Stevens and found a glimpse of her there. You might have looked in
The Alchemist
too, where you would have found her among the opulent materiality and detail of her goddamned seventeenth century.
Your mother’s book began with the journey of a consignment of glassware from Venice to Cambridge across the Fens, destined for Stourbridge Fair.
Glass Works
One morning in the early spring of 1664, glassmaker Sr. Allesio Alvise Morelli received a letter, delivered by horse to his glasshouse in Murano, a small island off the coast of Venice, a cream-coloured envelope bearing the thick red seal of John Greene, Glass Seller of London. The envelope contained a large order of glassware, some of it destined, Morelli knew, for one of the largest trade fairs in Europe, Stourbridge Fair at Cambridge. 1
Morelli could no longer take his English clients for granted. The English king, Charles II, on his restoration to the throne only four years before, had granted a royal charter to the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, allowing them to put tight controls on the importation of glassware from Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. Now that the war was over, the king and his dangerous ally, George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, were determined to forge a new glassmaking industry in England to rival that of the rest of the world. Buckingham was building glasshouses at Vauxhall in London. Orders for Venetian glass were already in decline, but, the other Murano glassmakers bragged, Buckingham’s English glass would never rival the fluted, twisted,
Since I shall devote quite a few pages to Newton’s alchemical interests, I feel the need to make a personal declaration…I am not myself an alchemist, nor do I believe in its premises. My modes of thought are so removed from those of alchemy that I am constantly uneasy in writing on the subject, feeling that I have not fully penetrated an alien world of thought. Nevertheless, I have undertaken to write a biography of Newton, and my personal preferences cannot make more than a million words he wrote in the study of alchemy disappear. It is not inconceivable to most historians that twentieth-century criteria of rationality may not have prevailed in every age. Whether we like it or not, we have to conclude that anyone who devoted much of his time for nearly thirty years to alchemical study must have taken it very seriously—especially if he was Newton.
“My personal preferences cannot make more than a million words he wrote in the study of alchemy disappear.” In those words Westfall admitted to wishing that he
could
make those million words disappear; if he could he would excise all that hocus-pocus from the collected works of the English hero of the Enlightenment. A million words.
In putting a floodlight on Westfall’s scepticism, drawn out of the shadows of his footnotes, Elizabeth was declaring her own position. She would go where angels and sceptical biographers had previously feared to tread; she would look where they had not wanted to look, at Newton the alchemist—not the scientist who dabbled in dark arts but the man who practised them. Elizabeth Vogelsang would not avert her eyes from Newton the magus.
Then without further comment—for her book worked by a kind of bizarre juxtaposition; she’d put things together as an alchemist would and let them do their own work, make their own chemistry—Elizabeth plunged straight into her first chapter, “Glass Works.” The phrase evoked Venice and optical instruments and sand and fragility, stained glass, blues and reds and golds. It made me think of rainbow reflections from Victorian chandeliers.
You would have liked the colour and light of her writing, the ease of her sentences.
The Alchemist
would not have grieved you as you feared it would. You looked for Elizabeth in Wallace Stevens and found a glimpse of her there. You might have looked in
The Alchemist
too, where you would have found her among the opulent materiality and detail of her goddamned seventeenth century.
Your mother’s book began with the journey of a consignment of glassware from Venice to Cambridge across the Fens, destined for Stourbridge Fair.
Glass Works
One morning in the early spring of 1664, glassmaker Sr. Allesio Alvise Morelli received a letter, delivered by horse to his glasshouse in Murano, a small island off the coast of Venice, a cream-coloured envelope bearing the thick red seal of John Greene, Glass Seller of London. The envelope contained a large order of glassware, some of it destined, Morelli knew, for one of the largest trade fairs in Europe, Stourbridge Fair at Cambridge. 1
Morelli could no longer take his English clients for granted. The English king, Charles II, on his restoration to the throne only four years before, had granted a royal charter to the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, allowing them to put tight controls on the importation of glassware from Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. Now that the war was over, the king and his dangerous ally, George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, were determined to forge a new glassmaking industry in England to rival that of the rest of the world. Buckingham was building glasshouses at Vauxhall in London. Orders for Venetian glass were already in decline, but, the other Murano glassmakers bragged, Buckingham’s English glass would never rival the fluted, twisted,
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