[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter by John Banville Page A

of us only blonde
Ottilie was not embarrassed. Stepping past Charlotte in
the doorway I caught her milky smell—and heard myself
offering her a month’s rent in advance.

    What possessed me? Ferns was hardly that Woolsthorpe
of my vague dreams, where, shut away from the pestilence of college life, I would put the final touches to
my own Principia . Time is different in the country.
There were moments when I thought I would panic,
stranded in the midst of endless afternoons. Then there
was the noise, a constant row, heifers bellowing, tractors
growling, the dogs baying all night. Things walked on
the roof, scrabbled under the floor. There was a nest of
blackbirds in the lilacs outside the parlour window
where I tried to work. The whole bush shook with their
quarrelling. And one night a herd of something, cows,
horses, I don’t know, came and milled around on the
lawn, breathing and nudging, like a mob gathering for
the attack.
    But the weather that late May was splendid, sunny
and still, and tinged with sadness. I killed whole days
rambling the fields. I had brought guidebooks to trees
and birds, but I couldn’t get the hang of them. The
illustrations would not match up with the real specimens
before me. Every bird looked like a starling. I soon got
discouraged. Perhaps that explains the sense I had of
being an interloper. Amid those sunlit scenes I felt detached,
as if I myself were a mere idea, a stylised and
subtly inaccurate illustration of something that was only
real elsewhere. Even the pages of my manuscript, when
I sat worriedly turning them over, had an unfamiliar
look, as if they had been written, not by someone else,
but by another version of myself.
    Remember that mad letter Newton wrote to John
Locke in September of 1693, accusing the philosopher out of the blue of being immoral, and a Hobbist, and
of having tried to embroil him with women? I picture
old Locke pacing the great garden at Oates, eyebrows
leaping higher and higher as he goggles at these wild
charges. I wonder if he felt the special pang which I feel
reading the subscription: I am your most humble and unfortunate
servant, Is. Newton . It seems to me to express
better than anything that has gone before it Newton’s
pain and anguished bafflement. I compare it to the way
a few weeks later he signed, with just the stark surname,
another, and altogether different, letter. What happened
in the interval, what knowledge dawned on him?
    We have speculated a great deal, you and I, on his
nervous collapse late in that summer of ’93. He was
fifty, his greatest work was behind him, the Principia and the gravity laws, the discoveries in optics. He was
giving himself up more and more to interpretative study
of the Bible, and to that darker work in alchemy which
so embarrasses his biographers (cf. Popov et al .). He was
a great man now, his fame was assured, all Europe honoured
him. But his life as a scientist was over. The
process of lapidescence had begun: the world was turning
him into a monument to himself. He was cold,
arrogant, lonely. He was still obsessively jealous—his
hatred of Hooke was to endure, indeed to intensify, even
beyond the death of his old adversary. He was—
    Look at me, writing history; old habits die hard.
All I meant to say is that the book was as good as done,
I had only to gather up a few loose ends, and write the conclusion—but in those first weeks at Ferns something
started to go wrong. It was only as yet what the doctors
call a vague general malaise. I was concentrating, with
morbid fascination, on the chapter I had devoted to his
breakdown and those two letters to Locke. Was that a
lump I felt there, a little, hard, painless lump . . . ?
    Mostly of course such fears seemed ridiculous.
There were even moments when the prospect of finishing
the thing merged somehow with my new surroundings
into a grand design. I recall one day when I was
in, appropriately enough,