Saturday, October 11, 2003

Stephenson's new novel... Posted here Saturday, October 11, 2003 at 2:24:50 PM     From Stephenson's new Quicksilver- BOOK ONE 'Should I study mathematics? Euclidean or Cartesian? Newtonian or Leibnizian calculus? Or should I go the empirical route? Will it be dissecting animals then, or classifying weeds, or making strange matters in crucibles? Rolling balls down inclined planes? Sporting with electricity and magnets?' Against that, what's in my shack here to interest them?"  - p 38 This was the range available in 1713. The human, the social, the poetic, moved to the background.   In the interstices created by the European wars among Catholics and Protestants, free cities and relatively free men were able to move about. In the flow the opportunity was to use mechanical knowledge to gain prestige and income. So the knowledge that was valued was that kind. So we get a line like .. "Wilkins let slip that, if it was an actual called Greshamn's College where he and a few of his old Oxford  cronies were teaching Natural Philosophy directly, without years and years of tedious Classical nincompoopery as prerequisite."  Understanding the society, such as could be learned by reading the classics, like Caesar's Gallic Wars, was not "useful". The new knowledge was experienced as in the realm of freedom, whereas in truth it was a freedom created by the unusual social circumstances of free capital and career. The social conditioning of opportunity was not seen, just as my father thought that paying taxes was robbery and he did not see that it was the society and its infrastructure that let him earn his income. ********