Quicksilver

Начало книги

But without you, no radiance can shed.

Why rustle in the dark, when fledged with fire?

Craze the night with flails of light. Reave

Your turbid shroud. Bestow what I require.

But you’re not in the dark. I do believe

I swim, like squid, in clouds of my own make,

To you, offensive. To us both, opaque.

What’s constituted so, only a pen

Can penetrate. I have one here; let’s go.

Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations… may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.

–Roger Cotes, preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713

ENOCH ROUNDS THE CORNER JUSTas the executioner raises the noose above the woman’s head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place. The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think. Enoch the Red reins in his borrowed horse as it nears the edge of the crowd, and sees that the executioner’s purpose is not to let them inspect his knotwork, but to give them all a narrow-and, to a Puritan, tantalizing-glimpse of the portal through which they all must pass one day.

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