Dark Matter

After dinner I returned to my lodgings in Maiden Lane. I slept uneasily, alone with my still-smouldering remembrances of him. I could not say that I had known Newton well. I doubt there was any man or woman who could ever have claimed as much as that. For he was not just a rare bird but a shy one, too. And yet I can say that for a while, with the exception of Mrs. Conduitt, I knew him as well as anyone could have known him.

Until I met Newton I was like London before the Great Fire, and gave little thought to the poor repair of my intellectual buildings. But when I encountered his spark, and the strong wind of his mind fanned the flames in the narrow streets of my own poor brain—which were quite filled with rubbish most of them, for I was young and foolish then—the fire took hold so quickly that it raged quite unchecked.

Perhaps, if it had been just the fire ignited by his own acquaintance, something of the man I was might have been saved. But there was also the fire in my heart that was ignited by his niece, Mrs. Conduitt—Miss Barton that was—and, in a case such as this, with fires breaking out in several places at once, and at so great a distance from each other, then the whole conflagration seemed like the result of some great and malevolently supernatural design. For one all too brief and brilliant moment my sky was quite lit up, as if by fireworks. The next, I lay overwhelmed and everything was consumed. My church maimed irreparably; my soul boiled away to nothing; my heart burned to a cold black cinder. In short, my life reduced to ashes.

Of course, after the fire comes the rebuilding. Sir Christopher Wren’s many great designs. St. Paul’s. Yes, it’s true, I had my own projects. The fact that I am a retired colonel might leave one to suppose that something arose from the ashes of my former life. But the rebuilding was difficult. And not entirely successful. Indeed, I sometimes think it would have been better if, like King Priam slain by Neoptolemus in the burning ruins of Troy, I too had died after we parted.

Doctor Clarke did not have the patience to be told as much. Doubtless he was still inclined to believe Doctor Newton was someone who gave sight to the blind. But any soldier will tell you that sometimes you can see too much. Even the most courageous man can become quite untrussed at the sight of the enemy. Could King Leónidas with his one thousand Spartans have held the pass at Thermopylae for two whole days if his men had seen the whole host of the Persian army before them? No, there are occasions when it is better to be blind.

Clarke had said that Newton had given us the golden thread by which we may find our way through God’s labyrinth. Well, that is how I first perceived his work, myself. Only the creator of the labyrinth institutes it otherwise, there being no end to the labyrinth, for it is infinite, at which junction one lights upon the awful discovery that neither is there a creator. But I do not like a labyrinth so well as a chasm or an abyss into which Newton, by virtue of his system of the world and falling bodies and mathematics and chronology, lowers us upon a rope, which is a more precarious situation wherein gravity may do its invisible work.

Invisible work. Newton knew all about that. His theory of gravity, of course. His interest in alchemy, for example. And ciphers, too. When I told Doctor Clarke how Newton had believed that a man who might decipher an earthly code might similarly fathom the heavenly one, I could have told Clarke such a story of codes and ciphers and secrets as would have made his wig smoke. But no. Doctor Clarke would not have had the patience to hear such a story as mine, for it is a difficult tale and besides, I am a soldier, without much skill in talk. Moreover, I lack the practice in its recounting since it has not been told before this day. Newton himself swore me to secrecy about this dark matter, as he himself called it. Yet now that the great man is dead I can see no reason not to tell someone. But who? And how would I have begun? I fear I am too cool to have mastered the unaffected eloquence and noble, simple style of history that would hold anyone’s attention for very long. It is the Englishman’s malady. We are too plain in our speaking to make a good tale in the telling. I must confess there is much about my own history that I have forgotten. It is difficult for me to remember all of this. More than thirty years have passed and there are many aspects to this story that seem to elude my grasp. But perhaps it is me who is lacking, for I do not find myself very interesting; and certainly not in comparison with Newton. How could I ever have thought to understand one such as he? I was not a man of letters. I could better describe a battle than a history such as this one. Blenheim, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. I fought in all those battles. There has been little poetry in my life. No fine words. Just guns and swords, bullets and bawds.