The Last Samurai

I put down Scientific American and picked up my book on aerodynamics. Sometimes I thought I understood it and sometimes it was hard to follow, and when it was hard to follow it wasn’t easy to tell what would help; the thing that would really help would be to be able to ask someone who didn’t sum up the mathematics required as 18th 19th century stuff. Any idiot can learn a language, all you have to do is keep going and sooner or later it all makes sense, but with mathematics you have to understand one thing to understand another, and you can’t always tell what the first thing is that you have to understand. And even then either you see it or you don’t. You can waste a lot of time trying to work out what you need to know, and a lot more time just trying to see it.

If I hadn’t said anything to Sorabji I wouldn’t ever have had to waste time that way ever again. In the first place I would have gone to Winchester at the age of 12, and in the second place whenever I had a question I could have asked someone who not only knew the answer but couldn’t do enough for his longlost son. And if I’d just seen Sorabji on another night—if I’d just spent one more day on the periodic table—I wouldn’t have seen Dr. Miller, and I wouldn’t have heard any phone calls, and I wouldn’t have known there was anything to see or hear. I could have stopped wasting time and been the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Instead I was going to have to do everything myself.

I had another look at the Kutta-Joukowski theorem. It wasn’t so much that I knew for a fact that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. It’s just that if you’re not going to win a Nobel Prize you might as well do something else worth doing with the time, such as going up the Amazon or down the Andes. If you can’t go down the Andes you might as well do something else worth doing, such as having a shot at a Nobel Prize. Whereas this was just stupid.

I put down my book on aerodynamics.

Sorabji looked out from the screen with flashing eyes.

I thought suddenly that it was stupid to be so sentimental.

What we needed was not a hero to worship but money.

If we had money we could go anywhere. Give us the money and we would be the heroes.

In the morning I decided to go the library. A day one way or the other was not going to have a significant effect on my chances of either winning a Nobel Prize or going down the Amazon. My chances of earning a lot of money soon were slim to non-existent. I thought I would read one of my old favourites just for fun.

Journey into Danger! was out so I got Half Mile Down instead.

I took the book to read on the Circle Line, and I turned to the first descent in the bathysphere before starting the whole book again.

It was of an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing manner. We kept thinking and calling it brilliant, and again and again I picked up a book to read the type, only to find that I could not tell the difference between a blank page and a coloured plate. I brought all my logic to bear, I put out of mind the excitement of our position in watery space and tried to think sanely of comparative colour, and I failed utterly. I flashed on the search-light, which seemed the yellowest thing I have ever seen, and let it soak into my eyes, yet the moment it was switched off, it was like the long vanished sunlight—it was as though it had never been—and the blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings. This is all very unscientific; quite worthy of being jeered at by optician or physicist; but there it was … I think we both experienced a wholly new kind of mental reception of colour impression.

And I suddenly thought of someone who had made a lot of money out of reading this paragraph in Half Mile Down.

I thought of someone who had never pretended to be a hero.

He was a painter. He had read the passage from Dr. Beebe which I had read. He had read this passage and he had said:

How can I paint when I don’t know what I paint?

He said:

I paint not things in the world but colour. How can I paint colour if I don’t know what it should look like? Is blue paint merely to represent blue?

And he had said that he must find a bathysphere, or something, that would take him down to see blue.