HANNAH '.. . a method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone.' This feedback, is it a way of making pictures of forms in nature? Just tell me if it is or it isn't.
VALENTINE [Irritated.] To me it is. Pictures of turbulence?growth?change? creation?it's not a way of drawing an elephant, for God's sake! HANNAH I'm sorry.
[She picks up an apple leaf from the table. She is timid about pushing the point.]
So you couldn't make a picture of this leaf by iterating a whatsit? VALENTINE [Off-hand.] Oh yes, you could do that. HANNAH [Furiously.] Well, tell me! Honestly, I could kill you! VALENTINE If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times,
each time there'd be a dot somewhere on the screen. You'd never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you'd start to see this shape, because every dot will be inside the shape of this leaf. It wouldn't be a leaf, it would be a mathematical object. But yes. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum7 looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about?clouds?daffodils?waterfalls? and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in?these things
5. 'Butts': concealed stands (blinds) for shooting birds. 'Beaters': people employed to drive the birds toward the guns. 6. Refers to a once-popular belief that, given sufficient time, a monkey jabbing typewriter keys at random would eventually produce the complete plays of Shakespeare.
7. Twentieth-century advances in physics made by Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and others. Valentine continues with a simplified description of chaos theorv.
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2786 / TOM STOPPARD
are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can't even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
[Pause. ]
HANNAH The weather is fairly predictable in the Sahara.
VALENTINE The scale is different but the graph goes up and down the same way. Six thousand years in the Sahara looks like six months in Manchester, I bet you.
HANNAH How much? VALENTINE Everything you have to lose. HANNAH [Pause.] No. VALENTINE Quite right. That's why there was corn in Egypt.8
[Hiatus. The piano is heard again.]
HANNAH What is he playing? VALENTINE I don't know. He makes it up. HANNAH Chloe called him 'genius'. VALENTINE It's what my mother calls him?only she means it. Last year some
expert had her digging in the wrong place for months to find something or other?the foundations of Capability Brown's boat-house?and Gus put her right first go.
HANNAH Did he ever speak? VALENTINE Oh yes. Until he was five. You've never asked about him. You get high marks here for good breeding. HANNAH Yes, I know. I've always been given credit for my unconcern.
[BERNARD enters in high excitement and triumph.] BERNARD English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. A pencilled superscription.9 Listen and kiss my cycle-clips!
[He is carrying the hook. He reads from it.]
'O harbinger of Sleep, who missed the press' And hoped his drone might thus escape redress! The wretched Chater, bard of Eros' Couch, For his narcotic2 let my pencil vouch!'
You see, you have to turn over every page. HANNAH Is it his' handwriting? BERNARD Oh, come on. HANNAH Obviously not. BERNARD Christ, what do you want? HANNAH Proof. VALENTINE Quite right. Who are you talking about?
8. Cf. Exodus 42.1. to be included in the first edition of Byron's work. 9. Note. 2. Sleep-inducing drug. 1. O herald . . . who published his poem too late 3. Byron's.
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ARCADIA II.5 / 2787
BERNARD Proof? Proof? You'd have to be there, you silly bitch! VALENTINE [Mildly.] I say, you're speaking of my fiancee. HANNAH Especially when I have a present for you. Guess what I found. [Pro
ducing the present for BERNARD.] Lady Croom writing from London to her husband. Her brother, Captain Brice, married a Mrs Chater. In other words, one might assume, a widow.
[BERNARD looks at the letter.] BERNARD I said he was dead. What year? 1810! Oh my God, 1810! Well done,
Hannah! Are you going to tell me it's a different Mrs Chater? HANNAH Oh no. It's her all right. Note her Christian name. BERNARD Charity. Charity . . . 'Deny what cannot be proven for Charity's
sake!' HANNAH Don't kiss me! VALENTINE She won't let anyone kiss her. BERNARD You see! They wrote?they scribbled?they put it on paper. It was
