I stumbled on more clues about Newton while I was “dusting” in the Whipple collections. It wasn’t really part of my job to dust in the museum, but I was fast, and usually finished with at least half an hour to spare. So I wandered among the gangly objects and decrepit manuscripts, flicking a duster about. It gave me a strange feeling, being in there, which I attributed to having spent the previous two hours inhaling cleaning agents in windowless spaces, and to my migraines with their ever-weirder visual effects. A feeling of being out of time.
I didn’t arrive at Newton directly, but I found a book that had once been Newton’s. His copy of Boyle’s Tracts Consisting of Observations about the Saltness of the Sea sits on display in a glass box in the Whipple, and I “dusted” the box open late one night. Finding myself once again in physical contact with a book I could not believe the universe would place in my hands (why don’t they lock these things?), I silently resolved this time not to spit on it. I even took care to set my red bucket of chemicals—no doubt weapons of mass book destruction—far off to one side, and to remove my powdery yellow cleaning gloves as I digested the book’s full title. It was a heavy name for anything to bear:
Tracts consisting of observations about the saltness of the sea : an account of a statical hygroscope and its uses : together with an appendix about the force of the air’s moisture : a fragment about the natural and preternatural state of bodies / By the Honourable Robert Boyle. To all which is premis’d a sceptical dialogue about the positive or privative nature of cold: with some experiments of Mr. Boyl’s referr’d to in that discourse. By a member of the Royal Society.
I thought of how Deb hadn’t been weighed down with so much as a middle name. Deb was so light, so floaty. A feather word.
I knew a little bit about Boyle from Lemon’s lectures. An atomist. More or less credited with inventing modern chemistry. Pioneer of the scientific method. (Order and method, Hastings!) Member of some sort of organization that he called an Invisible College. I had heard of his Suspicions about the Hidden Realities of the Air, which is what you might call an in-between book: a relative both of alchemy and of science, yet fully at home in neither family tree. The title stuck with me, perhaps because I had a few suspicions of my own about hidden realities by this time. Boyle’s family is interesting, too. How about his nephew Charles, the fourth Earl of Orrery, for whom the orrery is named. Or his collaborator Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, quickly excised from the history of science for the heinous shortcoming of being a sister, not a brother.
Deb, too, had been cut out. From me, from the world. Extracted like a diseased appendix. How many more were there like her, I wondered? So far gone by now that they might as well never have existed, all still out there somewhere, still real. Or as real as they could be in that state. Trapped at the boundaries, in the walls of a reality that didn’t want them, that wouldn’t let them either be or not be. Anchorites by accident. Robert Boyle himself was famously too soft-hearted to conduct vivisections.
Perhaps the saltness of the sea sounds unimportant to you because it’s about chemistry and small things. Well, no. The saltness of the sea is why you are alive. Everything is connected in pulses and currents: take the saltness away from the sea and it conducts electricity around a million times less well. Get down to the very small scale and start tinkering there and you start chain reactions that change the world. You can do it with chemistry or with people, the trick works in many mediums. Newton talked about worlds with different laws of nature, you know, in the Opticks: And since Space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow’d that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe.
Then he hedges: At least, I see nothing of Contradiction in all this. Yeah, well, me neither. And as for the very small, so for the very large: zoom out far enough and everything changes. That kind of perspective jolts you, shifts you. Right now, our best scientists, our envoys into these territories, cannot reconcile the very small with the very large. They cannot deal with the shifts. I mean that they do not know what it is in which we are shifted.
Still, as for Boyle’s Saltness, despite the author’s eminence and all the title’s promises I didn’t find much of interest as I read the words within. When my shift was over, I set the book back inside its airless little greenhouse as though nothing had happened.
But something had happened.
—
Isaac Newton owned this book of Boyle’s. And Newton’s work—his real work, what moved his heart—was his work on prophecy, mystical clues to the order of the universe, occult chronology, and alchemy. Newton didn’t want this boring world, the one made of gravity and
