He intends, as he tells Goethe and Schiller, to explore the New World. Did he understand?"Īfter an ironic aside about novels, ("the perfect way to capture the most fleeting essence of the present for the future") and historical novels in particular ("a foolish undertaking for an author, as was becoming the fashion these days, to choose some already distant past as his setting"), we plunge into Humboldt's early life and adventures abroad. Step back and the larger patterns appeared: Freedom and Chance were a question of distance, a point of view. Very soon on their journey another of the book's major themes is picked up - the relationship between mathematical and scientific advances and the great coming wave of political revolt that would sweep over Europe in 1848: "Viewed from up close, one could detect the infinite fineness of the web of causality behind every event. One of the products of Gauss's unions is Eugen, his poor son who accompanies him on the trip to Berlin, mainly serving as a target for jibes from his father about his stupidity and disappointing inadequacy.
There is nonetheless something endearing about the conjunction in Gauss of high theory and low sensuality, as exemplified by his Shandyesque pre-coital leaping up on his wedding night in order to write down a proof. Humboldt's taste for boys hardly emerges he's the opposite of the licentious courtier, whereas Gauss ruts like a farm animal. By contrast Gauss - a child prodigy born in poverty - is overbearing and intolerant. Although brought up to greatness - largely in competition with his philologist-diplomat brother - the patrician Humboldt is free of pride, forgiving of those less gifted than himself. Their personalities, deftly brought to life with incisive strokes, are not quite what you expect.
Although he meets von Humboldt by the end of the first chapter, it will take the whole book for there to be a meeting of minds between these two giants of the German intellect, with Kehlmann boxing and coxing between the two chapter by chapter. In September 1828, at von Humboldt's instigation, Gauss left his home town of Göttingen to attend the German Scientific Congress in Berlin. Given that its theme is displacement, it is appropriate that the occasion of the novel is a journey. Humboldt constantly took readings during his vast journey - the height of every mountain, the line of the equator, the exact number of lice on the head of a servant - while Gauss conceived space as a mathematical reality in which even lines were merely an abstraction yet his space was, in its way, as full of life as Humboldt's. Both Humboldt and Gauss were concerned with the measurement of the world - with the displacement between one part of space and another and the relation of that gap to temporal intervals and theoretical absolutes.
0 kommentar(er)
