Measuring the World

  As regards Berlin, said Humboldt, he had really had very little choice. After many years in Paris, his circumstances … He pushed his white hair back off his face, took out a handkerchief, blew into it gently, folded it, and stroked it smooth before putting it back in his pocket. How should he put it?

  The money ran out?

  That would be putting it too drastically. But documenting the journey had more or less exhausted his resources. Thirty-four volumes. All the plates and engravings, maps and illustrations. And at a time of war, with material shortages and inflated salaries. He had had to be an Academy all on his own. And so now he was a chamberlain, dined at court, and saw the king daily. There were worse things.

  Clearly, said Gauss.

  And besides, Friedrich Wilhelm revered science! Napoleon had always hated him and Bonpland because three hundred of his scientists in Egypt had accomplished less than the two of them in South America. After their return they had been the talk of the town for months. Napoleon had found that unacceptable. Duprés had recaptured some very beautiful reminiscences of that time in his Humboldt—Grand Voyageur. A book that did less damage to the facts than Wilson's Scientist and Traveller: My Journeys with Count Humboldt in Central America.

  Eugen asked what had happened to Herr Bonpland. It was clear just by looking at Eugen that he hadn't slept well. He had had to spend the night in the outbuilding in a stuffy room with two of the servants. He hadn't known human beings could snore so loudly.

  During his only audience with the emperor, said Humboldt, the latter had asked him if he collected plants. He had said yes, the emperor had said just like his wife and turned away abruptly.

  Because of him, said Gauss, Napoleon had chosen not to bombard Göttingen.

  So he'd heard, said Humboldt, but he doubted it, it would more likely have been on strategic grounds. But whatever the case, Napoleon had tried later to have him expelled as a Prussian spy. The entire Academy had had to gather to prevent it. And he never—Humboldt threw the secretary a look and the secretary immediately opened his writing pad—he had never wanted to sound out anyone but Nature herself, and the only secrets he had sought were the so openly displayed truths of creation.

  The openly displayed truths of creation, the secretary repeated with pursed lips.

  The so openly!

  The secretary nodded. The servant brought a tray with little silver cups on it.

  But Bonpland, Eugen asked again.

  A bad business. Humboldt sighed. A really tragic story. But here was the tea finally—a gift from the tsar, whose finance minister had repeatedly invited him to Russia. Naturally he had declined, on political grounds as much—it went without saying—as age.

  The right decision, said Eugen. The blackest despotism in the world! He went red with fright over himself.

  Gauss bent down, picked up the knobbed stick with a groan, took aim, and struck out under the table at Eugen's foot. He missed and struck again. Eugen jumped.

  He couldn't totally disagree, said Humboldt. He made a gesture of dismissal, and the secretary immediately stopped writing. The Restoration lay over Europe like a blight. And he had to admit his brother was partly to blame. The hopes of his youth were a thing of the past and seemed unreal now. On the one side tyranny, on the other the freedom of fools. If three men stood on the street together—he was sure the Gausses knew what he was talking about—it was a forbidden gathering. If thirty of them summoned up spirits in a back room somewhere, nobody had any objections. Dozens of muddled enthusiasts were crisscrossing the country preaching freedom and being fed by unsuspecting fools. Europe was now a theater and the play a nightmare from which none of them could wake any longer. Years ago he had made preparations for a trip to India, had assembled the money, all the equipment, the plan. It should have been the crowning achievement of his earthly life. Then the English had made it impossible. Nobody wanted an enemy of slavery in their territory. And in Latin America dozens of new states had sprung up without rhyme or reason. The life's work of his friend Bolívar now lay in ruins. And did the gentlemen know the title that the Great Deliverer had bestowed on him?

  He fell silent. Only after a time did it become clear that he was expecting an answer.

  So, what was it, asked Gauss.

  The true discoverer of South America! Humboldt smiled into his cup. They could find it in Gómez's El Barón Humboldt. An underappreciated book. Apropos, he had heard that the professor was now concentrating on probability theory.

  Death statistics, said Gauss. He took a mouthful of tea, made a disgusted face, and set the cup down as far from himself as he could. One thought one controlled one's own existence. One created things, discovered things, acquired goods, found people one loved more than one's life, had children, maybe clever, maybe clods, watched the person one loved die, got old, got ill, and then got buried. One thought one had decided it all oneself. Only mathematics demonstrated that one had always taken the common path. Despotism, he only had to hear the word! Princes were poor pigs too, they lived and struggled and died like everyone else. The real tyrants were the laws of nature.

  But it was reason, said Humboldt, that shaped the laws.

  The old Kantian nonsense. Gauss shook his head. Reason shaped absolutely nothing and understood very little. Space curved and time was malleable. If one drew a straight line and kept drawing it further and further, eventually one would re-encounter its starting point. He pointed to the sun, which hung low in the window. Not even the rays of this dying star came down in straight lines. The world could be calculated after a fashion, but that was a very long way from understanding it.

  Humboldt crossed his arms. First of all, the sun would never burn out, it would renew its phlogiston and shine forever. Second of all, what was all that about space? He had had oarsmen in the Orinoco who spun similar nonsense. He had never understood what they were babbling about. But they had often been using substances that confused their minds.

  Gauss asked what a chamberlain actually did.

  Different things, this and that. This chamberlain in particular advised the king on important decisions, if his experience extended to some field in which it might be of use. He was often asked to be there as adviser during diplomatic conversations. The king desired him to be present at almost every dinner. He was completely obsessed by information about the New World.

  So one was paid to eat and have chats?

  The secretary sniggered, went pale, and asked pardon, he had a cough.

  The real tyrants, said Eugen into the silence, weren't the laws of nature. There were powerful movements afoot in the country, freedom wasn't just a word from the likes of Schiller.

  Donkeys’ movements, said Gauss.

  He had always got on better with Goethe, said Humboldt. Schiller had been closer to his brother.

  Donkeys, said Gauss, who would never come to anything. They might inherit some money, and a good name, but never any intelligence.

  His brother, said Humboldt, had recently completed a profound study of the works of Schiller. As for himself, literature had never meant that much to him. Books without numbers made him uneasy. And he'd always been bored in the theater.

  Quite right, exclaimed Gauss.

  Artists were too quick to forget their task, which was to depict reality. Artists held deviation to be a strength, but invention confused people, stylization falsified the world. Take stage sets, which didn't even try to disguise the fact that they were made of cardboard, English paintings, with backgrounds swimming in an oily soup, novels that wandered off into lying fables because the author tied his fake inventions to the names of real historical personages.

  Disgusting, said Gauss.

  He was working on a catalogue of features of plants and natural phenomena which would be legally obligatory for all painters to consult. Something similar for dramatic poetry would be a good thing. He was thinking of lists of the characteristics of important people, and authors would no longer have the freedom to deviate from them.
If Monsieur Daguerre's invention were perfected one day the arts would become irrelevant anyway.

  That one writes poems. Gauss tilted his chin at Eugen.

  Really, asked Humboldt.

  Eugen went red.

  Poems and all kinds of nonsense, said Gauss. Since he was a child. He didn't show them to people, but sometimes he was stupid enough to leave the pieces of paper lying about. He was a miserable scientist, but an even worse artist.

  They were being lucky with the weather, said Humboldt. Last month had been extremely wet, but now they could hope for a beautiful fall.

  He was a parasite. At least his brother was in the military. But this one hadn't learned anything or had any skills. Poems, if you please!

  He was studying rights, said Eugen quietly. And mathematics.

  And how, said Gauss. A mathematician who didn't recognize a differential equation until it bit him in the foot. That studying per se didn't amount to anything was common knowledge: he had had to stare at the blank faces of young people for decades. But he'd expected more from his own son. Why did it have to be mathematics?

  It wasn't what he'd wanted, said Eugen. He'd been forced!

  Oh, and by whom?

  The changeable weather and seasons, said Humboldt, were what made the beauty of these latitudes. In contrast to the sheer variety of tropical flora, what Europe offered was the yearly drama of a reawakening creation.

  By whom indeed, cried Eugen. And who had employed an assistant for all the measuring?

  Magnificent assistance. He had had to remeasure mile upon mile because of all the errors.

  Errors in the fifth place after the decimal point! They had absolutely no effect, they were utterly irrelevant.

  A moment please, said Humboldt. Errors in measurement were never irrelevant.

  And the damaged heliotrope, said Gauss. Was that irrelevant too?

  Measuring was a high art, said Humboldt. A responsibility that no one could take lightly.

  Two heliotropes, come to that, said Gauss. He'd dropped the other one, but only because some idiot had sent him down the wrong path.

  Eugen leapt to his feet, reached for his stick and his red cap, and ran out. The sound of the door banging after him echoed through the castle.

  That was what you got, said Gauss. Gratitude was a lost concept.

  Of course things weren't easy with the young, said Humboldt. But one also should not be too strict, sometimes a little encouragement was more effective than reproach.

  If there was nothing there, nothing would become of it. And as for magnetism, the question as posed was wrong: it wasn't a matter of how many magnets the earth contained. Whichever way you looked at it, there were two poles and a single magnetic field that could be described in terms of the force of the magnetism and the angle of inclination of the needle.

  He had always traveled with a magnetic needle, said Humboldt. He had collected more than ten thousand measurements.

  God in Heaven, said Gauss. Carrying the thing around wasn't enough, you had to think. The horizontal component of magnetic force could be represented as the function of geographical latitude and longitude. The vertical component was best worked out using a power series following the reciprocal earth's radius. Simple functions of a sphere. He laughed softly.

  Functions of a sphere. Humboldt smiled. He hadn't understood a single word.

  He was out of practice, said Gauss. At twenty he hadn't needed a day for children's stuff like that, now he needed to set aside a week. He tapped his forehead. This up here didn't work the way it once had. He wished he had drunk curare back then. The human brain died a little every day.

  One could drink as much curare as one wanted, said Humboldt. One had to drip it into the bloodstream for it to be fatal.

  Gauss stared at him. Was that true?

  Of course it was true, said Humboldt indignantly. He was the one who'd effectively discovered that.

  Gauss was silent for a moment. What, he asked eventually, really did happen to this Bonpland person?

  It was time! Humboldt got to his feet. The reception wouldn't wait. After his introductory speech there would be a small reception for the guest of honor. House arrest!

  Pardon?

  Bonpland was in Paraguay under house arrest. After their return he'd been unable to settle down in Paris. Fame, alcohol, women. His life had lost its clarity and direction, the one thing that must never happen to anybody. For a time he'd been the director of the imperial gardens, and a superb breeder of orchids. After the fall of Napoleon he had gone across the ocean again. He had an estate and a family over there, but he had attached himself to the wrong side in one of the civil wars, or perhaps it was the right one, but in any case it was the losing one. A crazed dictator named Francia, a doctor to boot, had confined him to his estate under permanent threat of death. Not even Simon Bolívar had been able to do anything for Bonpland.

  Horrible, said Gauss. But who was the fellow anyway? He'd never heard of him.

  THE FATHER

  Eugen Gauss was wandering through Berlin. A beggar held out an open hand, a dog whimpered at his leg, a hackney horse coughed in his face, and a watchman ordered him not to be ambling about. On a street corner he fell into conversation with a young priest, from the provinces like him, and very intimidated.

  Mathematics, said the priest, interesting!

  Oh, said Eugen.

  His name was Julian, said the priest.

  They wished each other well and said goodbye.

  A few steps further, a woman addressed him. His knees went weak with fright, for he'd heard of such things. He hurried on, didn't turn round when she ran after him, and never realized that all she had wanted to say to him was that he had dropped his cap. He drank two glasses of beer in a tavern. Arms crossed, he looked at the wet tabletop. He had never felt so sad. Not because of his father, because he was almost always that way, and not because of his loneliness. It was something to do with the city itself. The crowds, the size of the houses, the dirty sky. He composed some lines of poetry. They didn't please him. He stared straight ahead until two students in loose trousers and with fashionably long hair came to sit at his table.

  Göttingen, asked one of the students. A notorious place. Things were blowing up there.

  Eugen nodded conspiratorially although he had no idea what they were talking about.

  But it'll come, said the other student, freedom, in spite of everything.

  It would certainly come, said Eugen.

  Right away, said the first, and like a thief in the night.

  Now they knew they had something in common.

  An hour later, they were on the way. As was the custom among students, Eugen went ahead with one of them, arm in arm, while the other followed thirty paces behind, so that they wouldn't be stopped by any gendarme. Eugen couldn't understand how anything could be so far: always more new streets, always another crossroads, and even the sheer numbers of people also walking seemed inexhaustible. Where were they all going, and how could anyone live like that?

  Humboldt's new university, explained the student next to Eugen, it was the best in the world, organized like no other and with the most famous teachers in the country. The state feared it like hell itself.

  Humboldt had founded a university?

  The elder one, the student explained. The respectable one. Not the one who was a lackey of the French and had squatted in Paris for the duration of the war. His brother had openly summoned him to arms, but he'd behaved as if the Fatherland meant nothing. During the occupation, he'd had a plaque put up in front of his castle in Berlin, saying no plundering, the owner was a member of the Paris Academy. Disgraceful!

  The street went steeply uphill, then gradually downward again. Two young men stood in front of a door and asked for the password.

  Free in the fight.

  That was from last time.

  The second student came up to them. The two of them whispered together. Germania?

  That was age
s ago.

  German and free?

  Oh my God. The guardians exchanged a look, and told them to go in anyway.

  They went downstairs and into a cellar room that smelled of mold. Crates stood on the floor and there were wine casks piled in the corners. The two students turned up the lapels of their coats to reveal black and red cockades stitched through with gold. They opened a trapdoor in the floor. A narrow stair led down into another, deeper cellar.

  Six rows of chairs in front of a rickety standing desk. Black and red pennants hung on the walls, and about twenty students were already waiting. All had sticks, some were wearing Polish caps, others Old German hats. Several of them were dressed up in home-tailored wide trousers with broad medieval belts. Torches threw dancing shadows on the walls. Eugen sat down, feeling faint from the bad air and the excitement. They were saying, someone whispered, that “he” was coming himself. Him, or someone like him, they didn't know, he had been arrested in Freiburg at the River Unstrut, yet apparently he was still wandering the country incognito. Unimaginable, if he was here in person. Your heart would explode if you saw him in the flesh.

  More and more students came in, always in twos, always arm in arm, most of them arguing about the password which clearly none of them had known. Here and there one of them leafed through a book of poetry or German Gymnastics. Some moved their lips in prayer. Eugen's heart was thumping. All the seats had been filled long ago, any new arrival had to squeeze himself into a corner.

  A man came down the stairs with a heavy tread, and everything went quiet. He was thin, and very tall, with a bald head and a long gray beard. It was, somehow not to Eugen's surprise, their neighbor from the next table in the inn, who had butted into their argument with the gendarme the day before. Slowly, arms swinging, he made his way to the desk. There he stretched, waited until a student, who was having trouble with his trembling hands and had to try more than once, lit the candles on it, and then said in a high-pitched, dry voice: You must not know my name!