Free Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson Page B

reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter in the center of a dish. Yet as Daniel, in the tavern, tries to rake together his early memories of Trinity and of Cambridge, he’s chagrined to find that a like process has been going on within his skull for half a century.
    The impressions he received in those years had been as infinitely various as what confronted a Conquistador when he dragged his longboat up onto an uncharted shore. Bewilderment, in its ancient and literal sense of being cast away in a trackless wild, was the lot of the explorer, and it well described Daniel’s state of mind during his first years at Trinity. The analogy was not all that far-fetched, for Daniel had matriculated just after the Restoration, and found himself among young men of the Quality who’d spent most of their lives in Paris. Their clothing struck Daniel’s eye much as the gorgeous plumage of tropical birds would a black-robed Jesuit, and their rapiers and daggers were no less fatal than the fangs and talons of jungle predators. Being a pensive chap, he had, on the very first day, begun trying to make sense of it—to get to the bottom of things, like the explorer who turns his back on orang-utans and orchids to jam his pan into the mud of a creek bed. Naught but swirling murk had been the result.
    In years since he has rarely gone back to those old memories. As he does now, in the tavern near Harvard College, he’s startled to find that the muddy whirl has been swept away. The mental pan has been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remain are a few wee nuggets. It’s not plain to Danielwhy these impressions have stayed, while others, which seemed as or more important to him at the time they happened, have gone away. But if the gold-panning similitude is faithful, it means that these memories matter more than the ones that have flown. For gold stays in the pan’s center because of its density; it has more matter (whatever that means) in a given extent than anything else.
    The crowd in Charing Cross, the sword falling silently on the neck of Charles I: this is his first nugget. Then there’s nothing until some months later when the Waterhouses and their old family friends the Bolstroods went on a sort of holiday in the country to demolish a cathedral.
    Nugget: In silhouette against a cathedral’s rose window, a bent, black wraith lumbering, his two arms a pendulum, a severed marble saint’s head swinging in them. This was Drake Waterhouse, Daniel’s father, about sixty years old.
    Nugget: The stone head in flight, turning to look back in surprise at Drake. The gorgeous fabric of the window drawn inwards, like the skin on a kettle of soup when you poke a spoon through it—the glass falling away, the transcendent vision of the window converted to a disk of plain old blue-green English hillside beneath a silver sky. This was the English Civil War.
    Nugget: A short but stout man, having done with battering down the gilded fence that Archbishop Laud had built around the altar, dropping his sledgehammer and falling into an epileptic fit on the Lord’s Table. This was Gregory Bolstrood, about fifty years old at the time. He was a preacher. He called himself an Independent. His tendency to throw fits had led to rumors that he barked like a dog during his three-hour sermons, and so the sect he’d founded, and Drake had funded, had come to be known as the Barkers.
    Nugget: A younger Barker smiting the cathedral’s organ with an iron rod—stately pipes being felled like trees, polished boxwood keys skittering across the marble floor. This was Knott Bolstrood, the son of Gregory, in his prime.
    B UT THESE ARE ALL FROM his early childhood, before he’d learned to read and think. After that his young life had been well-ordered and (he’s surprised to see in retrospect) interesting. Adventurous, even. Drake was a trader. After Cromwell