"Quicksilver"

[fiefoe]

I soon gave up the good intention to look up historical facts along the way, since it only seems to raise more questions -- "Why did Newton love the colour crimson? Did he really die a virgin and never see the sea? Just how friendly was he with John Wickins (his room-mate at Trinity College, Cambridge for 20 years)?" Anyway, it's mostly the historical perspective, the sense of history in the making, that I find enlightening:

    (After a sea storm is described as a four act opera:) As students, they huddled in a small vulnerable bubble of Act III. The human race has, actually, been in Act V for most of history and has recently accomplished the miraculous feat of assembling splintered planks afloat on a stormy sea into a sailing-ship and then, having climbed onboard it, building instruments with which to measure the world, and then finding a kind of regularity in those measurements. When they were at Cambridge, Newton was surrounded by a personal nimbus of Act II and was well on his way to Act I.

<Established church vs. Gathered Churches>
In making it legally possible for Gathered Churches to exist, Cromwell had, in effect, re-admitted Jews to England.

<St. Paul's, during the Plague>
Now the cathedral was fortified within a rampart of freshly tamped earth, the graves piled up a full yard above ground level.
During those years, Roundhead cavalry had pulled the furniture up from the western half of the church and chopped it up for firewood, then used the empty space as a vast stable for nearly a thousand horses, selling their dung as fuel.

<London on Fire>
Everything between East and South was flame, and everything below the stars. It fountained and throbbed, jetted and pulsed, and buildings went down beneath it as blades of grass beneath John Wilkins's giant Wheel.

<Monetary system, or the lack of>
"Let me see the color of your money."
 "My half-brother in London knows someone who saw a gold CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA coin once, displayed in a crystal case on a silken pillow," Daniel said. "People have begun to call them Guineas, because they are made of gold that the Duke of York's company is taking out of Africa." "I say, Daniel, is it true what they say, that those coins are perfectly circular?" "They are, Isaac - not like the good old English hammered coins..."
"Furthermore," said the Ashkenazi, "the King brought with him a French savant, Monsieur Blondeau, on loan from King Louis, and that fellow built a machine that mills delicate ridges and inscriptions into the edges of the coins."
"Typical French extravagance," Issac said.
"The King really did spend more time than was good for him in Paris," Daniel said.

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