An Elegant Solution(20)

The pulp was soaked and crushed in another press into sheets that were then dried, first between layers of felt, and then by hanging. Paper for writing was bathed in lime and dried again. I learned this especially when I tried to use the cheap un-limed stuff for writing and it drank ink from the pen like a thirsty horse at a trough, and made my equations into veined black spots and wriggles. The paper looked like the muddy road the horse trampled on its way to the trough!

All the paper I had in my room was from these mills, and I had so much paper! I’d known many geese, and if someday I could visit the place the ink was made, I’d have a good knowledge of my precious tools: paper, pen, and ink. I knew less about the ink except that it was made from ashes. I’d looked closely at it as it dried on the page, trying to see the flecks, but it was pure black. It seemed a worthy use of ash. A man would write, and what he’d written outlasted him: It was his ashes.

But the paper was dearest to me because it was what I started with. It was the promise and the potential and it was so pretty, just white.

Saint Alban’s street wasn’t only for paper. In the large houses facing the factory were the printers. What a greatness they were! Lieber had apprenticed in Frankfurt but was of a very old Basel family with generations of ink in his veins, and I thought his books to be the highest quality. He only printed books, not broadsides and flyers. But I wouldn’t have cared even if they were printed on burlap; it was the words written. I wrote because I read, and I needed to think when I read, and I needed to write when I thought. What others have written, though, was far more excellent.

And among the printers were the booksellers! I needed complete discipline to not peer into those shops. It was a very dangerous street for me.

But I had to go to Saint Alban’s Street on Tuesdays, despite the peril. Among the papers and books and words was the home of Master Desiderius, who held the University’s Chair of Greek.

Desiderius was a man not yet forty, and he held a special place in my admiration: He was the greatest read man I knew. Where my reading had covered an acre, his had covered a continent. Even the densest Mathematics I had on my shelves he had also read. I might have understood more of what I’d read than he did, but he had read more of what I understood than I had. And Mathematics, of course, was just a particle of his reading. He had read the Ancients and the Classics and the Moderns, he had read Philosophy and Theology, Anatomy and Botany, History and Logic, Rhetoric and Dialectic; he had read Virgil to make the mind tremble, and Homer to make the heart race, and Provencal romances to make the cheek blush. He was a very quiet man with a peaceful wife and studious children. They all read. He would read to each child in a different language depending on their age: first in German, then in Latin, then Greek, Italian, English, and I suppose in obscure Hebrew and Persian and Chinese! When they did speak, the family was hushed Babel.

His lecture room was small, for only a dozen students at most. His larger lectures were given at the University building in the Old Lecture Hall and were attended by the larger mass of beginning students who all were required to take Greek, and from whom I earned my pocket money tutoring. Those who came to his house were we who craved the language. The dozen seats were seldom full.

The Master himself entered and greeted us and we immersed ourselves in Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Aristotle. Every classic writer was fair game in our hunt, all save one. Plato was considered too vast and deep to even consider except on his own, and he was given his own special days.

The double thickness of Greek was the speaking and what was spoken. It seemed impossible to me to ride the wine dark Aegean with Odysseus, or visit bloody dark Thebes with Sophocles, in awkward thudding German. Even Latin was hollow. No, it must be Greek for the Greeks! And on other days, when Master Vanitas wasn’t looking, we discussed the New Testament. Vanitas held the Chair of Theology. He was a dismal man, very unlike Desiderius, and I’d sat under only one semester of his lectures, and though I respected his thoughtfulness, I would take my Theology in a sunlit church on a Sunday instead of under Vanitas’ clouds. But within the billowing cloak of a Greek lecture, there was ample room for almost anything, and I was especially glad that the Fathers wrote in the language that Desiderius taught.

When the lecture concluded, I stayed behind. Master Desiderius was not to be bothered with a wig, so his red and brown curls were like autumn leaves among his students’ snowy white headdresses.

“Master Desiderius,” I said. Unlike with Master Huldrych, I often stayed behind in this class. “May I borrow a book?” This was my usual reason.