An Elegant Solution(39)

“Then there’s no fault to you,” I said. “They said a spiral, and you carved it. Only what you were told.” I tipped my hat to him, and I think it was then that he saw it was three-pointed, and fully comprehended that I was in a scholar’s gentleman costume.

“As you say, Master,” he said, very sullenly.

“And Lithicus,” I said. “Is it still the same stone in the arch you’re repairing?

“No, Master. There’s more to do. The cracks are deeper than they’d first looked.”



I finally walked my last steps home. In my room, I could feel again the sliding and twisting of the house and streets. It was my books that were stable and gave me a reference to my own motion. But suppertime was nearing and I had to turn my back on them and undress my solemnity and return to plain brown. But in doing that, I felt again the whipsaw movement of not being anchored fast. I changed myself many times in a week from near-gentlemanly student to near-commoner. But it wouldn’t always be. My ship would have to come to port someday, and there were many docks on just the Rhine. Nicolaus had been to Italy, and Daniel to Heidelberg, at my age.

There was a principle in Mathematics called Elegance. It described a statement or a proof that was exactly right: not only correct, but also complete, and yet simple, encompassing every necessity for its meaning but nothing else. It was seldom that life was elegant. Mine own seemed to have become complex, burdened with disconnections and incompletions and particularly, on my head, this hat.

I’d left my wig on my own head while I dressed and I was a strange sight, in plain wool brown with a pompous top; but now was the moment to put the wig off, and I’d hesitated for the reason of the hat. My old hat was still in Gottlieb’s keeping for lack of any other place to have put it when I stood at his door, and my neglect at retrieving it. The tricorne was still crowning me and I wasn’t sure it should crown my wood head, which had more common sense and fewer pretensions.

I decided the wood wouldn’t mind and I put them all together. Now I was in the presence of a gentle-stump, and I was honored. As I studied it, respectfully of course, I knew I felt more comfortable and proper that the emblem of wisdom and respectability and maturity was on that head and not mine. Mine wasn’t ready.

A true Mathematician must be a gentleman, so I would need to wear that hat. But someday.



That evening I ate supper with my grandmother. “Must you attend the Inquiry tomorrow morning?” she asked. Inquiries were respected and approved of in Basel, yet they made a thin fear like frost that chilled the city.

“Yes, Grandmother. I’m only a clerk. I won’t be even noticed.”

“What has Master Gottlieb learned?”

“I don’t know. He knew much more before his questions than I knew even after them.”

“You asked your own questions, also. Why are spirals important to you?”

“Because they’re marvelous. They are to any Mathematician.”

“That you ask a stonemason about them?”

“Master Jacob chose a spiral for his epitaph, and someone chose a spiral to mark the trunk. They were different spirals. But now I know they were meant to be the same.”

“What does that mean of the trunk? That it belonged to Master Jacob?”

“I believe it did. I believe he’d chosen the Logarithmic spiral as his emblem.”

“Then why was it a different spiral on his epitaph?”

“The stonemason didn’t know there were different types of spirals and carved the wrong one. And I didn’t want to ask him much about it, Grandmother. He seems very vexed and angry at the mention of it, and suspicious, even after twenty years.”



Thursday morning dawned chill. Light was latecoming and when it came, from just the edge of the sky, the streets hid behind the houses’ long shadows. Only the open square of Bare Feet welcomed radiance. I was there as usual to get water, and the face of the church, all white, was in silhouette of the sun rising behind it. But I saw an amazing light in it, as if it was glowing of its own. Then I saw across the Square that the Boot and Thorn, with the sun direct on it, was all dark. The church had its light. I didn’t know how the inn was able to spurn the sun and the church embrace it. I went in the church, through its gleaming door.

Saint Leonhard’s parish, which both my father and grandfather pastored, and of which my grandmother and I were part, was a church I closely loved. The Church of Bare Feet was different and I loved it just as well. There was something both less and more personal about it. It was the visible of Saint Leonhard’s that was dear to me; the servants of the church and families who worshiped there. It was the invisible of the Bare Feet that drew me to its benches.