An Elegant Solution(63)

“Master,” I said. “I’d like you to tell me about Master Jacob.”

“Master Jacob,” he said. “Well, then, Leonhard, please sit and I will tell you.”

Master Vanitas was a man who spoke carefully, slowly, and long. There had always been a tinge of sadness in his voice. Whenever he spoke, and whatever he spoke of, he seemed always aware of the weight and implication of humanity. This gave his lectures on Theology a meaning, a purpose, and a depth in which his students quickly drowned. Those who remained awake felt that they were hearing things that must be understood but were not understandable. I was always fascinated by his teaching, though I was careful to have a full night’s sleep beforehand.

When he conversed on subjects more mundane, he wasn’t abandoned by that weight of thought he always carried, and so if he was asking Lieber for a book or his wife for a plate of fish, or just considering the chance of rain, his listener felt that nothing was trivial, nothing was answerable, and nothing was even visible. It was so much like Mathematics!

Therefore, as Master Vanitas told me his thoughts and impressions of Master Jacob, it was as if that Master was an Old Testament Prophet translated via Latin from the original Hebrew. I interpreted the verses and imagined him.

Jacob had been like his brother Johann. He was brilliant, sullen, far-seeing, narrow, vengeful, could think like lightning . . . but there was a trait that the older brother didn’t have which the younger did, the ability to control the men around him. And, he’d been very suspicious of Master Johann, especially because he’d known his younger brother had that great advantage and was honing it in Holland. In the ten years they were apart, they fought constantly and with only a little mercy. Their letters and publications were full of vitriol for each other, but they had respect.

And when Jacob had learned that Johann was returning, he fell into a thick, bitter, angry sadness. Vanitas had already stepped away from Mathematics toward Theology but he still called on his old teacher, and he’d seen that something final was occurring in his Master’s thoughts.

“What do you mean by final?” I asked.

“Something that was an end and irretrievable.”

“How did he die?”

“Of an illness. He was in poor health but I hadn’t expected it. When I was young, death was still a surprise to me.”

“Did he die before or after Master Johann arrived in Basel?”

“At just about the same time,” Master Vanitas said. “There was a grievous elegance to it. That the Chair should pass from one brother to another. Death brought about change that in some ways was no change.”

There was a growing risk that the entire Lecture on the Certainty of Death would proceed. I quickly asked a question on a different subject. “I was speaking with Master Desiderius. He said that it was you who nominated him to his Chair.”

“Greek? Yes, I did. I’d not met him, but I’d known of him.”

“Then you knew he’d be qualified for the Chair.”

“Yes, I knew. But it was Master Johann who reminded me of him. I’m not sure who our committee might have nominated otherwise.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” I said.



Past seeing Lithicus and Master Vanitas, it seemed fit to walk to the Death Dance, which was nearby. That dance was certainly the most universal of all human gambols. No face in the mural was anyway joyful except for death’s. While Death Dances dated from the years of the Black Death, the dance would be true even without a plague. In the most peaceful, healthful land, Death would still take every man and woman by hand. But when he did for any reason other than age, he was being more inevitable than he needed be. I wanted to look again at Master Jacob’s epitaph.



Through Vanitas, I’d come from the stonecutter to the stone. I stood a long while in the Munster cloister, considering Uncle Jacob’s memorial, considering the medallion, and thinking of what Lithicus the stonecutter had said.

To most people, a spiral was the Archimedean. It would begin at a center and circle out. Mathematically, it was a polar graph with the radius at every point equal to the angle from an axis. As the angle increased and reached the full circle and increased on, over and over, the arm of the spiral would increase outward. Every point of the arm was an equal distance from the circle inside and the circle outside. There was a satisfaction to it. It had its single beginning and continued growing forever. But it was the spira mundanus, the mundane spiral, and it had this failing: that as a viewer stood back from it, it would shrink as everything would with distance. The revolutions, always equidistant, would vanish into indistinction.