An Elegant Solution(84)

Once the lectures had been given, the University would meet a third and last time. The casket would be unlocked and the Provost, humbly submitting his high position to the ignominy of a blindfold, would choose a single sealed lot from the three. The seal would be broken and the symbol revealed, and the new Chair congratulated and presented to the city.



In the Common Room, all the details of the ritual were discussed.

The casket is left out on the lectern, without guard? Could it be pried open and the stones exchanged?

Gustavus, as blacksmith, had made the casket. “That casket will never open unless the lock is turned,” he said.

Could a pick-lock turn the lock?

“Keppel the locksmith made the lock. I told him to make it safe against picks.” And if Gustavus had told him, then it would have been done.

But where were the keys?

“There is only one, and the Provost has it.”

Before the casket was made, what had been used then? A previous casket?

“The old one was lost in the river, twenty years ago.”

But the stones? Where had they come from?

“Lithicus carved them when the new casket was made.”

And the Election itself? When will it be held?

To that, Gustavus had no answer, and Daniel’s was morose: “The Election will begin when Brutus says it will,” he said. “He’s doing all the choosing now, and when he’s told everyone their parts, he’ll let it start.”

No one had a reply. Basel had great faith in the integrity of the University’s Election, and there might have been a protest. But Master Johann also had a place in the city’s beliefs. No one would claim surety of what that man might do.

And what of the unopened stones?

The Senior Chair of the College owning the Chair would take the casket and verify the stones, then return it to the Provost. That had been Huldrych; now it would be Johann.



I walked early Sunday morning by the Rhine.

There was a moment, as a child, when I realized numbers were infinite. I didn’t then yet know the names of Thousand and Million. I may not have known even Hundred. I was watching the raindrops falling on the river. It was even before my father moved us to Riehen to take the pastorate of that village’s church. I could have only been four or five years old. My thought, walking with my father on the riverbank, where we were caught in a shower, was that the river was made of all the drops of water, all the rain. I’d looked at the wide surface, which was vast to me then, and considered how very, very many drops of water there were: innumerable, then no, they could be counted. It would only take a very long time. Perhaps all day! in my childish calculation.

But I watched more drops fall. We were under a tree, father and I. We’d had to run to it. I remember that well, laughing and running, how we both loved to run. The rain decreased and the raindrops lessened, but I was fascinated at those small beads crashing into the river and being absorbed by it, and my father let me just be and watch. One branch over us tilted steeply down, so I could see its last leaf just inches from the surface, and finally after minutes of staring, the drips from that leaf had slowed to only one, by one, by one, each falling across the last space to their sum. And then I knew, that whatever their sum was, it could always be one more, and if always more, then never to end. For any number, there was one more beyond. Always.

I had only one way to comprehend that. The Mathematics of infinity was still beyond me. But my father’s preaching was already deep in everything I would know about my world. From him, I knew a word for something that was beyond everything else: heaven; a place where “one more beyond, always” did reach its end. So I had always understood the infinite end of all numbers as God showing himself in his creation. Everything he made had his image, and part of his image in Mathematics, was infinity. It was invisible because it was far past the end of sight. It was the greatest elegance.

Then later that morning at Saint Leonhard’s, with my grandmother, all my thoughts were on infinity and the infinite sum of infinite things. We were instructed in the sermon that the gulf between ourselves and God was vast and unbridgeable, which Mathematically would be infinite. Yet, we were reminded, it was bridged, by sacrifice.



We had our Sunday dinner.

“Grandmother,” I said, “I think highly of Master Desiderius.”

“He seems a pious man.”

“He has a Chair at the University, yet he doesn’t seem proud. I believe he’s humble about it.”

She looked at me shrewdly. “Yes, Leonhard. It is possible to have an eminent position and not be brought down by pride. But it’s rare. Pride may be slow to increase but it always does.”