I was enamoured of
mathematics and physics: I went far enough in the latter to be
appointed undergraduate assistant in the college laboratory. I had
learned, by my junior year, exploring the charms of integral
calculus, that there is no imaginable mental felicity more serenely
pure than suspended happy absorption in a mathematical problem. Of
course I attained no higher than the dregs of the subject; on that
grovelling level I would still (in Billy Sunday's violent trope)
have had to climb a tree to look a snake in the eye; but I could see
that for the mathematician, if for any one, Time stands still
withal; he is winnowed of vanity and sin. French, German, and Latin,
and a hasty tincture of Xenophon and Homer (a mere lipwash of
Helicon) gave me a zeal for philology and the tongues. I was a
member in decent standing of the college classical club, and visions
of life as a professor of languages seemed to me far from unhappy. A
compulsory course in philosophy convinced me that there was still
much to learn; and I had a delicious hallucination in which I saw
myself compiling a volume of commentaries on the various systems of
this queen of sciences. "The Grammar of Agnostics," I think it was
to be called: it would be written in a neat and comely hand on
thousands of pages of pure white foolscap: I saw myself adding to it
night by night, working _ohne Hast, ohne Rast_.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25