The Golden Age

Leibniz and the hermaphrodite

“After that it took me quite a long time to find another scene which belonged in the story of the wrecked yacht. In the old quarter by the harbour there was a house built into the ruins of a cloister. The columns of the erstwhile cloister, which no longer had weight to bear, stood in the house’s not particularly well-maintained interior garden among bushes and large, colourful flowers. Leading into this interior garden was a door and the wide window of a sculptor’s studio on the ground floor of the house. In the gloom of the studio the outlines of sculptures could be seen, and there were several of them in the garden itself. Labels bearing titles had been attached to the plinths of some of these. A bust standing on what was left of a stone column was labelled ‘Self-portrait’ this was a likeness of the owner of the Zephyrus. When he wasn’t sailing the seas he was a sculptor, and he worked in this garden studio.

“Glinting in the rays of the sun which had found their way through the leaves was a bronze statue. On its pedestal I read ‘Leibniz discovers infinitesimal calculus.’ And indeed the statue was a life-size likeness of Leibniz, deep in thought and wearing a periwig. The philosopher was seated on a low stool, resting his chin on one hand and holding in the other Pascal’s “A Treatise on the Sines of a Quadrant of a Circle,” the reading of which Leibniz declared to have led him to the theory of infinitesimal calculus. ‘I have discovered here a light which the author did not glimpse,’ Leibniz wrote to Guillaume de l’Hôpital. In his contemplation the philosopher had relaxed his grip on the book and it was slowly slipping from his fingers, which perhaps was supposed to symbolize his gradual disentanglement from the original mathematical theories of Pascal. There was a small shaggy dog waiting intently for the book to fall from Leibniz’s hand so it could claim it for itself…”

“You’re confusing me. Was this a real dog or a bronze one?”

“It was part of the statue, of course, so it was bronze. It was bronze and painted on the picture. The statue depicted the ideas of Leibniz in an original manner. It was similar to when someone’s visions and ideas are painted onto a picture with their figure, when the painter puts these in the space next to the figure’s head. (Usually the figure has the wide-open eyes of the visionary or his eyes are cast downwards to show that he is immersed in his inner world.) In front of Leibniz in the air (but in fact attached to the statue by thin wires) was a geometric diagram — a quadrant bounded by a horizontal line x and a vertical line y (the lines were drawn by metal bars and the letters were soldered on to these). At point I, in the upper part of the quadrant, a tangent was made, and this — at points A and B — sprouted two metal abscissae, one parallel to line x and the other to line y. They intersected at point C inside the quadrant, thus giving the catheti of a right triangle whose hypotenuse was the segment AB in the tangent.”

“I don’t understand this at all, nor can I imagine it. I know very little about mathematics,” Baumgarten protested.

“It’s simple, I’ll show you,” said the thief, taking off her black glove and drawing a quadrant in the snow with her index finger. But as she stretched to describe its base and sagitta, the y beneath her gave a fearful crack and in terror she grabbed Baumgarten by his dressing gown. He suggested she leave off the explanations: for the listener’s understanding of the story of the wrecked boat a knowledge of infinitesimal calculus was probably not altogether necessary.

“You’re right,” the girl conceded. “You should just know that the right triangle ABC plays an important role in all of this and that Leibniz realized that if we reduce the horizontal base of this triangle, correspondingly we reduce the second cathetus so that the triangle will always remain homothetic; the relation of the two catheti maintains a constant value which is a characteristic of the curve of the line at point I. The infinite reduction on which Leibniz was meditating was expressed in the statue by three fine wires leading from the apex of the triangle which gradually drew nearer to one another before coiling themselves into a spiral. The coiling wires formed triangles in their midst, each smaller than the last. On one of the arcs of this spiral of ever-smaller triangles, which disappeared into the trees, sat the sculptor’s tamed parrot, which was green with a red head and was holding a date in its mouth.

“For the story about the wrecking of the boat, the important thing was the statue standing directly next to Leibniz. This was carved in ebony and was a depiction of a hermaphrodite emerging from the waves of the sea, holding a large, open book in its hands. For sure the words in the letter on the desk of the sculptor’s flat were about this statue. (Baumgarten had no recollection of what these words were, but he was too tired to ask.) In the book one could read a poem written in letters formed from pearls and set into the black ebony of the pages. This was a poem the sculptor had written for the woman he loved, who at this moment was lying in bed with another man. I imagine that the sculptor and traveller wanted to make the woman a gift of pearls he had found in the speos on the island. He wrote a poem for her and worked on the statue of the hermaphrodite, which were also intended as presents for her (the hermaphrodite was meant to symbolize their ideal communion); then it came to him that his gifts to his beloved would be more original if he made the three into one.

“But surprisingly the poem written in pearls had little in common with love poetry. In painstaking rhyme and regular stanzas it told that the dead do not reveal themselves at night in churchyards or old houses, as people foolishly believe, but that they like the sun, light and warm. So they walk upon sandy beaches, and many people meet their dear-departed on the beach at Waikiki, on the beaches of California, on the Epi-plage or Tahiti beaches of Saint-Tropez, even on the municipal pebble beach in Nice. The epic poem in pearls told how a middle-aged businessman goes on holiday for the first time without his wife, who has been kept at home by her career commitments. Through a travel agent he books a stay on the Aegean island of Mykonos. On his very first day on Paradise beach a suntanned girl in a swimsuit calls to him, and to his great astonishment the businessman recognizes her as a woman he once loved, who died in a car accident twenty years earlier.

“After that they meet on the beach every day, and on a sun bed under a parasol or under the reed awning of the beach bar she tells him of life in the underworld; she shows him which of the visitors to the beach are deceased; she greets other dead folk as if they are all members of some club. She says that life in the underworld is not especially entertaining, nor is it particularly depressing. Admittedly the vast underworld spaces are a little unwelcoming and hardly abounding with comforts, but they are clean and always kept tidy. She claims that such a life is quite tolerable, that it might even be slightly better than life before death: the regime of the underworld is not very strict and the deceased are able to leave Erebus every day. If they return in the evening at a time later than allowed for by their exeat, generally all they receive is a reprimand. They can go anywhere on Earth they choose, and as many of them love warm, sandy beaches they spend whole days on the hot sand.

“She isn’t sure whether she is in Hell or in Paradise. She says that this is a common topic of discussion among the deceased, that everyone’s opinion on it is different. But there is no higher authority in the underworld to arbitrate their disputes. The guards who watch the gate are themselves deceased who have been in the underworld for a long time, as is the captain of the ship of the dead which takes them ashore every morning. Every evening the businessman waits with her on the cooling beach, on which most of those remaining are deceased, until he hears the distant drone of the engine of the ship of the dead and a white speedboat sweeps into the bay. Then they kiss and the girl climbs aboard with the others and gives him a last wave before the boat disappears behind the rock. When after two weeks they say their final goodbyes, the girl asks if she will ever see him on Mykonos again. The businessman replies that it is unlikely he will ever again manage to go on holiday without his wife. ‘No matter,’ says the girl. ‘You can visit me once you die. I’ll give you my address. The underworld is pretty vast and complex and you might not find me otherwise. Then we can make up for lost time. I’m already really looking forward to the time we can walk together on Paradise beach every day; in fact, we can visit all the beaches of the Aegean…’ Hey, don’t go to sleep or you’ll fall.”