Measuring the World Read Free

could make head or tail of this sentence. Not their mother, not Kunth the majordomo, a rail of a man with large ears. He took it to mean, he said finally, that it was a kind of experiment. The one should be educated to be a man of culture, and the other a man of science.
    And which was which?
    Kunth thought. Then he shrugged his shoulders and suggested that they toss a coin.
    Fifteen highly paid experts came to lecture them at university level. For the younger brother it was chemistry, physics, and mathematics, for the elder it was languages and literature, and for them both it was Greek, Latin, and philosophy. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, with no time off and no holidays.
    The younger brother, Alexander, was taciturn and frail; he needed encouragement in everything he did and his marks were mediocre. When left to his own devices, he wandered in the woods, collecting beetles and ordering them in categories he made up himself. At the age of nine he followed Benjamin Franklin's design and built a lightning conductor and attached it to the roof of the castle they lived in near the capital. It was only the second anywhere in Germany; the other was in Göttingen, mounted on physics professor Lichtenberg's roof. These were the only two places where one was safe from the heavens.
    The elder brother looked like an angel. He could talk like a poet and from the earliest age wrote precocious letters to the most famous men in the country. Everyone who met him was dazzled, almost overcome. By thirteen he had mastered two languages, by fourteen four, by fifteen seven. He had never been punished; nobody could even remember him doing anything wrong. With English envoys he talked about economic policy, with the French the dangers of insurrection. Once he locked his younger brother in a cupboard in a distant room. When a servant found the little boy half-unconscious the next day, he swore he'd locked himself in; he knew nobody would believe the truth. Another time he discovered a white powder in his food. He knew enough about chemistry to identify it as rat poison. With trembling hands he pushed the plate away. From the other side of the table his elder brother watched him knowingly, his pale eyes impenetrable.
    Nobody could deny that the castle was haunted. Nothing spectacular, just footsteps in empty corridors, sounds of children crying out of nowhere, and sometimes a shadowy man who asked in a rasping voice to buy shoelaces, little toy magnets, or a glass of lemonade. But the stories about the spirits were even eerier than the spirits themselves. Kunth gave the two boys books to read full of monks and open graves and hands reaching up out of the depths and potions brewed in the underworld and séances where the dead talked to terrified listeners. This kind of thing was just becoming fashionable and was still so novel that there was no familiarity that could inure people to the feelings of horror. And horror was necessary, according to Kunth, encountering the dark side of things was part of growing up; anyone innocent of metaphysical anxiety would never achieve German manhood. Once they stumbled on a story about Aguirre the Mad, who had renounced his king and declared himself emperor. He and his men traveled the length of the Orinoco in a journey that was the stuff of nightmares, past riverbanks so thick with undergrowth that it was impossible to land. Birds screamed in the language of extinct tribes, and when one looked up, the sky reflected cities whose architecture never came from human hands. Hardly any scholars had ever penetrated this region, and there was no reliable map.
    But he would, said the younger brother. He would make the journey.
    Naturally, the elder brother replied.
    He really meant it!
    Yes he understood that, said the elder brother and summoned a servant to note down the day and the exact time. The day would come when they would be glad they had fixed this moment.
    Their teacher in physics and philosophy was