Measuring the World Read Free Page B

sobbing. Turning onto his stomach, he belly-flopped toward the bank. His brother was still standing there, bent forward the way he had been, hands in his pockets, his cap pulled down over his face. He reached out a hand and helped him to his feet.
    That night the fever started. He was aware of voices and didn't know whether they belonged to figures in his dreams or the people who were standing round his bed, and he could still feel the cold of the ice. A man who must be the doctor was pacing up and down the room, and said it's up to you, you'll either make it or you won't, it's your decision, all you have to do is hold on, you know. But when he tried to answer, he could no longer remember what had been said; instead he was looking at the wide expanse of a sea under skies flickering with electricity, and when he opened his eyes again it was noon two days later, the winter sun was hanging all pale in the window and his fever had broken.
    From now on his marks improved. He concentrated when he worked and began a habit of balling his fists while thinking, as if there were an enemy to conquer. He had changed, Henriette said in a letter to him, and now he made her a little fearful. He asked permission to spend a night in the empty room which was the most frequent source of nocturnal sounds. In the morning he was white and quiet, and the first vertical line had appeared in his brow.
    Kunth decided that the elder brother should study jurisprudence, and the younger, public administration. Of course he traveled with them when they went to university at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder; he accompanied them to lectures and oversaw their progress. It was not a good higher education. If someone incompetent wanted to earn his doctorate, the elder boy wrote to Henriette, he could come here in full confidence. And for some unknown reason there was also a large dog which attended lectures most of the time, scratching incessantly and making noises.
    It was the botanist Willdenow who introduced the younger boy to his first dried plants from the tropics. They had protuberances that looked like feelers, buds like eyes, and leaves with upper surfaces that felt like human skin. They seemed familiar to him from his dreams. He dissected them, made careful sketches, tested their reaction to acids and alkalis, and worked them up cleanly into preparations.
    He knew now, he said to Kunth, what he wanted to concern himself with: Life.
    He couldn't give his approval, said Kunth. One had more tasks on earth than mere existence. Life in and of itself did not supply the content for existence.
    That wasn't what he'd meant, he replied. He wanted to investigate Life, to understand its strange grip on the world. He wanted to uncover its tricks!
    So he was allowed to stay and study with Willdenow. Next semester the elder brother transferred to the University of Göttingen. While he was finding his first friends there, trying his first alcohol, and touching his first woman, the younger boy was writing his first scientific paper.
    Good, said Kunth, but not yet good enough to be printed under the name of Humboldt. Publication would have to wait.
    During the holidays he visited his elder brother. At a reception given by the French consul, he met Kästner the mathematician, his friend Privy Councilor Zimmerman, and Professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the most important experimental physicist in Germany. The latter, a hunchback, a clotted mass of flesh and intellect, with a flawlessly beautiful face, pressed his hand softly and stared up at him with a twinkle. Humboldt asked him if it was true he was working on a novel.
    Yes and no, said Lichtenberg with a look that suggested he could see something beyond Humboldt's understanding. The work was called About Gunkel , had no story, and was making no progress.
    Writing a novel, said Humboldt, seemed to him the perfect way to capture the most fleeting essence of the present for the future.
    Aha, said Lichtenberg.
    Humboldt blushed. It