Mount Terminus Read Free

Newton, and when his enthusiasm for this field was brought to the attention of one of the orphanage’s trustees, he was introduced to a man named Jonah Liebeskind, an inventor and craftsman, who made his living shaping lenses for cameras and naval telescopes. Mr. Liebeskind was a fastidious bachelor who saw the smallest imperfections in all things. In objects. In architecture. In the manners of men. In the appearance of women. His intention, he would one day explain to Jacob, was not to be unkind by pointing out the deficits in people and the objects they created, he simply could not tolerate mediocrity.
    He said to Jacob the afternoon they met that if he was willing to work hard and do everything in his power to live up to his standards, if he was willing to pledge to him his diligence, and promise he would attempt to rise above his circumstances, he would make Jacob his apprentice.
    To this, Jacob agreed.
    In return, he was given a room of his own in Mr. Liebeskind’s splendid home, a key to the garden, a pair of coveralls to be worn in the machine shop, a new suit to be worn on days they made their deliveries, an additional suit, even more refined, to be worn to shul on the high holidays, to the theater, where they would spend each Sabbath eve, to the museum, where they would spend each Sabbath day studying art, and always to dinner.
    Mr. Liebeskind was fond of saying, We will not be unseemly Jews. We will not look or speak like men spawned from the gutter. We will rise above. He settled for nothing less. Sartorial perfection. Clean hands. Buffed nails. Hair groomed. Shoes shined. Posture erect. Words pronounced without guttural inflection. Manners. Always manners. Always serving the aesthetics of grace. Jacob adopted Mr. Liebeskind’s regimen. A small sacrifice to make for a room of his own and for the opportunity to handle such beautiful tools. In a night and a day, the upright Mr. Liebeskind transformed him from an unkempt boy into a pristine little man, and in ten years’ time, all the while playing his role accordingly, Jacob absorbed everything Mr. Liebeskind imparted to him. He learned from him all there was to know about the properties of glass and shaping lenses, the mechanisms of photographic equipment, the physical nature of light, the internal workings of reflecting telescopes. His mentor had an impeccable eye for painting and believed there was no reason why he and Jacob, with a forthright application of ingenuity, couldn’t, one day, craft lenses and mechanisms that would make it possible for the photographers to whom they sold their equipment to be as great as Hals and Van Dyck. Tiepolo. Poussin. Guardi. He dreamed of traveling abroad like a proper gentleman, to meet with other opticians, to research their methods of shaping lenses, but they were always too consumed with work to take time for a holiday.
    With Mr. Liebeskind’s permission, Jacob dissected the early projection and viewing devices his mentor had acquired over his lifetime; the components of his magic lanterns , the spinning carousel of his zoetropes, the synchronized disks of his phenakistoscope, the mandalas of his Wheel of Life; and with the little money he earned from Mr. Liebeskind, he bought materials with which he re-created, from designs he’d seen illustrated in the journal Phantasmagoria , an electrotachyscope and a phasmatrope. In this same journal, he read one night before bedtime an article about Thomas Edison’s search for a method by which he might deliver clear and consistent images on his Kinetoscope. Jacob visited the patent office to study the blueprints of Edison’s motion picture viewer, and saw in the drawings that the flaw wasn’t, as Edison claimed, with the width and length and tensile strength of the celluloid, or, for that matter, with the placement of perforations along the film’s edge, but rather with the rate at which each framed image moved past the device’s