The Syme Papers Read Free Page A

volume between the palms of my strapped fists, for Pitt is a digger, you know; a roll-up-the-sleeves fellow, a thorough scholar, in his way.
    If I could begin my career from scratch, with a fresh slate, I should return as a bibliographer, a historian of the collections of books. What stories might not be told through the libraries of this world? Records of childhood and old age, of generations, of the cloudy atmosphere of solitude and words in which our mind grows tall. What better bed in which to trace the roots of our slightest thoughts than the libraries, the books, we burrowed in as children? And here before me, spread out in page after page, in the thin, knuckly hand of his father, marking title and date, I read through the circumstances surrounding the birth of Alfred’s genius. ‘I hereby commence’, he wrote, ‘this inventory of the library on Friedrichsgracht, this new year, 1880. May all future acquisitions be recorded herein.’
    The catalogue was arranged according to shelves. I could dimly picture the dark galleries above the canal by the lists of scribbled titles, feel the comfortable solitude at a corner, where one row finished and another began, see the young Wegener propping his back against a handful of volumes, pushing them flush with the board; just as here or there a run of scribbled book-names leans against the margin of the page, as his father’s hand grew weary or the room grew dark in that long-ago new year. Then there is the first thrill of recognition, a title familiar, perhaps even the contents contained within: Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers; Tales of my Landlord, 1st Series, 2nd Series; Headlong Hall, Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers …
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    The moment of discovery is often a gap between two other things. ‘Most ideas’, Syme once said, ‘begin as the answer to an unimportant problem, soon forgotten, a stone washed away once the stream is crossed … So true it is that we are at the mercy of our own … inspiration – that is too grand a word, which means nothing more than the ability to begin in idleness and end in faith.’ And out of an idle, dozy day I stumbled upon my faith.
    I believe the first name to wake my attention in the heavy volume was that of Robert Jameson, a prolific geognosist and noted Neptunian, a follower of WERNER (not Wegener, Alfred, hisdescendant, but Werner, Gottlob, an older, even stranger fish in the kettle of German geology). I had come at last to the very corner of the library I sought. I pictured a row of books squeezed into a bottom shelf, away from the window and the door, a dark, crouching, peaceful nook – but we shall never know, for all such nooks were tumbled into the canal below. Here the geologists and geognosists lived in their leather neighbourhood, a familiar company.
    In that dark corner, where the young, breathing Alfred might have slept to escape some distasteful chore, the dead and dusty Werner himself lay ensconced, both his early On the External Characters of Minerals (entered into the library in June 1884) and A New Theory on the Birth of Veins (also June 1884). Werner rubbed elbows with Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (entered September 1884), containing in the first volume as I knew James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe (we live in a world of breathless titles, no?). Between them, Werner (elegant and slender) and Hutton (thick and obscure, supported by a mass of royal correspondence) divided the field into their camps, the NEPTUNISTS and PLUTONISTS (more of them later). Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (February 1885) danced cheek by jowl with Richard Owen’s Key to the Geology of the Globe (January 1886, a surprising inclusion). And there, between Richard Owen of Indiana, and the Reverend Osmond Fisher, Rector of Harleton, England, and author of Physics of the Earth’s Crust