The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page B

about it, but I will think about it.’ Once in the parlour, he looked round him as though at a revelation. ‘It is beautiful, beautiful.’
    ‘It’s not beautiful at all,’ said Rahel. ‘You are more than welcome here, I hope that you will learn a great deal and you are free, of course, to form whatever opinions you like, but this parlour is not beautiful.’
    Fritz continued to gaze around him.
    ‘This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.’
    Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron.
    ‘You are beautiful, gracious Fraulein,’ said Fritz.
    ‘We expected you yesterday,’ said Rahel, dryly, ‘but you see, we are patient people.’ When Karoline had gone out, as she very soon did, to the kitchen, she added, ‘I am going to take the privilege of someone who met you so often when you were a student, and welcomed you, you remember, to our Shakespeare evenings, and tell you that you ought not to speak to Karoline quite like that. You did not mean it, and she is not used to it.’
    ‘But I did mean it,’ said Fritz. ‘When I came into your home, everything, the wine-decanter, the tea, the sugar, the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated.’
    ‘They are as usual. I did not buy this furniture myself, but -‘
    Fritz tried to explain that he had seen not their everyday, but their spiritual selves. He could not tell when these transfigurations would come to him. When the moment came it was as the whole world would be when body at last became subservient to soul.
    Rahel saw that, whatever else, young Hardenberg was serious. She allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she didnot mean that. But she soon found out that he took at most thirty drops at bedtime as a sedative, if his mind was too active - only half the dose, in fact, that she took herself for a woman’s usual aches and pains.

14
Fritz at Tennstedt
    F RITZ’S luggage arrived a day later on the diligence. It consisted largely of books. Here were the hundred and thirty-three necessary titles, the earlier ones mostly poetry, plays and folktales, later on the study of plants, minerals, medicine, anatomy, theories of heat, sound and electricity, Mathematics, the Analysis of Infinite Numbers. They are all one, said Fritz aloud, warming his hands over a candle in his cold attic bedroom at Tennstedt. All human knowledge is one. Mathematics is the linking principle, just as Ritter told me that electricity is the link between body and mind. Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language. And if all knowledge was to be expressed through symbols, then he must set to work to write down every possible way the operation could be performed.
    ‘ Triumph !’ exclaimed Fritz in his icy room (but he had never in his life - nor had anyone he knew - workedor slept in a room that was not exceedingly cold).
    His second load of books began with Franz Ludwig Cancrinus’ Foundations of Mining and Saltworks , Volume 1. Part 1: In What Mineralogy Consists. Part 2: In What the Art of Experiment Consists. Part 3: In What the Specification of Aboveground Earth Consists. Part 4: In What the Specification of Belowground Earth Consists. Part 5: In What the Art of Mine Construction Consists. Part 6: In What Arithmetic, Geometry and Ordinary Trigonometry Consists. Part 7, Section 1: In What Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Aerometrics and Hydraulics Consists, Section 2: In What the Construction of Mountain Machinery Consists. Part 8, Section 1: In What the Smelting and Precipitation of Metals from Ore Consists, Section 2: In What the Smelting of Half-metals Consists, Section 3: In What the Preparation of Sulphur Consists. Part 9, Section 1: In What the Examination of Salt and the