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| Septimus: Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat's last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y, and z are whole numbers each raised to the power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2. (1.1) |
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Definition
| Septimus is purposely being funny here by juxtaposing two facts that have very different cultural weight – one most people would consider appropriate for him to be teaching Thomasina, and the other might get some members of the PTA coming after him with torches and pitchforks. But by putting these two sentences in such close contact, Septimus makes us wonder: why is it that some kinds of knowledge are often considered acceptable while others are treated as obscene? |
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| Valentine: It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. [...] It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. (1.4) |
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| Valentine's excitement and enthusiasm suggests that facing the unknown doesn't have to be a terrifying prospect: it also opens up the possibility for new discovery. For him, being wrong can be just as satisfying as being right...so long as you realize that you're wrong. |
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| Chater: "To my dear friend Septimus Hodge, who stood up and gave his best on behalf of the Author – Ezra Chater, at Sidley Park, Derbyshire, April 10, 1809." There, sir – something to show your grandchildren! (1.1) |
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| Does Chater realize the sexual double entendre of his dedication? Given his general stupidity, it seems doubtful. Bernard certainly doesn't get it when he reads the words two centuries later, underlining how important context can be in understanding writing. |
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| Thomasina: Papa has no need of the recording angel, his life is written in the game book. (1.1) |
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| This passage juxtaposes an "objective" history (the angel on high who sees everything) with a "subjective" one (the seemingly limited account of life as reflected by bird-killing) to suggest that they are equal. Although, since recording angels don't share their diaries with us down here on earth, the only option we have is to reconstruct the past as best we can through limited records. |
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| Septimus: Now there's a thing – a letter from Lord Byron never to be read by a living soul. (2.6) |
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| Plot-wise, Septimus burns this letter out of respect for Lady Croom, but it seems there's something deeper going on here, especially in light of Bernard's crack about the lost, burned letter of Byron. The unread letter could symbolize the necessary incompleteness of the written historical record – there could always be something disproving our theories that we don't know about. This raises the question, how can we form theories responsibly, knowing that we've always got blind spots? |
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| Thomasina: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. (1.1) |
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| This seems to be the strength of Thomasina's scientific thinking: she's able to think about big ideas in familiar terms, and to make connections between seemingly unrelated things. |
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| Valentine: It's not about the behavior of fish. It's about the behavior of numbers. This thing works for any phenomenon which eats its own numbers – measles epidemics, rainfall averages, cotton prices, it's a natural phenomenon in itself. Spooky. (1.4) |
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| Translating everything into numbers highlights the similarities between things that usually seem totally different. But is something important lost by not considering the specifics of a particular numbers-producing thing? |
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Hannah: Oh!, but . . . how beautiful!
Valentine: The Coverly set. [...] See? In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing. I can't show you how deep it goes. Each picture is a detail of the previous one, blown up. And so on. For ever. (2.7) |
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| While Bernard may think that poetry (Byron especially) has a monopoly on beauty, this suggests that mathematics can be pretty as well. (Though you might want to stick with poetry rather than pi for your next love letter – or not, depending on who you're writing to.) |
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| Thomasina: There is no proof, Septimus. The thing that is perfectly obvious is that the note in the margin was a joke to make you all mad. (1.1) |
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| The "joke" Thomasina guesses at only works if people really want to believe that truth exists – they'd rather go mad searching after the proof they are sure is there than admit that the proof never existed at all. |
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Bernard: "Without question, Ezra Chater issued a challenge to somebody. If a duel was fought in the dawn mist of Sidley Park in April 1809, his opponent, on the evidence, was a critic with a gift for ridicule and a taste for seduction. Do we need to look far? Without question, Mrs Chater was a widow by 1810. If we seek the occasion of Ezra Chater's early and unrecorded death, do we need to look far? Without question, Lord Byron, in the very season of his emergence as a literary figure, quit the country in a cloud of panic and mystery, and stayed abroad for two years at a time when Continental travel was unusual and dangerous. If we seek his reason – do we need to look far?
Hannah: Bollocks. [...] You've gone from a glint in your eye to a sure thing in a hop, skip and a jump. (2.5) |
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Definition
| While Bernard is convinced his own faith is enough, he does build a lot of circumstantial evidence to try to convince others that he is right. His rhetoric here is interesting because he's asking questions assuming that the audience will answer in a certain way (which Hannah doesn't). It's like he's asking fake questions in order to stop the audience from asking real ones. |
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| Bernard: Oh, bugger persuasive! I've proved Byron was here and as far as I'm concerned he wrote those lines as sure as he shot that hare. (2.7) |
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| Here's another joke thrown in for the century-hopping audience but lost on the characters themselves. Lord Augustus's complaint that Byron took undue credit for his hare (2.7) suggests that even the supposedly factual record of the game books is not to be trusted as an accurate account of what really happened – making Bernard's use of it here as a benchmark for certain truth unintentionally funny. |
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| Hannah: What the hell is it with you people? Chaps sometimes wanted to marry me, and I don't know a worse bargain. Available sex against not being allowed to fart in bed. (2.5) |
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| Well, maybe Bernard has the point – Hannah isn't exactly the most sex-positive person ever. Her sex vs. farts equivalence is crude, but it does emphasize yet again that sex is, at its most basic, a physical function, with a lot of emotional baggage added on. |
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| Lady Croom: It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them. (2.6) |
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| Lady Croom's assertion that sexual attraction is so nonsensical even God can't figure it out sounds kind of similar to her descendant Chloë's thoughts on a similar subject (see below) – we wonder whether the characters who are less serially monogamous think differently. |
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Septimus: My lady, I was alone with my thoughts in the gazebo, when Mrs Chater ran me to ground, and I being in such a passion, in an agony of unrelieved desire --
Lady Croom: Oh . . . !
Septimus: -- I thought in my madness that the Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the happiness to which I dared not put a face.
Lady Croom: I do not know when I have received a more unusual compliment, Mr Hodge. (2.6) |
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| Septimus sure knows how to sweet-talk the ladies ... or not. He's fortunate that Lady Croom takes his comment in the spirit that it was meant – which suggests that they have a similarly unconventional attitude towards sex. |
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| Thomasina: If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. (1.1) |
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| If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? And if an equation exists, but no one can calculate it out, does it matter? |
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Thomasina: You can't stir things apart.
Septimus: No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it forever. This is known as free will or self-determination. (1.1) |
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Definition
| This quote is also discussed under "Time," but here's another take on it: Septimus could be saying that while the ultimate destination is determined – we're all going to end up in a state as pink as a princess-obsessed little girl's bedroom. But the exact way we get there is up to us. Perhaps fate and free will are not entirely mutually exclusive after all. |
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| Septimus: "If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton's law of motion, what becomes of free will?" (1.1) |
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| The quotes are there because Septimus is referring to a question that was already so common as to be trite in 1809 (the "are we there yet?" of physics). Perhaps a more interesting question would be, why does this subject make people so uncomfortable? What's so disturbing about saying free will is just an illusion? |
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| Valentine: The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. [...] We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can't even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable in the same way, will always be unpredictable. (1.4) |
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| Valentine is saying that a dripping faucet is just too complicated to track, that you'd have to be able to chart what each individual atom is doing. Or is this just another case of not enough pencils? Perhaps there's a future development in technology that is as difficult for Valentine to imagine as computers would have been for Thomasina, and another scientific revolution will make his grouse seem as quaint as Thomasina's rabbit equation. |
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Augustus: You are not my tutor, sir. I am visiting your lesson by my free will.
Septimus: If you are so determined, my lord. (2.7) |
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| Septimus plays on the double meaning of "determined" discussed above – and the beauty of his joke is that there's no way for Augustus to prove that Septimus is making fun of him. Thanks, ambiguity of the English language. |
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| Septimus: Well, so much for Mr. Noakes. He puts himself forward as a gentleman, a philosopher of the picturesque, a visionary who can move mountains and cause lakes, but in the scheme of the garden he is as the serpent. (1.1) |
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| Septimus is being rather unfair to Mr. Noakes – after all, the gardener didn't tempt him to make love to Mrs. Chater, he just tattled on him to her husband. Septimus is stretching his metaphor to make the point that man's having power to manipulate nature doesn't make Mr. Noakes anything like God – he could be Satan instead. |
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| Thomasina: If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. (1.1) |
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Definition
| Thomasina is the first to state this theme that develops throughout the play: the idea that natural phenomena follow laws that can be described through math. Her suggestion here that human knowledge of nature could, theoretically, be all-encompassing, seems very different from the snatches of Romantic poetry we get throughout the play, where the mystery of nature is something to be preserved and appreciated. |
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| Hannah: The hermit was placed in the landscape exactly as one might place a pottery gnome. And there he lived out his life as a garden ornament. (1.2) |
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| So far the play has mostly treated the landscape as an accessory for humans, so it's intriguing that the relation can work the other way. Perhaps particular kinds of landscapes can create particular kinds of people, as well as vice versa? |
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| Valentine: People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. (1.4) |
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| Is a view of nature as mysterious necessary in order to write poetry about it? And it's kind of funny that the most familiar things are also the most difficult to explain scientifically. Or is it precisely their familiarity that makes them more difficult to see with the distance required for scientific observation? |
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