Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land by John Crowley

Author:John Crowley
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, pdf
Tags: Literary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780060556594
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-07-03T07:00:00+00:00

NOTES FOR THE 9TH CHAPTER

ennui: Lucky is the human spirit immune to the excitements of Chance. There is no exaltation that is like the certainty that a perfect system of betting exists, at the race-course or the card-table, and that it is in hand, and needs only the refinement that comes with actual play. The exaltation is itself as fixating as the result, and the proof positive that one’s system is in fact sound would, in my own opinion, be a gratification beyond any sum of money won at Newcastle or the St-Leger. The costs to be paid for failure being, concomitantly, twice as bitter as mere money lost.

Weeks’s museum: Decades later the silver lady here described came into the possession of Charles Babbage, who would make it dance and nod, beckon and gesture, for guests who came to his house, that house so full of wonders, mechanical and intellectual. He had fallen in love with the lady when he was a little boy and she was shewn at Merlin’s museum, of which Weeks’s was the successor. Yet I remember that she was disassembled when he bought her, a box of parts long stored in Weeks’s attic, and it was left to him (like Pygmalion) to bring her back to life—she had never danced in public since 1803, when Merlin’s closed. How then did Ld. B. see her? Or did he invent her, tho’ she existed before his invention? It is quite mysterious.

craniologist: The phrenology of the last generation, which so took the imaginations of many—among them Lady Byron—seems now inadequate to the unequalled complexity of that organ, and moreover its principles are based on no particular experimental result, but only on supposition. I have my hopes, & very distinct ones too, of one day recording cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations; in short a law or laws for the mutual action of the molecules of the brain, equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary and sidereal world—a Calculus of the Nervous System. The great difficulty, which was not present to the Phrenologists, and vitiated their system, is in the design of practical experiments. I must become a most skilful practical manipulator in experimental tests & that, on materials difficult to deal with, viz., the brain, blood and nerves of animals. In time I will do all I dare say I hope & so may bequeath to future generations by application industry attention a system wch

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