Spring by Ali Smith

Author:Ali Smith [Smith, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Women, Art, History, Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), General, Political Science, Political Process, Political Advocacy
ISBN: 0241207053
Google: KBdkDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07F3MCM4Y
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2019-03-27T23:00:00+00:00

Long long ago in the morning of what was actually still today, Brit had been on her way to work. But now, opposite her on a train speeding its way up the map of England, the girl, Florence, is talking about the invisible life she says there is in this –

she is pointing at a spill of water out of one of the water bottles on the table between them

– so he got the idea for the first microscopes, she is saying. He was something to do with the making of cloth and he wanted to be able to see what the threads he was making his cloth with looked like really close up. So he taught himself to grind glass out of sand, which is how you make glass.

No. Is it? Brit said.

Yeah, it really is, the girl says, and he ground it into exceptionally small but powerful lenses so he could look at things magnified hundreds and hundreds of times.

Exceptionally, Brit says.

Then he invented a wooden thing to hold the lenses up to your eye, the girl says, it was only this size, literally, because the lenses were so small too, but though his lenses were quite definitely tiny the human eye could still look through them and perceive the small things made massive.

Perceive, Brit says. Big word.

My mother always says as a general rule it’s a good thing to make the world bigger, not smaller, the girl says. And then the Dutchman thought, great, I can look at all sorts of things really close up now, and one day in the year 1670-something he was eating his lunch and there was pepper sprinkled on it. And he thought to himself, I bet if I look at a grain of pepper through one of my lenses that the grain of pepper will have sharp sides, or lots of prickles on it like a hedgehog, because that’s what it feels like on my tongue, like it’s pricking it with invisible pointed sticks. So he soaked some grains of pepper in water for like a month. And then he looked at the pepper-water through a lens that made it 200 times closer than the naked eye can see. And he saw that the water was filled with little, animalcules is the word he called them, like the word molecules, all swimming about. So he tried looking again, this time with water that didn’t have any pepper in it, and the animalcules were still there in it so that meant it wasn’t the pepper that put them there.

And there’s this other really cool thing he did. He used one of his lenses to look through the eye of a dragonfly. He cut into a dragonfly eye, the dragonfly was already dead –

How d’you know for sure? Brit says.

– don’t be horrible, and he took out a piece of its eye and placed it on one of his lenses. And when he looked through them both at once out of his window,

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