An Instrumental New Year
The coming of a new year always makes me think about calendars, timekeeping, the measurement of space and time. Though Time is typically the emphasis at a year’s beginning, I’ve been thinking especially about Space because I recently read a fine book by Rachel Hewitt called Map of a Nation, which narrates the first hundred years or so of England’s Ordnance Survey. A fascinating figure in this history is one Jesse Ramsden, the leading maker of scientific instruments in his era. Ramsden was notorious for his perfectionism, which meant that his instruments were the finest that could be purchased — if he ever finished them. He was habitually late in providing what he had promised to provide, by months and in some cases even years. But his instruments are gorgeous to behold. Here’s a sextant:
And here’s the “Palermo Circle,” the telescope Ramsden made for the Palermo Astronomical Observatory, generally considered his greatest single achievement:
I love how these once-useful instruments have become works of art. A similar transformation is noted in Auden’s poem “Fleet Visit,” written when he was living on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples and saw a fleet of American warships anchored in the bay:
The sailors come ashore
Out of their hollow ships,
Mild-looking middle-class boys
Who read the comic strips;
One baseball game is more
To them than fifty Troys.They look a bit lost, set down
In this unamerican place
Where natives pass with laws
And futures of their own;
They are not here because
But only just-in-case.The whore and ne’er-do-well
Who pester them with junk
In their grubby ways at least
Are serving the Social Beast;
They neither make nor sell —
No wonder they get drunk.But the ships on the dazzling blue
Of the harbor actually gain
From having nothing to do;
Without a human will
To tell them whom to kill
Their structures are humaneAnd, far from looking lost,
Look as if they were meant
To be pure abstract design
By some master of pattern and line,
Certainly worth every cent
Of the millions they must have cost.
Rocks that look like faces, or other recognizable objects — that’s Elephant Rock, on Heimaey off the coast of Iceland, above — are called Mimetoliths.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Already beginning to prep for the courses I’ll be teaching next term: one, two, and three.
- Music: Bach’s Advent and Christmas Cantatas have been my delight for the past few weeks, as they always are this time of year.
- Viewing: Probably too much Premier League football. I love that holiday tradition, but for the sake of the players English football needs to follow its Continental peers and take a bit of a break in December.
- Food and Drink: Ack, so much. So, so much.
