High Energy

Here in late February 2011 I'm happily awaiting Noi's return from her little trip north, but a good part of me is locked in the April of 1781 with William Herschel pretty sure the tailless Comet he has spotted is the seventh planet of our sun and just waiting for the world to catch up with him. (Yet another part is celebrating the mighty Reds storming to victory last night over at Wigan pier, but we'll let that pass.)

The writer responsible for transporting me back to the eighteenth century is, of course, the incomparable Richard Holmes. I reckon The Age of Wonders has at least three to four exciting ideas on pretty much every page. And he's superb at communicating the ordinary humanity of the extraordinary thinkers he deals with. But what I've found overwhelming about the great astronomer so far (I'm now in Chapter 2) is his abundant energy - and that of his equally remarkable sister, by the way.

Which leads me to wonder (in more ways than one). Did folks back then simply have more drive than we do now as a result of the sheer difficulty of their lives? Did the relative lack of ways of idling away the time make for lives of greater accomplishment? Or is it just that we're looking at the most exceptional, those who made the best of the hands they were dealt? I get exhausted just reading about what Banks and Herschel got up to. I mean Herschel, an accomplished musician - that was his day job - found time to write an entire oratorio on Paradise Lost which only just makes it into Holmes's entertaining footnotes.

It probably wasn't a very good oratorio, but that's not the point (for me, anyway). Just as it is equally not the point that Herschel's ideas were sometimes spectacularly wrong. It's the drive to have the ideas, to create the music, to devise and assemble those beautiful telescopes (making one heck of a mess in the process) that counts.