Theory of the living earth

Morgan describes his despair as their captors string up King Arthur for a hanging: "They were blind-folding him! I was paralysed; I couldn't move, I was choking, my tongue was petrified.... They led him under the rope." But, in the best cliffhanging tradition, and at the last conceivable instant, Sir Lancelot comes to the rescue with 500 knights--all riding bicycles.

Lord, how the plumes streamed, how the

sun flamed and flashed from the endless

procession of webby wheels! I waved my

right arm as Lancelot swept in...I tore

away noose and bandage, and shouted:

"On your knees, every rascal of you, and

salute the king! Who fails shall sup in hell

tonight!"

I am not citing either Monty Python or Saturday Night Live, and I didn't mix up my genders in the first sentence. The speaker is not Morgan le Fay (who, no doubt, would have devised a magical, rather than a technological, solution to the same predicament) but Hank Morgan, the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court in Mark Twain's satirical novel of the same name. Morgan, transported from nineteenth-century Hartford, wreaks mayhem in sixth-century Camelot by introducing all manner of "modern" conveniences, including tobacco, telephones baseball--and bicycles.

As a literary or artistic device, anachronism exerts a powerful hold upon us and has been a staple of all genres from the highest philosophy to the lowest comedy--as Jesus is crucified in a corporate boardroom by Dali, condemned at his second coming by Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, but only offered a half-price discount (as he changes to modern dress) by the Italian barber or the Jewish tailor of various ethnic jokes, now deemed tastless and untellabe.

Anachronism works this eerie and potent effect, I suppose, because we use the known temporal sequence of our history as a primary device for imposing order upon a confusing world. And when "the time is out of joint; O cursed spite," we really do get discombobulated. We also know that correction of a perceived time warp cannot be achieved so easily in real life as in magicaal fiction (where Merlin can put Hank Morgan to sleep for 1,300 years, or Dracula can be dispatched with a wooden stake driven into the right spot). We regard Hamlet's blithe confidence as a mark of his madness when he completes his rhyming copulet with the Shakespearean equivalent of "no sweat" or "hakuna matata"--"That ever I was born to set it right!"

Science, for reasons partly mythical but also partly accurate and dependable presents itself as the most linear and chronically well ordered of all disciplines. It science, working by fruitful and largely unchanging methods of reason, observation, and experimentation, develops progressively more accurate accounts of the natural world, then history provides a time line defined by ever expanding success. In such a simple, linear ordering, mediated by a singly principle of advancing knowledge, any pronounced anachronism must strike us a especially peculiar--and subject to diametrically opposite judgment depending upon the direction of warp. An ancient view maintained in the present strikes us as risible and absurd--the creationist who wants to compress the history of life into the few thousand years of a literal biblical chronology, or the few serious members of the flat earth society. But a "modern" truth espoused our of time by a scholar in the distant past, fills us with awe and may even seem close to miraculous.

A person consistently ahead of his time--a real-life Hank Morgan who could present a six-shooter to Julius Caesar or explain the theory of natural selection to Thomas Aquinas--can only evoke a metaphorical comparison with a spaceman from a more advanced universe or a genuine angel from the science, no man seems so well qualified for such a designation as Leonardo da Vinci of science, no man 1519 but filled his private notebooks with the principles of aeronautics, the mental invention of flying machines and submarines, and a correct explanation for the eighteenth century. Did he have a private line across the centuries to Einstein seems so well qualified for such a designation would not develop until the end of the eighteenth century. Did he have a private line across the centuries to Einstein, or even to God himself?

I must confess that I share, with so many others, a lifelong fascination for this man. I was not a particularly intellectual child; I played stickball every afternoon and read little beyond comic books and school assignments. But Leonardo captured my imagination. I asked, at age ten or so, for a book about his life and work, probably the only intellectual gift that I ever overtly requested from my parents. As an undergraduate geology major, I bought the two-volume Dover paperback edition of Leonardo's notebook (a reprint of the 1883 compilation by Jean Paul Richter) because I had read some of his observation on fossils in the Codex Leicester and had been stunned not only by their accuracy but also by their clear statement of paleoecological principles not clearly codified before our century and still serving as a basis for modern studies.