Chapter 1
Progress, Optimism, and Restless Journeying
It is not good for one to spend the whole day brooding.
Thinking is bad for one’s health, Metaphysicus.
Why don’t you look there at the muddy ground instead, see what quivers and gurgles.
Durs Grünbein,Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland (2003)
It swoops down from the ceiling and buzzes around the room, darting this way and that, fitfully changing the direction of its flight. The housefly’s movements aren’t so quick anymore; the days have gotten shorter, and it sinks sluggishly onto the windowsill. In the chill it grows inert, but as the stove heats up, it begins once more to zip through the small room, lit by the glow of torches and candles. By the window, there is another source of warmth. On the table next to the window are the remnants of a meal and a cup of sugar-sweetened coffee. The sweet nourishment lures the fly; it flies to the table. There the dark source of warmth begins to move. A hand raised to strike casts a shadow; quick as the wind, the insect dodges out of the way. While the hand’s owner has eyes that can process only about twenty frames per second, the fly perceives nearly two hundred frames in the same amount of time. To it, the hand moves incredibly slowly, as if in slow motion; by the time it reaches the fly’s position, the insect has already turned and flown off toward the stove. From there, the tiny creature observes the large warm shadow that perches in its chair for what seems like an eternity—and from time to time, it flies once more toward the tempting sugar.
Bent low over the table sits a man, incessantly reading and writing, occasionally raising a hand to shoo away a fly that loves sugar as much as he does. Thus can we imagine Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who has likely been in this spot working without pause since late morning. It wouldn’t be hard for Leibniz to imagine what is happening from the vantage point of a fly—after all, in
