An alchemist in his tower, and the chemist who knocked.
The alchemist was good once. This is the thing the story keeps forgetting. He had refined a pigment that the dyers of three cities still mix the way he taught them; he had drawn a fever down out of a child whose mother stopped him in the market for years afterwards to press his hand. He had a name in the guild. Younger men brought him their notebooks.
Then a winter came when he did not leave the tower for a long time, and then a spring when he did not notice he had not left, and then a habit of not leaving, and then the habit was the thing.
Inside the tower he had everything. A furnace of brick, a copper pot, a long bench of glassware whose names he remembered and whose origins he had stopped looking up. A daybook in a hand that had loosened over the years into something only he could read. An apprentice he had chosen because she was bright and willing and asked exactly the questions he already had answers to. A door he kept barred more out of habit than out of fear, since visitors had stopped knocking a while ago and the last few times he had not been quite sure what to say.
The tower had become a cell, in the monastic sense — warm in winter and lit in the dark, full of a kind of pleasure that does not require anyone else to be in the room.
It is important, when this story is told, not to begin in mockery. The alchemist is not a fool. He is a practitioner of a real craft. He is also a man who has not noticed that a sister craft, downhill from his tower and in a building with much larger windows, has eaten his.
The pot stirs the pot
Inside, the work goes well. It always goes well.
In the morning he stokes the furnace. In the late morning he and the apprentice place the pot. In the afternoon he watches the surface of the liquid for a flicker, and in the early evening, two days out of three, he finds one. The flicker has a name in his daybook. The name is his own; he gave it to the flicker last spring and the apprentice copies it now without asking what it means, the way one copies a word in a language one has decided to trust.
The flicker is real. It is not imagined; the surface of the liquid does change; the change is measurable in the small ways he has learned to measure it. He has built, over the years, a private instrument calibrated to this exact pot, in this exact tower, fed by this exact furnace, observed in this exact afternoon light. By the standards of the instrument, the flicker is undeniable.
You know already where the instrument came from. It came from the pot. He made it to measure what the pot does. It works.
The shape of the work is everything: the pot stirs the pot. The instrument, refined for the pot, agrees with the pot. The daybook, written in the hand only he reads, records what the instrument says about the pot. The apprentice, trained on the daybook, learns to see what the daybook describes. In the small warm room everything corroborates everything else, and the corroboration is the pleasure.
It is honest pleasure. It is the pleasure of a thing fitting cleanly into another thing. It is the pleasure of waking and knowing what you will do, and doing it, and finding at the end of the day that the thing you set out to find was there. It is the pleasure of a dashboard you built, watched only by you, whose numbers go up because you decided what would make them go up. It is the pleasure of a metric you defined this quarter on the basis of data you collected last quarter from a system whose behaviour you designed the quarter before. It is the pleasure of a notebook with forty-seven cells in which the first forty-six are scaffolding for the chart in the forty-seventh — the chart you already knew you wanted before you wrote the first import.
And the alchemist did not look up.
The apprentice
She came in spring. She was twenty-three and clever in the particular way of clever students, which is to say she had done her exercises and been told that her exercises were good, and had concluded — reasonably, since no one had told her otherwise — that the exercises and the trade were the same thing.
She had wanted to be a chemist. She was specific about this. She had read about the periodic table in a pamphlet that had reached her village a year late, and she had decided, in the bright clean way one decides things at nineteen, that she would spend her life in the careful weighing of elements. She walked four days to the tower because the tower was the nearest place where, as far as she could tell, weighing was being done.
The alchemist welcomed her, and was kind to her, and put her to work on the pot. He did not lie to her. He did not say, this is chemistry, because he did not think of the distinction; in his mind there had never been a distinction; chemistry, when he used the word at all, meant what he did. He gave her the daybook to copy. He showed her how to watch for the flicker. He praised her hand.
She loved it. She loved the warmth of the room and the order of the bench and the dignity of being trusted with the pot. She loved that her teacher remembered her questions from the day before. She loved the daybook, which felt, when she copied it, like an inheritance.
If you have ever been twenty-three and bright and given a notebook by a man you respected and told that the work in the notebook was the real work, you know her. Most of us have been her at least once.
She is not the villain of this story. She is not even, properly, its subject. She is the thing the tower needs in order to keep being a tower: a second pair of hands, a witness, a believer, a person to whom the daybook can be passed.
She did not know the word for what she had walked away from.
The journals on the post-house shelf
Downhill from the tower, in a city the alchemist had not visited in eleven years, the Royal Society met every second Thursday in a hall with windows on three sides.
They had, in those eleven years, drawn up a table of the elements. They had identified the gases that the alchemist's furnace was releasing into the rafters of his tower and had given them names, and had measured their weights, and had learned which of them would kill a man slowly and which would do it quickly. They had developed a notation for reactions which could be read by a chemist in Edinburgh and reproduced by a chemist in Naples and disputed by a chemist in Saint Petersburg, and the dispute, when it was resolved, would be resolved by the same notation. They had agreed on the temperatures at which water boils at sea level and at altitude, and they had built instruments — not private instruments, but instruments any chemist could buy from the same three workshops — to measure these things in the same way in every laboratory in Europe.
None of this had reached the tower. It is important to understand that it had not been hidden from him. It had been published. It had been published, in fact, in a journal that arrived at the post-house at the foot of his hill four times a year, and which his apprentice — had she known to ask — could have fetched in an afternoon. The journal was not hidden; it was simply not opened. To open it would have required closing the furnace for the afternoon, and the furnace, when one has stoked it that morning, asks not to be closed.
He had not even heard the word periodic.
Someone, in another country in another century, asked the question one is supposed to ask oneself once a week: what are the most important problems in your field, and why are you not working on them? The alchemist had not heard the question, because the question, by the time it reached him, would have required him to admit that there was a field — a thing larger than the tower, with problems in it that were not his — and the admission of the field is the thing the tower exists to prevent.
It is tempting, when one tells this story, to make the alchemist's ignorance contemptible. It is not contemptible. It is comfortable. The two are not the same word but they describe, in this case, the same room. The journals on the post-house shelf are not the enemy of the man in the tower. They are simply unread, because reading them would be cold, and the tower is warm.
If you have ever, when a colleague said have you tried X, replied we looked at that, it wasn't quite right — without having looked: you have lived in the tower for a small afternoon.
If you have ever said, of a tool you had not used, we searched and searched and there wasn't anything quite like what we're doing: you have lived in the tower for a season.
If the search, when you ran it, returned three results and you did not click any of them because the first paragraph was hard: the tower is where you live.
You are the easiest person to fool.
The chemist who knocked
The chemist came in the autumn of the eleventh year. He had heard of the tower from a man at an inn, who had heard of it from his uncle, and he was the kind of chemist who, when he heard of such a tower, would walk a day out of his way to knock on it.
He brought a small case. In the case were three vials, a sheet of the new notation, and a copy — folded twice — of the periodic table, which had been printed that summer in the city.
The alchemist welcomed him. He was not turned away at the door. There was tea. The apprentice was introduced; the chemist was praised for the long walk; the furnace was admired; the daybook was opened on the bench for a moment, and the chemist, who was a generous man, said kind things about the hand it was written in.
Then the chemist, because he was a chemist and could not help himself, took out the folded sheet and laid it on the bench between the cups.
The alchemist looked at it. He was polite. He turned it ninety degrees and looked at it again. He asked, in the voice of a man asking after a distant cousin, what the columns meant. The chemist explained. The alchemist nodded. The apprentice, who had been quiet, leaned forward. The alchemist asked another question; the chemist answered; the apprentice opened her mouth and then, glancing at her teacher, closed it.
The conversation moved on, as conversations do, to the road and to the weather and to a mutual acquaintance who had recently married. The sheet stayed on the bench. When the chemist left, at dusk, the alchemist walked him to the gate and thanked him with real warmth, because he was a man capable of real warmth, and watched him down the hill until the bend in the road.
When he came back inside, the apprentice had cleared the cups. The sheet was where the chemist had left it, on the bench, next to the pot. The alchemist picked it up. He looked at it once more, in the failing light. Then he folded it — neatly, because he was a tidy man — and placed it in the drawer with the receipts for coal and the letters from his sister.
He did not throw it away. This is the part of the story that, if you have lived it, you will recognise. He did not throw it away. He filed it.
There is a kind of grief — small, easily mistaken for fatigue — that visits a craftsman the evening after a real chemist has been to his workshop and has, without meaning to, shown him the shape of the room he is in. The alchemist felt it that evening. He sat by the furnace and stirred the pot for an hour without writing in the daybook. The apprentice, sensing something, did not speak. By morning the feeling had passed, because the work was there in the morning and the work, when it begins, is warm.
The chemist's visit was not refused. It was absorbed. The tower has a great capacity for absorbing visits.
And the alchemist did not look up.
The first principle
Feynman, who knew this story without having heard it, said it in a sentence that has been quoted so many times it has lost the weight of being read: the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
He said it to undergraduates. It is the kind of thing one says to undergraduates because one assumes that anyone past undergraduate has heard it, and anyone past thirty has internalised it, and anyone past forty has built habits around it. None of these assumptions is true. He said it to undergraduates because he had to start somewhere, but he meant it for everyone, and most especially he meant it for the version of himself that he could feel forming, year by year, in the corner of his own laboratory: the version who had a pot, and a flicker, and a daybook in a hand that only he could read.
The diagnostic, if you want one to carry in your pocket: you can tell you are in the tower when the visiting chemist arrives and you find a reason not to hear him. The reason will always be a good one. The reason will be that he is junior, or that the email is at the bottom of your inbox and you will get to it tomorrow. The reason is not the disease. The reason is the symptom. The disease is that you needed a reason.
The tower has many floors
The alchemist did not, in the end, fall. He grew old in the tower, which was kind to him. The apprentice, whose name does not survive in this telling, became, in her forties, the alchemist of the tower; she took an apprentice of her own, in the spring of a year much later than this one, and she gave that apprentice the daybook in the loosened hand and showed her how to watch for the flicker. She was not unhappy. The tower had become, for her, the world; she could not have said what else she might have done, because the question — by the time anyone might have asked her — had become unaskable, the way the unaskable questions of one's life always do.
This is not, strictly, a tragedy. A tragedy requires that someone notice. In this story no one does. The tower stands. The flicker recurs. The daybook accumulates. The journals continue to arrive at the post-house, four times a year, and continue not to be fetched. Somewhere, in a hall with windows on three sides, the chemists meet, and from time to time one of them — a kind one, with a long stride — walks a day out of his way to knock on a door, and is welcomed, and given tea, and walked back to the gate at dusk, and is glad of the walk, and does not, for some time afterwards, understand quite what has happened to him.
The tower has many floors. You have, in your life, spent a season on at least one of them. The launch you announced, in the end, to no one but yourself — the one whose metric you had not named.
The question is not whether you have ever been in the tower. The question is whether, the next time the chemist knocks, you can hear it.
You are the easiest person to fool.
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