"Age of Wonder"

A Note on "Age of Wonder" from Tom Sleigh:

There are certain things in every poem I write that I don’t fully understand: at first, I thought that the title “Age of Wonder” was a riff on Richard Holmes’s book by the same name, in which scientific discovery, initially at least, wasn’t the province of government agencies or academic institutes. Instead, it was the obsession of private individuals to explain to themselves the fundamental, hidden laws of the universe—the sort of obsession that drove Isaac Newton to discover the laws of universal gravitation, to co-invent calculus with Leibniz, and to posit that white light was in fact all the unaltered spectral colors combined. But what Newton most cared about—he wrote upwards of a million words on the subject—was the search for The Philosopher’s Stone, the alchemical substance that could transform base metals into gold. This obsessed him as much, if not more, than his so-called “legitimate” discoveries, and prompted John Maynard Keynes, who bought Newton’s papers, to observe that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”

So maybe that’s the Age of Wonder that I’m really talking about—the search for a substance that becomes the medium in which two people perform a mutual experiment—on, with, and for each other—in the hope of discovering the real nature of time. Love, and the process of living together year after year, would combine in a kind of crucible of shared experience, and transform whoever we thought we were into an unheard of, never thought of before, new compound. That was the dream, at least—to find the emotional and spiritual equivalent of what Newton, a notorious loner, called Philosophical Mercury: add it to lead, and suddenly the lead would bubble up in a molten blaze and turn into gold.

But of course you eventually have to come down from the secret tower laboratory and stare time in the face—the lined, sleep-drawn, blur-eyed face of time that we see reflected in the window each morning when one or the other gets up to pull the shades to let in the sun.