Hamnet
When Eliza hears these claims, made in her presence by people in the street, by neighbours, by those to whom she sells gloves, she doesn’t pretend not to have heard. She stops in her tracks. She holds the eye of the gossip in question (she has an unnerving stare: this she knows – her brother has told her often enough; it is, he says, something to do with the purity of her eye-colour, the way she can open her eyes wide enough for the whole iris to be seen). She is only thirteen but she is tall for her age. She holds their gaze long enough for them to drop their stare, for them to shuffle off, chastised by her boldness, her silent severity. There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.
From the archives
·
2020
Time Shelter
At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ. It was a Saturday (of course). Some even say Ussher gave a precise time of day as well—around six in the afternoon. Saturday afternoon, that sounds completely believable to me. When else would a bored creator set about building a world and finding himself some company? Ussher devoted years of his life to this, his work itself numbered two thousand pages in Latin; I doubt many have ever made the effort to read the whole thing. Nevertheless, his book became exceptionally popular, well, maybe not the book itself, but the actual discovery. They started to print the Bibles on the island with a date and chronology according to Ussher. This theory of the young earth (and of young time, if you ask me) captivated the Christian world. It should be noted that even scientists like Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton estimated specific years for the divine act of creation that more or less coincided with that of Ussher. But still, the most mind-boggling thing for me is not the year and its relative recency, but the specific day.
Read more of this excerpt...
Time Shelter
At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ. It was a Saturday (of course). Some even say Ussher gave a precise time of day as well—around six in the afternoon. Saturday afternoon, that sounds completely believable to me. When else would a bored creator set about building a world and finding himself some company? Ussher devoted years of his life to this, his work itself numbered two thousand pages in Latin; I doubt many have ever made the effort to read the whole thing. Nevertheless, his book became exceptionally popular, well, maybe not the book itself, but the actual discovery. They started to print the Bibles on the island with a date and chronology according to Ussher. This theory of the young earth (and of young time, if you ask me) captivated the Christian world. It should be noted that even scientists like Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton estimated specific years for the divine act of creation that more or less coincided with that of Ussher. But still, the most mind-boggling thing for me is not the year and its relative recency, but the specific day.
Read more of this excerpt...
WORDS TO LIVE BY
1957 ·
NON-FICTION
NEW MUSIC