The following day, they came for me. I had no part of the transaction. When it was done, my father seemed satisfied. I hope he got a good price for me.
And so began my education. In the tower at the top of the friary where, Master Roger, you have your seclusion and your books – twenty or more when I arrived, an immense library to which you proceeded to add, bought through means I never did discover. It was not just me at first in that room of books and instruments and crystal and glass, there were other boys lifted from villages who had also passed the apple test.
You taught us the trivium, the arts of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, and the quadrivium, which are the arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.
You read Aristotle to us, so much Aristotle, the ways of the heavens and the beasts of the field, Aristotle on Categories, on Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Sophistical Refutations. And you read Porphyry to us, and Nicomachus of Gerasa, and John of Sacrobosco, and the Elements of Euclid and the Practical Geometry of Leonardo of Pisa because, Master Roger, you said geometry is the foremost instrument for the demonstration of theological truth as well as being necessary for the understanding of natural philosophy.
The class shrunk, boys were cast aside, sent back to their villages, or given occupations elsewhere in the friary. And we read Grosseteste on light and Boethius on music, and Ptolemy on Astronomy, and Aristotle again, on the Heavens and Meteorology, on Plants, on Metaphysics.
And we read Qusta ibn Luqa on the Difference between Soul and Spirit and Averroes on geometry, and the antique authors of Rome: Seneca on the passions, Ovid on the transformations. You had taught in Paris, you used your lecture notes from the time before you had become a friar, and the class further shrank, my companions were too dull, too slow, they could not compute, deduce, dispute to our Master’s satisfaction, no matter how loudly you read or how hard you drove your wisdom against their bodies and souls.
For your primary method of pedagogy was to beat the information into your students’ heads: Here are the examples, numbers 1, 2 and 3. What are the examples?– Beat! – What are the examples?! List them! – Good enough. Now what law do these examples illustrate and prove? – Beat! – What are the examples? – Yes. Now what laws do they illustrate? – Yes. Now again. And again.
Your other method was to offer a short description of a special case in nature. It was the pupil’s work to gather this new information into what he already had been taught, to offer up a law to account for this otherwise strange manifestation, and the craft would be to form an argument so fine that it would entice you, Master Roger, elsewhere now, unmindful, back into the dispute.
(And, in the schoolroom, when they thought they were unobserved and unheard, Brother Luke would maliciously lead his fellows in a recitation of the martyrdom of Saint Felix, the strict teacher whose pupils stabbed him to death with their pens.)
Elsewhere, I saw little of the friary and nothing of the world. The friars went out to the city to preach, while my work was to learn. And then there were just two of us, me and Daniel, whose understanding was just as nimble, perhaps even nimbler than my own, but had an impediment which sometimes kept the required answers hidden behind eyes that were too large for his body, and we were the last vessels for my Master’s knowledge. Occasionally, on the roof, constructing the apparatus for the burning mirror, I would see my former classmates and the novice friars below. I once saw Brother Andrew and Brother Bernard nursing a broken-winged starling, but my Master called me back before I could discover if their labours prospered. I attended prayers. Each day, before Vespers, I had an hour for myself when I would lie on my bed, and meditate, try to quench the triangles and squares that occupied my inner vision and fight the demons that grow so strong before daylight, and bring myself closer to the steps of Our Lord, and otherwhile try to remember how my life used to be.
In this way were my days sanctified. In this way did I give thanks to the God who made me and the Saviour who redeemed me.
• • •
My Master does not approve of the divisions of the seasons. My Master does not approve of many things or, indeed, people. He disapproves of Peter of Lombardy and Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus and the translators of the Holy Scriptures who have incorporated so many errors into the sacred text. He disapproves of the Principals of our Order who have sacrificed the lamb of knowledge on the altar of temporal concerns. He disapproves of anyone who does not believe the evidence of his own eyes and takes no pains to celebrate the glory of creation by gathering knowledge to gain a closer apprehension of God’s work.
My Master holds the wisdom of his own teacher Robert Grosseteste to be above all others in the present age, but even he is not beyond reproach as in his acceptance of the division of the seasons into four, when it should be, rather, three, intervals of growth, equilibrium and decline. My Master also has proved that the calendar is wrong. By his calculations, one-hundred-and-one-thirtieth of a day is being lost every year, as our method of reckoning the passage of time loses pace with the rhythms of the stars.
• • •
And I would help him build his mirrors and lenses, my instruction would proceed, and he would beat out time and we would sing together, and the fallacious seasons passed, and the misreckoned years passed, and I was seventeen years old and the only one left in his classroom.
Saint Athanasius’s Day
Brother Andrew so dainty and girlish, Brother Bernard silent and large and phlegmatic, half-doltish. Brother Luke the reprobate, malicious and acting so freely, and somehow, his lightness, always escaping censure. Perhaps this is because he has the ear of the sacristan. Brother Daniel is the perpetual mark for Brother Luke. There is a quality about Brother Daniel that offends Brother Luke, and rouses his energies. Brother Daniel takes these attentions without complaint, as if they are his due. He humbly bears the weight of Brother Luke’s tricks.
At night I go to sleep listening to the murmur of this little herd of novices in the dormitory as they devise their wiles against Brother Daniel. They do not include Brothers Andrew or Bernard in their works. Brother Andrew would be their mark were it not for the greater offence that Brother Daniel causes them. Brother Bernard stands neither for nor against them. They regard him as a beast in the field, not quite man.
As for me, they do not dare to act directly. They whisper against me too, I hear them, on walks down to the refectory, to mass; but the fear of Master Roger’s mystery and power extends to me: just as in those days of living outside the walls, when we looked up to the friary tower to frighten ourselves and fear you and throw little stones that would not reach a quarter of the way to the roof, not daring to look over our shoulders as we ran away to the safety of our fathers’ world, in case we saw demons flying after us, they dislike me but they do not dare to assault me in case Master Roger’s power move itself against them.
• • •
You ask me to observe the world, and you are my world, so I shall begin with you.
Master Roger is well-made. His body is strong, putting to shame the constitutions of men half his age. His eyes are the colour of the sea on a stormy spring morning. His beard is grey. He credits his strength and vigour to his diet. The purpose, he says, in eating and drinking, is to satisfy the desires of nature, not to fill and empty the stomach. He has his own elixirs of rhubarb and black hellebore, which he pounds down to a paste and adds to his meat. And I have mine, justly accorded to my age and capacities. My Master says that if I observe the regimen he lays down I might live as long as the nature assumed from my parents might permit. It is only the corruption of my father and his fathers before him that limits the utmost term beyond which I may not pass.
Master Roger