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Chapter 12
There's an old saw in Frankenstein scholarship that the monster is a metaphor for the novel. Mary Shelley, who was nineteen when she began writing the book, encouraged that interpretation by calling it her hideous progeny, a dead thing with a life of its own. Having lost a child at seventeen, and having caused her own mother's death in childbirth, she must have known what she meant by it.
For a time I thought Mary Shelley was all my thesis subject had in common with Paul's: she and the Roman Francesco Colo
Oddly enough, it was by arguing that Francesco Colo
Still favoring the notion of a Venetian Colo
The Hypnerotomachia was published in 1499, Taft said, when the Roman Colo
And so, like the curmudgeonly king inventing new labors for young Hercules, Taft left it to Paul to shoulder the burden of proof. Until his new protege could shrug off the problem of Colo
It nearly defies explanation, the way Paul refused to buckle under the logic of those facts. He found inspiration not only in Taft's challenge, but in Taft himself: though he rejected the man's rigid interpretation of the Hypnerotomachia, he brought the same relentlessness to his sources. Whereas my father had let inspiration and intuition guide him, searching mainly in exotic locales like monasteries and papal libraries, Paul adopted Taft's more thorough approach. No book was too humble, no location too dull. From top to bottom, he began to scour the Princeton library system. And slowly his early conception of books, like a boy's conception of water who has lived his whole life by a pond, was dethroned by this sudden exposure to the ocean. Paul's book collection, the day he left for college, numbered slightly under six hundred. Princeton's book collection, including more than fifty miles of shelves in Firestone Library alone, numbered well over six million.
The experience daunted Paul at first. The quaint picture my father had painted, of happening across key documents sheerly by accident, was instantly exploded. More painful, I think, was the questioning it forced onto Paul, the introspection and self-doubt that made him wonder if his genius was simply a provincial talent, a dull star in a dark corner of the sky. That upperclassmen in his courses admitted he was far beyond them, and that his professors held him in almost messianic esteem, was nothing to Paul if he couldn't make headway on the Hypnerotomachia.
Then, during his summer in Italy, all that changed. Paul discovered the work of Italian scholars, whose texts he was able to wade through thanks to four years of Latin. Digging into the definitive Italian biography of the Venetian Pretender, he learned that some elements of the Hypnerotomachia were indebted to a book called Cormicoptae, published in 1489. As a detail in the Pretender's life, it seemed unimportant-but Paul, coming at the problem with the Roman Francesco in mind, saw much more in it. No matter when Colo
What followed was a period of soaring confidence. Armed with four languages (the fifth, English, being useless except for secondary sources) and with an extensive knowledge of Colo
That man was Francesco Colo
And so it went. Spring came; coeds in tank tops tossed Frisbees beneath his window; squirrels and blossoms stooped the tree branches; te
It took a summer alone to change him. In early September of senior year, after three months on an empty campus, he welcomed us all back and helped us move in. He was suddenly open to interruptions, eager to spend time among friends, less fixated on the past. In the opening months of that semester, he and I enjoyed a renaissance in our friendship better than anything I could've expected. He shrugged off the onlookers at Ivy who hung on his words, waiting for something outrageous; he spent less time with Taft and Stein; he savored meals and enjoyed walks between classes. He could even see the humor in the way garbage men emptied the Dumpster beneath our window each Tuesday morning at seven o'clock. I thought he was better. More than that: I thought he was reborn.
It was only when Paul came to me in October of senior year, late one night after our last fall midterms, that I understood the other thing our theses had in common: both of our subjects were dead things that refused to stay buried.
Is there anything that could change your mind about working on the Hypnerotomachia?” Paul asked me that night-and from his tense expression, I knew he'd found something important.