The Imagination Chamber, page 2
But Pantalaimon preferred Alice’s dæmon, Ben the big patient mongrel dog, because he was kind.
IN Lyra’s world dæmons, in the world of the mulefa the oil-bearing wheels – both ways of making the workings of Dust apparent. In our world, what?
AGAIN, Will, later: the sense his hand and mind had learned together as the point of the knife searched among the tiniest particles of the air, the sense of feeling without touching, of knowing without spoiling, of apprehending without calculating. He never lost it. When he was a medical student, he had to pretend to make a wrong diagnosis occasionally: his success was in danger of looking supernatural. Once he was qualified, it became safe to go straight to the right answer. And then began the lifelong process of learning to explain it.
THERE should be, and probably is, a name for the scraps of paper found marking some lost reader’s place in a book, or blowing along the gutter, or in the bottom of an old shopping bag. They might bear half a paragraph from a newspaper article, or the scribbled name and phone number of someone we don’t remember, or a circled figure in a column of numbers.
The storyteller’s instinct is always to elaborate around such a scrap, to watch a story growing out in every direction like frost on a window-pane, with the little scrap of paper and its enigmatic information always the point from which the story develops in the storyteller’s mind. It might never be mentioned in the story itself – it might be forgotten entirely – or it might turn out to be the vital evidence in a murder trial. You could expand it logically, if you had to, or you could sink into a state of hypnagogia and let it develop by itself. If you did it well, no one would be able to tell afterwards which way you did it.
MARY, absorbed and happy as she fooled around with the lacquer to make her spyglass; fooling around was something she’d never been able to explain to her colleague Oliver Payne, who needed to know where he was going before he got there. Back in Oxford, she gave three of her precious wheel-tree seeds to a scientist at the Botanic Garden, a nice man who understood the importance of fooling around. The seedlings are growing well, but she refuses to tell him where they came from.
AN infinity of silvery greens and gold-sand-browns, the whispering of grass in the warm wind. Safety, sunlight.
LYRA at eighteen sitting intent and absorbed in Duke Humfrey’s Library with the alethiometer and a pile of leather-bound books. Pushing the hair away from her eyes, pencil in mouth, finger moving down a list of symbols, Pantalaimon holding the stiff old pages open for her… “Look, Pan, there’s a pattern there – see? That’s why they’re in that sequence!” And it felt as if the sun had come out. It was the second thing she said to Will next day in the Botanic Garden.
ON board The Maid of Portugal with Giorgio Brabandt, Lyra often noticed the care the old man took with his tools. Every knife, every spanner, every screwdriver had its place, and the knives were sharp enough to shave with, he often told her. His hands were filthy, with grease under his nails and dirt in the lines of his fingerprints, and he changed his clothes when he no longer enjoyed the smell of them; but his spanners, his chisels, his silver spoons (he was fastidious about his cutlery, and used only silver), his feeler gauges and the little bone-handled fruit knife he peeled apples with were as brilliantly glittering as when they left the tool-maker’s bench.
THE library at Jordan College was no bigger than a hundredth of the size of Bodley’s, the great library that served the whole university, and whose buildings lay just outside the walls of Jordan. The college library was entered through a modest doorway in the Fellow’s garden, and had two storeys of reading rooms above ground and several levels of stacks below. Lyra at the age of eleven was convinced that there were secret tunnels that connected it with the most private sections of Bodley’s, and led all through Oxford and for many miles beyond, to caverns where Scholars and eminent people from the great world held dinners and performed unmentionable rites. She had no idea what a rite was; it was the word unmentionable that excited her.
WHEN Lyra, very young, couldn’t sleep, Mrs Lonsdale would sit on her bed with the night light glowing gently and sing nursery rhymes. The housekeeper was quite different at night. Her daytime sharpness was all smoothed away; instead of hard elbows she had a soft breast; her voice was sweet and low, and her repertoire was endless.
MR TAPHOUSE the Priory handyman, a great hero of Malcolm’s, had a clear view about anbaric-powered tools. “Them old craftsmen,” he said, “like the ones who made the great chest in Sister Benedicta’s office – if they’d had power drills and sanders and the like, they’d have used ’em in a trice, and blessed the Lord for ’em. There’s some kinds of work that’s a pleasure to the hand, and other kinds that’s drudgery. Learn to tell the difference, Malcolm boy, and don’t be a snob about any good tool.”
NOTHING, not even the ocean, not even the stars on a clear night, gave Lyra such a profound sense of endlessness as the steppes of Central Asia. Grass, and grass for ever, and grass that became in the far distance a vapour of sand-brown and water-green and air-blue. She didn’t realize there was anything missing until she remembered the long lacing roads of black basalt, the friendly thunder of seed-pod wheels.
THE smell of the mash Sister Fenella mixed up every afternoon for the chickens… Malcolm loved it, and wondered if it tasted as good as it smelled. The old wooden troughs, one under each arm, in which she carried it out… Just rough things knocked together out of pine, the edges worn away, deep earth-brown, rich with the scent of good mash… Everything fitted together, Malcolm thought.
WILL as a physician wondering about synaesthesia and neural pathways. If someone (for instance) saw numbers in colour, it was because of an accidental connection between neurons, and in itself meaningless. But we can learn to see and hear things deliberately, by training our senses and our memories. A piano tuner learns to hear the beats that tell when two strings are not perfectly in tune, and in learning it, establishes a new connection in the brain; and when Will was a boy there had been a vogue for Magic Eye pictures, where you could learn to see a 3D image in a printed picture. You only had to learn to do it once, and next time it became easier: a new neural connection had been set up, so that things really there, but not noticed before, became clear and apparent. All we had to do was learn how to perceive them.
Could we follow that example, Will thought, and train ourselves to see other people’s dæmons?
IN Lyra’s world people got used to knowing that their dæmons talked to other people’s dæmons, and could perceive dislike, coldness, attraction, sympathy, etc, without their people saying a word, or while they were talking of something entirely different. Later their people might realize that (for example) they had made a lifelong enemy, or that they’d fallen in love.
ONE day a visitor arrived in college to be met with ceremony and deference: a great writer, Lyra was told, who had received a magnificent prize from the King of Spain. There was a garden party in his honour to which Lyra was invited, a dinner of great splendour to which she was not, and in between, the great man was to give a lecture on the metamorphosis of the folktale, which she could go to or not, as she pleased. She ate too many cakes and strawberries at the garden party and felt ill throughout the lecture, which was disappointing anyway because it was all metamorphosis and no tale. She crept out halfway through to be sick in the corridor, but she pulled back the carpet first and replaced it afterwards so that no one would notice.
ONE of the signs of good sense in someone is when they don’t pester their dæmon to tell them everything. When they’re happy to know that their dæmon has secrets, too.
FARDER CORAM, in his old age: words like ill-trained dogs become indifferent and disobedient – you call them, you whistle and try to remember their names – no success. In a field where you once had complete command you stand mouthing silence, the dogs out of sight doing something else, the sheep grazing blandly, the grass noticing nothing. Everything continues nevertheless.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’m grateful for all the books and magazine articles and encyclopaedia entries about science I’ve ever read, especially for the words between the equations.
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Philip Pullman, The Imagination Chamber
