James Clerk Maxwell: A Private Life

1878, Glenlair, Kirkcudbrightshire

The weakness is real, but it does not decide the matter. The chest tightens on the stair. The pulse turns disorderly after a short walk. I stop at a doorway or beside the desk and wait until the body remembers its office. Glenlair remains in order while I require it to remain so, and that is the point now, the point more than comfort, more than the kindness of return, more than the soft assurances of those who think a country house and a faithful wife are an answer to diminishing strength. The fields still hold their lines. The burn keeps its course. The rooms keep the old relations of window, stair, table, and shelf. Things persist when the governing principle persists. I do not mistake this for sentiment. It is rule. Men outside this house are already arranging me into a fable fit for repetition, the boy of rural curiosity, the mathematician of Cambridge, the translator of Faraday, the mild philosopher whose equations proceeded as naturally as weather. That arrangement is false because it removes the act that made the work possible. Reality does not hold itself in form. It is held. It is held by exact conviction, by refusal to yield the invisible back to convenience, by standing firm enough inside a relation that the relation does not collapse under weaker handling. If these pages remain, then the work remains under its proper sign. If they do not, then others will inherit the symbols and declare the intention unnecessary, and that too is a kind of theft. Tait has already written to say the field equations will be more serviceable once the medium is removed from the account. He means well. That is the worst of it.