Timothy Sandefur - The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski: The Life and Ideas of a Popular Science Icon

B ronowski wrote this poem, The Thumb in the Margin, in 1940, shortly after ending his relationship with Eirlys Roberts and beginning a relationship with Rita Coblentz, whom he married a year later. The poem reflects on his time in Spain, the coming of World War II, and his feelings at the end of a romance that he likens to the biblical story of Jacob and Rachel. Cagoulards refers to members of a French Fascist terrorist organization, Comit secret daction rvolutionnaire, which was nicknamed La Cagoule.

Thirty years a fool, and two a boor

put me to school, and taught me to despise

tipster and bigot, and the man of rule,

whoever claims to live by being wise;

and that no nostrum but contempt will cure

two years a boor, and thirty years a fool.

I gave myself this year to make amends

for all that idle discomfort, which flattered

I must be tragic, or make history.

History rolls its own thunder latterly,

playful as a puppy; and, as animal, rends

the paper promise with a clap of glory.

No longer is disaster what is dreamed

between the lids of what I feared, and dare.

It is the eyeball of the world which wakes

on roofs of nightmare, where the moonlight chalks

her icy orbit, under a sky at war;

and sees the craters swinging nearer, screaming.

How should his story dare to make a man

match that defeat, because he lived in want

of happiness, like others; but learned to choose

to sleep alone and think the nights well spent;

loving a girl like reason, and being then

most moved when all her reasons mastered his?

Yet let me tell the story, for a fable

either of spirit, or the famished passion

which bites the apple world and spits the core.

I shared my folly with any man of fashion,

finding it no less for being reasonable,

nor, because it is pitiful, think his the worse.

A Polish Jew spent his precocious childhood

on the Sudeten border; and had it plain

that such a one could never live at home,

live he the year long with a love in Spain

that, too, sleeps in the amber of my blood.

This year I wait in England for the bombs.

Two revolutions bitterly slaked the guns,

with bitter men, of Germanythere came

the starveling boy to find an English slum

sanctuary, or a knife to scratch my name

on school and college; while the revolutions,

silently, were betrayed; I heard no drums.

What might that hungry mind, that hungry mouth

have heard, had not my ear been satisfied

with abstract spaces for geometry,

abstruse music of a verse which lied.

They gave assurance to content a youth

to take a mistress, and write poetry.

Even under the drums is a pulse: love

can be momentous, and the blood suddenly

feel in the spinning head the centrifuge

pull on the middle of the heart; nor be

uneasy that the piling force may move

into destruction when the beat grows huge.

The eye will see a girl, and etch the error,

acid, upon ambition; and be devout

the act of seeing had been made for this,

the act of thinking is her thought read out;

and that her mind can be the burning mirror

wherein my life and hers shall hiss and fuse.

I, yes, saw such a one; and served my time,

a Jacob, chastely, to possess that riches;

grudging no more the labour than to share

what all must envy, because each bewitches.

Hers was the breathless ladder I learned to climb

where sweet and stinging went the singing air.

I hold to-night that night I took her hand

so great a happiness, the last of nights

but equaled it; nor would forgo for either

two years of pain I wrestled for her sight

so great a pain, I cannot understand

she charmed and loved me, and was true in neither.

And count those too, how should I forget, the years

we smuggled happiness; were constant; drove

two hundred miles to spend a night in love.

We did not sense the sultry Europe when

we pressed for mastery, and left in tears;

drive back two hundred miles, but drive alone.

Neither do I belittle the pain I cost her

because, being headstrong and intolerant

and wretched with the loss of days undone

watching out nights, I would be dominant;

cruel when angry, and when glad, preposterous;

and, being lonely, made her be alone.

I, who foretold all tragedies: the wounds

of Austria, Spain crucified, the walls

ghostly with soldiers on the wine-bled Rhine

I knew them all, but ours, original,

because the mounting reason is caught in bounds

by men whose passion masks the fury of swine.

The tears of angels are the sweat of torture;

light seeping through the page flows from their stain,

and historys, the thumb in the margin, leaving

the angel print because these flow again:

because a man wants certainty of future,

a girl would rather love than live by grieving.

Would rather be a woman than created

in any high imaginary room

a ghost on water where the light is clear

to hear my words re-echo like a doom

hers, because I thought we two were mated;

would sooner be anothers than my dear.

Dear, be forgiving, for I wronged, and wrong you;

yet let me speak. I thought that all would fail,

world and friends, peace, the dignity of men;

but not we two. The merciless thought like hail

drives me to-night because I have seen you, true,

forswear the true, and let the best be beaten.

It is not arrogance which makes me cry

there are no men like me, who hold the good

higher than every personal whim or hurt;

contemptuous and despairing, yes, but

for whom worlds bear, that they may live. They die.

You stamped that man deliberately in dirt.

You made a rant of what had been heroic.

I had thought such men as I should hold to, still,

the desert tragedies of Greece and Spain.

All, all is nothing now but obstinate will.

The strong philosopher creeps to the stoic;

the tragic hero makes a show of pain.

Cries, world, be burst with medlar ripeness; fall,

you ashes that ferment the sweating apple.

The willow stump shall glow at night, the light

by day run rivers in the fallow, dappled.

You made a mockery of the man, to call

destruction, who had once believed in right.

Do not take trouble even to smile: I beckon

none to destroy but me; none to destruction

but that proud man was me. The time is ready

the man of folly be a man of action,

the two year boor forget the bitter reckoning

and walk the street which rinses as it bleeds.

My English Miss, my snob that stints and stings,

I shall not love the like of you again.

The face I fumble shall say tenderness

to bread or hawker, being easy, open,

company for men and at home with things;

the mind be simple but be sharp as these,

who come to knowledge not by will but use,

live with themselves and husband no regrets.

Teach me to speak like her, homely and searching,

to men in trams and buying cigarettes;

what women think of when they hear the news,

which councillors are dead, what soldiers marching.

Their life is cancered with the rich, the hard

and iron-faced; the ironmasters; all

who buy the poor for lunch and spend the title

on afternoons with fear and cagoulards

the powerful, the possessed. And Europe falls

to all their evil because we abide it.

I with my cynical illusions; you

mercenary of your comfort, with the foible

only the lesions of professional women