Memoirs, Part 1
I instinctually feared Sir Isaac, the way other children might shrink from a natural predator. He was of course unfathomably brilliant, and often I phant’sied that he could divine my thoughts based on a complicated string of equations that only he knew or used. After all, if he could figure the currents of the Thames or the trajectory of the Earth, the uncomplicated emotions of a child were likely as transparent as Venetian glass.
I never hunted snakes and tadpoles as the others my age did, never wallowed in riverside muck searching for fragmented shells or smooth worn stones. My days were generally spent indoors with books and chalk. My father had not himself been gifted with the mind of a scholar, and so he saw opportunity in me to make up for whatever failings he might have perceived in himself. My days were devoted to the reading of Descartes and of Sir Isaac himself, and the application of whatever I tended to learn. This was not typically much. I read the Principia Mathematica several times over before it began to make sense to me. Of course, I was only seven years old, so perhaps a certain amount of misunderstanding was warranted.
But I have gotten far ahead of myself, for this part of the story takes place long before I began to unlock the secrets of the Calculus (which we then called Fluxions and Fluents, but that is a story much greater than my own).