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!!/7cMIiSCHvi/lit/24536636#24548109
7/14/2025, 3:34:34 AM
The Fanatic
by meteor
>>24523950
Right away, I want to declare that this is my favorite work of yours yet (though I still have to read >>24524220).
It was like you spent the whole story keenly tugging on two Chinese linking rings—the rigid Venn diagram of Newton’s “whole deal”—until silently and effortlessly seperating them with one sharp, enigmatic pull.
Unlike a typical magic trick though, your Newton is anything but ostentatious and show-offy; he’s subdued, focused, and economical, and you provided ample motivation for why he is these things:
The cosmic truths that Newton stumbled upon merely laid in the shadow of his much grander pretentions—ones which we know now were truly beyond his purview…?
It really is impressive what you’ve done here: Sketching the most successful scientific figure in history as cowed by his own inadequacy—past, present.
Perhaps my least favorite part of the piece is the title, which detracts from and conflicts with the central image of “deepest-cellar” Newton whom you so well sustained throughout.
While “Fanatic” may telegraph a fulfillment of the assigned character, a more appropriate, ambiguous, and absorbing title would be “The Relinquished,” which could describe Newton, Eleonora, or knowledge itself, while still picking up the fanatical strain, but on a much deeper (and more aesthetically pleasing) level.
I’m saying that naming a work this multifaceted after such a plain-faced character requirement only does it a disservice.
>[crows’] black wings folded like judicial robes.
>When they brought her in, she moved like water finding its level, adapting to the space without surrendering to it.
These are top-shelf metaphors, primarily because their subject matters are extremely pertinent to Newton himself, serving as windows into his unique life and how he conceptualizes the world.
Words like “geometry,” “crystalline,” “dissolve,” and “dissecting light” are other examples.
But I wanted them to shift at a certain point, lapsing from scientific and official down to…well, something “opposite;” something that embodies his sad, dirty, “deepest-cellar” self.
Newton did say
>that would be to trumpet Jericho’s horns indeed
which is an allusion to scripture, and religion could work as a means to supplant his impirical perception, but simply having Newton make more and more “common” observations would do—things like connecting aspects of Eleonora to his time spent as a farm-worker, or to his mother.
I’m saying that his confident, science-referencing paradigm should break-down the deeper his pathos journey goes—instead of re-revisiting the “cellar” image.
>I do not know all the thoughts that moved through his mind, but I suspect they were singularly focused.
A jut in an otherwise smooth piece of pottery—when I read “I,” it just makes me needlessly ask: “Who’s writing here?”
And somehow they know everything but this fact?
by meteor
>>24523950
Right away, I want to declare that this is my favorite work of yours yet (though I still have to read >>24524220).
It was like you spent the whole story keenly tugging on two Chinese linking rings—the rigid Venn diagram of Newton’s “whole deal”—until silently and effortlessly seperating them with one sharp, enigmatic pull.
Unlike a typical magic trick though, your Newton is anything but ostentatious and show-offy; he’s subdued, focused, and economical, and you provided ample motivation for why he is these things:
The cosmic truths that Newton stumbled upon merely laid in the shadow of his much grander pretentions—ones which we know now were truly beyond his purview…?
It really is impressive what you’ve done here: Sketching the most successful scientific figure in history as cowed by his own inadequacy—past, present.
Perhaps my least favorite part of the piece is the title, which detracts from and conflicts with the central image of “deepest-cellar” Newton whom you so well sustained throughout.
While “Fanatic” may telegraph a fulfillment of the assigned character, a more appropriate, ambiguous, and absorbing title would be “The Relinquished,” which could describe Newton, Eleonora, or knowledge itself, while still picking up the fanatical strain, but on a much deeper (and more aesthetically pleasing) level.
I’m saying that naming a work this multifaceted after such a plain-faced character requirement only does it a disservice.
>[crows’] black wings folded like judicial robes.
>When they brought her in, she moved like water finding its level, adapting to the space without surrendering to it.
These are top-shelf metaphors, primarily because their subject matters are extremely pertinent to Newton himself, serving as windows into his unique life and how he conceptualizes the world.
Words like “geometry,” “crystalline,” “dissolve,” and “dissecting light” are other examples.
But I wanted them to shift at a certain point, lapsing from scientific and official down to…well, something “opposite;” something that embodies his sad, dirty, “deepest-cellar” self.
Newton did say
>that would be to trumpet Jericho’s horns indeed
which is an allusion to scripture, and religion could work as a means to supplant his impirical perception, but simply having Newton make more and more “common” observations would do—things like connecting aspects of Eleonora to his time spent as a farm-worker, or to his mother.
I’m saying that his confident, science-referencing paradigm should break-down the deeper his pathos journey goes—instead of re-revisiting the “cellar” image.
>I do not know all the thoughts that moved through his mind, but I suspect they were singularly focused.
A jut in an otherwise smooth piece of pottery—when I read “I,” it just makes me needlessly ask: “Who’s writing here?”
And somehow they know everything but this fact?
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