An Algebra Among Cats

In this poetic, subtle, and erudite book esoteric scholarship and philosophical curiosity transcend guidebook facts. Bronk does not prosaically lecture us about Machu Picchu, that ancient city of Peru in the Andes, the traditional cradle of Inca civilization. He is fascinated that such a city of such fantastic and compelling beauty could be built by savage and primitive workmen knowing no mortar, iron, steel, or mechanical contrivances and that it should be founded during a remote period in an inaccessible spot in the middle of the High Andes.

Bronk explorations in Machu Picchu, for centuries an empty city, are more philosophical than antiquarian. It is so outside his tradition and so remote from him in time and space that he is disturbed and bewildered. Such experience is beyond common sense; it is foreign to his long tradition of early civilizations inherited from Europe and the Middle East. And yet by some mystical means he is confirmed and corroborated. If he finds himself reflected, it is as though he were able to find an algebra among cats or a Christianity among the people of Mars.

Because the origin of Machu Picchu is unaccountable, because the city is inconsistent with common notions about primitive people, and because the impact on Bronk is unsoftened by data and explanations, he may be like the sea captain in Joseph Conrad's story, "The Secret Sharer," who was confronted by his double, his own naked image emerging from the sea and climbing over the gunwale. Like him, Bronk acknowledges an obligation, and he experiences an enrichment in living with the image. The buildings of Machu Picchu lead him to reflect on the shallowness of our centuries-old European tradition "as full of unimportant details as a dull afternoon, and as essentially trivial as the changes in costume fashion from year to year." The beauty, simplicity, and subtlety of stone work, for example a carved rock, a post-to-tie-the-sun, unchanged and unmoved for centuries, engenders the same sort of excitement experienced in the opening of an unrifled Egyptian tomb.

At Tikal in Guatemala, Bronk is led to comment on the invention, elaboration, and refinement of measuring time, on the dated stones erected as monuments to time itself, and on the regulated passage of accumulative years rather than to great events during those years. Time, he observes, is like a thread or cord laid up by twisting many individual fibers of varying length and definite measure. Although the individual fibers end, the cord stretches on forever. Hence the paradox: if time exists endless before now and after now, time as a measure is an absurdity because a pure and abstract continuance is immeasurable.

In Palenque, Mexico, Bronk explores the meaning and importance of space. The serenely composed spatial perfection of the Palenque Palace is emotionally staggering because of the massive disorder of our own surroundings. Although everything pertaining to Palenque seems to promise unalterable and perfect continuity, it was abandoned. What of us? "We are always in some degree nowhere in an empty vastness. Our passionately occupied Palenques are always abandoned."

THE NEW WORLD. By WilliamBronk '38. The Elizabeth Press. 61pp. Boards, $16; wrapper, $8.