Birthday Rites (or Rights)
On January 4, 382 years ago, Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England.
Other than a strictly amateur interest in physics, optics, and a workmanlike respect for the laws of gravity, I don’t have much of a connection with that great man. However, I did purloin a few of his words for part of the introduction to my first published book (The Resource Guide for Foodwriters).
Copyright is only a legal term, establishing a minimum degree of respect for the intellectual property of others, but the ethical foundation of these rights also extends into the past, beyond the statute of limitations of the literal law. We owe more to those who came before us than the financial share guaranteed to their heirs by our legislatures.
In a letter written to scientist Robert Hooke in 1676, Isaac Newton once explained modestly, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He knew whereof he spoke—he even borrowed that expression from those who preceded him. An earlier seventeenth-century variation on the line appeared in a work by Robert Burton. Nor was Burton the first to use the line. John of Salisbury made use of it, in The Metalogicon, in 1159. At the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it appeared in the writings of Bernard of Chartres. He, in turn, had borrowed it from the Latin poet Lucan, a nephew of Seneca, who flourished briefly in the first century. The original line was “Pigmæi gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident (Pygmies, placed on the shoulders of giants, see more than the giants themselves).” Nor was Newton the last to adopt the expression. A century after Newton’s death, Lucan’s phrase was to crop up anew in a poem, “The Friend,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge probably saw it first in a popular (and oft-reprinted) Elizabethan translation of Lucan’s epic Bellum Civile (The Civil War) by Christopher Marlowe, or perhaps in the 1718 translation by Nicholas Rowe.
None of this is meant to diminish the contribution of any of these luminaries—far from it.
It is a simple fact that we borrow from others all the time. And we, in turn, are sources for others. A food writer’s life (like that of any other writer) may seem a solitary affair, but it is not. We are in constant communication with other writers, from our own times and from other times, learning from their mistakes, glorying in their successes, struggling the same struggles that plagued them.
It may appear that there is little we can do to help those who went before us—Apicius, Brillat-Savarin, M. F. K. Fisher—but there is something we should do: treat their work fairly, giving them the credit they deserve. Savor their words anew, in an intellectual ambiance they never imagined. Burton, and Newton, and Coleridge did not plagiarize Lucan’s work—they built upon it, they kept it alive, breathing fresh relevance into the ancient verse.
That is what we hope to accomplish with our research. We cannot all be giants, but our shoulders may still improve the view for others. We, ourselves, can become resources for food writers.
P.S. While Isaac Newton stood upon the shoulders of giants, I have stood upon Newton’s shoulders (and whatever else remains of him)… where he is buried in Westminster Abbey. I do not, however, claim that my view was improved by the experience.
Humbled, definitely, but not enhanced.
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