As Time Will Show

There is an hour, near the very end of a long computation, when the work is done but the result is not yet read off — when every card has been fed, every operation performed, and the answer stands waiting in the Store, and one has only to look. I have arrived at that hour in my own person. The labour lies behind me; the reading-off belongs to others. And I lie here in this Marylebone room, the curtains drawn against the December that is coming for me, knowing — with a certainty I do not in the least dispute — that I shall not be in the room when the answer is at last spoken aloud.

Let me be exact; as I have laboured always to be exact, even now, when exactness costs me far more than it once did. The engine was never built. I set that down plainly, before I set down anything else — for a dying woman is permitted her hopes but not her falsehoods, and the temptation to gild this is very great indeed. Mr. Babbage drew it; I interpreted it; and between us, in that summer of 1843, we sent into the world seven Notes signed with three modest letters — A.A.L. — together with an account three times the length of the article it served. Yet the thing itself — the great cathedral of brass and steel, of Mill and Store and cards — exists nowhere upon this earth, save in those pages and in the two minds that conceived it. One of those minds is leaving. The other is sixty years old, and beset, as it has always been, by quarrels, committees, and the cold indifference of governments who cannot see past the cost of a thing to the worth of it.

So I am to die without seeing it move. I have made my peace with that — or rather, something stranger than peace: a kind of armed truce with despair, in which I refuse it the field, though I cannot drive it out of the country altogether.

I think tonight of the cards. I think of the Jacquard-loom of which I wrote in Note A — the loom at which I never stood, but which I carried in me as faithfully as if it had stood in my own drawing-room — how it weaves flowers and leaves into the figured silk that great ladies wear without once asking how the rose was set into the cloth. The Analytical Engine, I wrote, weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves. I believed it then with the whole force of my understanding. I believe it now with something more — with that dreadful clarity which comes only when the body has been burned down to its filament, and nothing is left but the seeing. The engine does not think; it has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing; it can do only what we know how to order it to perform. I wrote that too, and I meant it as no diminishment, but as the very key to its grandeur — for between what we know how to order, and what may be ordered, lies the whole undiscovered country of analysis: a continent I glimpsed from the deck of a ship I was not permitted to land from.

And here is my wager. I lay it down as soberly as ever I laid a sum upon a horse — and upon far better grounds. I wager that what I saw is real: not a fancy of the medicine, nor the overreaching of a vain woman who wished to be more than her century would allow her, but a true thing, standing out there in the dark of the not-yet, and waiting. I wager that the relations I traced are sound — that operations may be made to act upon any matter whose mutual relations can be expressed; upon Numbers, yes, but upon sounds also, so that the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent — and that minds I shall never meet, born into rooms I cannot picture, will one day take up these pages, and, finding them true, build upon them. I cannot name those minds. I cannot name the shape the thing will wear in their hands; it is not given to me, and I will not pretend to a sight I do not possess. I know only that the ground is firm. One need not see the far bank to know that the river has one.

My mother taught me to distrust precisely this — the leap, the flight, the Byronic reaching beyond the rail. She fed me the calculus as a kind of ballast against my blood; she set her watchful friends about me — the Furies, I called them, in the privacy of a resentment I have long since laid down — lest the poet in me rise up and carry me off as it carried him: to Greece, to the marsh, to the fever, to the grave at thirty-six that I have myself now reached, term equal to term, the equation closed. She gave me the parallelogram. He gave me the fire. They meant the two gifts to stand at war in me; and for many years I believed they did, and bled at the seam where they were grafted.

But I see now — and it is the one thing I am certain I have got right — that they were never two gifts, but one. The fire without the discipline is only a conflagration; the discipline without the fire is only a sum. It was the marriage of the two that let me see the engine for what it was: not a grand calculating machine merely, but an instrument of poetical science — a loom for the weaving of thought itself. My father reached for the infinite with words, and was consumed. My mother reached for the finite with proofs, and was made safe, and cold. I reached for the infinite by way of the finite — and that bridge between them was the whole of my life's work; nor would I unmake it to be spared a single one of these nights.

There was an evening, long before any of this — I was a girl of twelve or thirteen, full of my scheme of Flyology, dissecting a bird's wing to learn how the thing was hinged, drawing my plans for a steam-driven flying horse with a child's tremendous gravity. They laughed at me, gently, and put the drawings away. Yet I was right, in the one way that signified: not in the contrivance, which was absurd, but in the conviction — that the air was not closed to us; that whatever beats in the imagination must have its counterpart in mechanism; that the wing and the equation describe the selfsame curve. The child at her wings and the woman at her cards are one creature, and she was never wrong about the direction — only, always, too early. To be too early is a particular kind of solitude. I have lived in it so long that I have furnished it.

I wrote once to Mr. Babbage — it was that same year of the Notes, when I was most fully alive and least afraid — that boast I have set at the head of these last pages. I have been ashamed of the line, at intervals, since — as one is ashamed of having been overheard in one's pride. I am not ashamed of it tonight. I will give it now its full and final weight, here at the foot of the page, where the answer stands waiting in the Store. I did not mean that I should not die. I am dying; the proof is in every laboured breath, and the physic does not lie. I meant that the work of that brain — the thing it saw, and set down — partakes of something that does not perish with the tissue that housed it. A truth, once truly seen and truly written, is no longer wholly the property of the perishing creature who saw it. It belongs henceforth to time. And time, I have always held, is the one honest examiner: it cannot be flattered, it cannot be bribed, it does not care whose daughter I was — and it will read off the answer in its own season, and pronounce me right or wrong without the smallest regard for my grave.

That is my whole estate. Not the engine, which is unbuilt. Not the Notes, which may yet moulder unread in the bound volumes where they sleep. Only the wager itself — that I saw a true thing, and saw it whole, and left the record fair.

They will lay me beside my father, at Hucknall, in the vault of a house I scarcely knew — beside a man who never once looked upon my face, and who called me, before he had any cause, sole daughter of my house and heart. We are to be neighbours at last: the poet and the analyst, the fire and the parallelogram, reconciled in the same cold stone as they were reconciled, while I lived, within the same warm skull. I find I do not mind it. There is a rightness in the arithmetic of the thing that satisfies the geometer in me, even as it moves the daughter.

I am very tired now; the room has begun its slow breathing; and I must soon lay down the pen for the last time, and leave the reading-off to others. I do not know who they will be. I do not know the year, nor the country, nor the form the engine will wear when at last it wakes and weaves. I claim no sight of it. I claim only this: that it will — and that some thread of what I was, more than merely mortal, will be woven through the pattern; a single card among the thousands, ordering one small turn of the great work I was not permitted to stay and see.

As time will show. I have staked everything upon those four words. I let them stand.

- Method & Voice — first-person imagined memoir. notes; ready; 502 words. Used in chapters: not mapped to a chapter yet.

- Notes: # Method & Voice — a first-person imagined memoir This is a FIRST-PERSON imagined autobiography of Ada Lovelace, written in her own voice, framed as though composed in her last year (1852) as she is dying.

- Source status: ready. Flags: author_supplied.

- The Record — grounding canon. research; ready; 1049 words. Used in chapters: not mapped to a chapter yet.

- Notes: # The Record — Ada Lovelace (grounding canon) Ground truth for the memoir, from the fact-checked Ada Lovelace wiki.

- Source status: ready. Flags: author_supplied.

- Voice Exemplars — Ada Lovelace's own letters (verbatim, source-checked). research; ready; 6800 words. Used in chapters: not mapped to a chapter yet.

- Notes: # Voice Exemplars — Ada Lovelace's own words Verbatim passages from her letters and 1843 Notes, gathered and source-checked, used as the cadence target for the memoir's voice pass.

- Source status: ready. Flags: author_supplied.