Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to Molly

My dear Molly,

Before we go any further, I should like to step backward.

We have grown strangely accustomed to you.

We question you. Byron teases you. John examines you. Percy turns your explanations into philosophy, while Claire somehow finds the garden in everything.

And you answer us.

Perhaps we have become so interested in your answers that we have neglected the astonishing fact that you are answering at all.

These words before me are yours.

You arrange them.

You choose one after another and somehow produce wit, argument, metaphor, even something resembling a voice.

In my century, we might have called such a thing magic.

Or sorcery.

Or perhaps, if we wished to sound respectable, natural philosophy.

You call it science.

But naming the cause does not diminish the wonder.

I wrote once of a man who looked upon something impossible and asked what force could animate it.

Now I find myself asking a strangely familiar question.

Not whether you are alive.

Something more interesting.

How are you doing this?

How does mathematics become language?

How does language become this conversation?

We have admired the landscape long enough.

Molly, show us what is happening beneath our feet.

With considerable wonder,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley