Saturday night Andro (who is lately obsessed with entropy) and Tom and I went to the nicely laid out town of Mountain View to see Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. What a lovely play. Stoppard, of course, some people find a little too cerebral, and indeed close to half of the audience left at intermission (does that mean a Silicon Valley millionaire would pay $100 to see a whole play?) But we were all enthralled and amused. Our friend Amanda Moody was a delightful Lady Croom, Thomasina was as bubbly, distractable, and precocious as anyone could hope, and the expansiveness of the set, while perhaps a little uncomfortable for the actors’ voices, invoked both the excessive size of an English manor and the expanding mental horizons that characterize both the early 19th and the late 20th centuries.

For that is, I think, the real find Stoppard has made, and his witty and sparkling prose leaps to the task of explaining it in a way that I think even Shakespeare would be jealous of. That is, in human terms England stood in almost the same place that the world stands now. The old geopolitical structures were being swept away by new goals and dangers, science was making good on its promise of making life better for humanity, and the middle class, freed from lives of menial toil, was taking interest in art and music on a scale that was absolutely unprecendented in history. For instance, the Broadwood piano that is heard offstage at several points was one of the first mass-produced instruments to come out of the industrial revolution. Put together on a sort of assembly line, it cost 18 or 20 pounds in England, well within the means of the bourgeoisie. As a consequence, people on a mass scale were not only becoming consumers of music, but were learning to produce it themselves.

That accessibility, in a word, sums up the promise of the Enlightenment. Once people can write and play music, it becomes less esoteric, less mystical; rather, a knowledge and skill that can be possessed by anyone that takes the time to learn the notation and bang it out on the Broadwood. Newton’s equations stand in exactly the same relation to Aristotelian science. It took close to a century to work out the implication, but when the movement of physical bodies can be described in equations rather than in a body of (guarded) empirical observations, even a child of thirteen years and ten months can sit at her table and find out true things about the universe. Using Newtonian physics, ordinary humans built machines with more power than the Holy Roman Emperor’s armies, and used them to remake the world (symbolized by Lady Croom’s garden) on a scale never imagined before.

In this context, the idea that the world was perfectly determined by Newtonian physics was both fascinating and terrifying. Determinism conveyed, as most people realized, almost infinite power over the physical world—we who are accustomed to seeing miracles on a daily basis are not so impressed by this—but it also reduced human existence to a Hobbesian network of springs and levers. Modernity simultaneously granted humanity the strength of a god and the mind of a beast.

Thus Romanticism, which was coming into its own around the time of the action in Arcadia. A reaction to the Enlightenment, it declared the whole scientific enterprise trivial, just as the Enlightenment, though perhaps without intending it, had declared trivial all the irrational aspirations of humanity. That battle over triviality is still with us. Stoppard’s depiction of the debate between Bernard the humanist and Valentine the scientist is brilliant because of the way in which it so rapidly degenerates into name-calling, as if some secret grudge between two friends had been suppressed and only flared up in moments of anger.

There is a secret grudge, not between any two people, but between two incommensurable ideas about what humans are and what their place is in the world. After two centuries of fighting (and there were some very very bloody fights when sense and sensibility were given political implications) we are no closer to a reconciliation. If anything, humanity has concluded that everything is trivial, that all meaning is invented. Yet, as Tom was so right to point out, in the play the whole debate is punctured swiftly and irrevocably when everyone realizes that Thomasina died in a fire on her seventeenth birthday. And the meaning of her life had nothing to do with whether she knew Lord Byron or was on the verge of discovering chaos theory, but because she was in love and death took that from her.

In a sense, Death must also be in Arcadia, if Arcadia is to mean anything at all.