Chapter 3
Newton’s Laws of Emotion
The first time Isaac Newton got hit in the face, he was standing in a field. His
uncle had been explaining to him why wheat should be planted in diagonal
rows, but Isaac wasn’t listening. He was gazing into the sun, wondering what
the light was made of.
He was seven years old.^1
His uncle backhanded him so hard across his left cheek that Isaac’s sense
of self temporarily broke upon the ground on which his body fell. He lost any
feeling of personal cohesion. And as the parts of his psyche put themselves
back together, some secret piece of himself remained in the dirt, left behind in
a place from which it would never be recovered.
Isaac’s father had died before he was born, and his mother soon abandoned
her son to marry some old rich guy the next village over. As a result, Isaac
spent his formative years being shuffled among uncles, cousins, and
grandparents. No one particularly wanted him. Few knew what to do with
him. He was a burden. Love came difficultly, and usually not at all.
Isaac’s uncle was an uneducated drunk, but he did know how to count
hedges and rows in fields. It was his one intellectual skill, and because of this,
he did it probably more often than he needed to. Isaac often tagged along to
these row-counting sessions because it was the only time his uncle ever paid
attention to him. And like water in a desert, any attention the boy got he
desperately soaked in.
As it turned out, the boy was a kind of prodigy. By age eight, he could
project the amount of feed required to sustain the sheep and pigs for the
following season. By nine, he could rattle off the top of his head calculations
for hectares of wheat, barley, and potatoes.
By age ten, Isaac had decided that farming was stupid and instead turned
his attention to calculating the exact trajectory of the sun throughout the
seasons. His uncle didn’t care about the exact trajectory of the sun because it
wouldn’t put food on the table—at least not directly—so, again, he hit Isaac.
School didn’t make things any better. Isaac was pale and scrawny and