At the Feet of Newton

For years, I worked just a short walk from the British Library. My job in higher education often brought me there for meetings and between sessions I’d sometimes step outside for air (actually, I was once a smoker!) and find myself drawn again to Eduardo Paolozzi’s statue of Newton.

It sits just outside the library’s main entrance: massive, muscular, and hunched in concentration. Most people just walk past it. A few stop for a photo. Some kids try to climb it. But if you linger, it becomes stranger. Newton is naked but he’s not exposed. His limbs are made of bronze plates, bolted together. His hand holds a compass, poised above a diagram. His eyes are fixed on the drawing, not on the world.

Paolozzi based the statue on a print by William Blake. In Blake’s original image, Newton is crouched underwater, absorbed in measurement, blind to the organic forms around him. It’s not a flattering portrait. Blake saw in Newton the narrowing of vision that can happen when reason tries to become a world unto itself. Blake wasn’t anti-science, but he knew imagination had to have its place. Otherwise, knowledge becomes something sterile, even inhuman.

And yet, a Stoic wouldn’t dismiss Newton entirely. Nor would Blake. Both traditions honour the disciplined mind. The real problem is not thought, it’s isolation. It is the failure to listen to what cannot be measured. The danger is not in making a diagram, but in mistaking it for the world.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in Paolozzi’s Newton. There’s an ache there, a kind of severance. A Stoic might see in it a soul no longer attuned to the Logos, the rational, animate order of the cosmos. Blake would recognise it too: a life cut off from vision, from the inward fire he called the Imagination.

I’ve loved Blake for a long time. For years I led an annual walk through London, visiting the places he lived, worked, and saw visions. His birth in Soho, his printing press near South Molton Street, his grave in Bunhill Fields, the church where he married in Battersea. The last walk ended where he died. The building is gone. The spot is now a service alley behind the Savoy Hotel. To reach it, you go down a side street and find yourself among bins and delivery trucks.

I was standing there, speaking about Blake’s final years, when two men in long black coats emerged from a side door. Security. They asked us to leave. I explained it was a public right of way. They disagreed. I refused to move. They stood there with their arms folded as I finished what I had to say.

It was a small moment, but I think Blake would have approved. Not because it was rebellious, exactly, but because it insisted on something the world often tries to tidy away: that imagination, memory, and refusal can still hold ground, even next to big and burly security men.

That moment came back to me early this morning as I was sorting through old notes that need filing. Blake’s critique was never just about Newton. It was about all of us, whenever we trade wonder for certainty, or confuse precision with truth.

The statue seems to ask a quiet question: what kind of knowledge makes us more alive, and what kind slowly turns us to bronze?

In the end, this is an epistemological concern, which is a needlessly pretentious way of saying: how do we know what we know, and what do we leave out when we think we’ve understood? Paolozzi doesn’t answer the question. But he gives it a body, and a weight. He plants it outside the library, where we go to learn things. He reminds us, gently and without scorn, that not all knowledge is held in books. Some knowledge must be imagined. Some must be remembered. And some must be protected, quietly, beside the bins.