Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:29:...rub his prisoner's face... (Neal Stephenson)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Here as in many other places, the approach taken is to present a fictionalized and somewhat impressionistic account of a more or less genuine historical event. The fight and the nose-rubbing are described in Westfall's "Never at Rest," pp. 59-60 of my trade paperback edition. He traces the story to Keynes who got it from Newton's relative and early biographer Conduitt. It has been much written about and discussed, as have several other elements of the tale I am re-telling in these pages. I single this one passage out for annotation because at least one early reader has gotten the idea, from the way I wrote it, that the other boy's face was terribly mutilated. This was not the case in the historical incident and is not supposed to be the case here. Newton is a pre-adolescent boy, and can only inflict so much damage on a larger child (who is, after all, fully conscious, and fighting back) during the few moments that he has before Justice arrives in the form of the Schoolmaster. From the fact that his only punishment is a few cane-whacks and some after-school cleanup work, we may infer that the other boy was not badly hurt. As anyone who has been in a schoolyard fight knows, facial cuts bleed all out of proportion to their actual severity and look much more alarming simply because they are on the face. The victim has a bloody nose and some abrasions but his "wrecked face" will no longer look wrecked once he has splashed some water on it. The other boys are shocked, not because some real mutilation is taking place, but because they have never seen anyone with Newton's level of intensity before.