The Plague, Apples, and Good Will Hunting

The Ghost of a Flea, William Blake

In the 1650s, the plague slowly infected Europe. Italy fell first. It took another decade to reach England. But the forces of globalization were already in motion. England relied heavily on trade. Rats boarded the ships, fleas infested the rats, and bacteria flourished in the fleas.

On Christmas Day 1664, a single plague death was reported in London. Another came in February, then another. The deaths accelerated. Over the summer, the death toll swelled from hundreds to thousands per week. People were told not to leave their homes. A large cross was painted on the outside of each ‘plague house’. 

Plays, sports, and other gatherings involving crowds were banned. The universities closed. When Cambridge sent its students home, one young man, fanatical about mathematics, headed back to his mother’s farm. 

There, in isolation, Isaac Newton conceived the laws of gravity, and invented calculus. The plague years were to prove the most intellectually fertile period of Newton’s life. He would look back on this time with the observation that “truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.”

The emblem for his discovery of the force of gravity is, of course, the apple. No one knows to what extent the story of the apple falling from the tree and hitting Newton on the head is true, and whether it really led to a Eureka moment.

What we do know is that the image of the apple has strong cultural and, since Newton, scientific appeal. It was an apple (some say a fig or pomegranate) that Eve famously ate in the Garden of Eden, tempted by the serpent into eating forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. The Bible story was probably influenced by the Greek myth of Atalanta.

The beautiful Atalanta agreed to marry, but on condition that her suitor could beat her in a race. Atalanta could run extremely fast, so she beat all of her suitors (who were then put to death). Realizing that he could not win fairly, Melanion prayed to the goddess Aphrodite, who gave him three golden apples to distract Atalanta during their race. 

Atalanta indeed stopped running long enough to retrieve the apples, allowing Melanion to win the race and so secure Atalanta's hand in marriage. The theme once more is temptation, with the apple a means of seduction. In Latin the word malus means both ‘apple’ and ‘evil’. 

It was an apple that Alan Turing, who laid the foundations for modern computer science, laced with cyanide to kill himself, having been sterilised and criminalised for his homosexuality. The story echoes the poisoning by an apple of Snow White.

And it was an apple that Steve Jobs chose as the logo for his company when designing his personal computers. The little bite out of the edge is almost certainly a mingled reference to Eve’s quest for knowledge, Newton’s inspiration, and Turing’s self-slaughter.

Eve paid a heavy price for yielding to temptation. It is thought Newton by contrast remained a virgin his whole life, while Turing had to suppress his sexuality. I thought of all of them recently when I watched again a Japanese film called Late Spring, directed by Yasujiro Ozu.

Late Spring is the story of a daughter who worships her father, so much so that she never wants to leave him and is reluctant to get married. The father dotes on his daughter, but feels she has served him enough, and insists that she marry and lead her own life.

The final wordless scene of the film shows the father on his own, his daughter now gone. In a moment of solitude and melancholy, he starts to peel an apple. This is how the film ends, with him simply peeling an apple in one long unbroken ribbon-like piece. It is as if he is unpeeling his own grief.

In the movie Good Will Hunting, star university student Will, played by Matt Damon, bangs on the window of a bar where his friend and rival at MIT (Massachusetts’ Institute of Technology) sits, and asks him through the glass, ‘Do you like apples?’ 

The man through the glass says, yes. Will then slams a piece of paper with a number on it against the window, and says, ‘Well, I got her number. How do you like them apples?’ – which is slang for: something you say when you want someone to know how clever you are, and you’ve done something better than them.

It is a romantic boast, of course, but it’s also an intellectual one as Will wants to beat his university rival.

We don’t want our students to be quite so arrogant, of course, but we do want them to eat hungrily from the tree of knowledge. Every lesson is a form of nourishment in this respect. Culturally, linguistically, scientifically, we want them to enjoy ‘them apples’. 

And even if students don’t make the same intellectual progress that Isaac Newton did during the time of the plague, they can still use this time of isolation to develop their skills, cultivate their knowledge, and their understanding of the world and themselves.   

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO