The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  Bruno laughed, remembering, and laced his hands behind his head.

  When Teofilo at last realized what sort of world Giordano imagined, then the struggle began. Giordano’s world was just as round as Teofilo’s, and it made better sense; it was to him so obviously the case that it took him a long time even to grasp what Teofilo was laughing at, and then expostulating about. And when he did grasp it, the difficulties of it seemed overwhelming: What held the air and the light in? How could we live, sticking out into the nothingness? Why did the peoples in the Antipodes not fall off, and keep falling forever? It was absurd.

  And then on a golden day he sat eating an orange in the winter ruin of the garden, and he turned—it felt like cracked knuckles or crossed eyes all through his being—he turned the round world inside out, like the skin of the orange he was peeling; and all the mountains and rivers, the vineyards and farmsteads and churches, turned with it. The sun and stars flew out to fill the nothing where God lived. The world was outside itself. The world was round.

  Softly through the hospice of Susa the low bell sounded for Prime.

  That—that sense of the world turning inside-out like the peel of an orange—was what he had felt standing in the rain in Venice at the stall of the bookseller with the curious ring: that was what had made him laugh.

  If he put the center of the universe in motion, then what became of its circumference? If he turned the outer spheres inward, what became of spheres? In the center of the old universe had been the earth, in the center of the earth himself, in the center of himself the spheres of the heavens he had built within himself, in the center of them. …

  If he turned the small universe within him inside-out, then what would happen in the one outside him?

  He heard the sandals of the postulant whose duty it was to wake the monks for prayer. The sandals approached his door, the postulant struck his door and passed on, calling at each door: Oremus, fratres.

  Snow was still falling in the spring air as the caravan Giordano joined went up through Novalese to Mont-Cenis. The travelers coming down from the top rode on sledges, a strong marron in front with a strap around his chest pulling, and another up behind with an alpen-stock to steer; on the slick path the sledges shot by, the marrons stoical, the faces of the fur-wrapped foreigners wide-eyed with alarm. All day the snow swirled heavily down from the heights; stuck carts began to burden the trail, the tough little mules waded in snow to their knees. Giordano, terrified and elated, felt his senses swallowed up in it.

  His caravan called a halt at last at a carter’s village just short of the Col; the villagers expertly tucked all the travelers in among themselves, every cranny could contain a sleeper; the animals were penned and the carts covered. Giordano paid high for a bowl of milk and bread and a share of a mattress stuffed with crackling beech leaves, not far from where the fire glowed.

  It was still night when he awoke amid the snorers. The inn was a lightless cave. Giordano struggled out from the pile he was ensconced in, and pulled a fur robe with him; he wrapped it around his monk’s robe, and—stepping over and around and sometimes on sleeping dogs and children on the floor—he found a door to go out by.

  The air was shocking, as still as if all crystal, corrosive in his nose and throat. The storm had passed, and the sky was clear, more clear than he had known it could be: as though he were high up, away from the earth, and within the sphere of air itself. His warm breath hung before his face in a cloud. He gathered his robes and his fur around him and stepped into the yard; his rag-bound feet left black holes like pools behind him in the starlit snow.

  But was there a sphere of air above the earth, if Copernicus was right? The old earth of Aristotle, black thick and base, collected at the bottom of creation, within finer spheres of water, air, fire. Whatever was lighter—sparks, souls—rose up. But Copernicus said the earth itself rose up, lighter than air, and went sailing; and so which way was up?

  His heart was full. In the moonless sky the stars and planets stared down or stared away and burned. Burned. There was Cassiopeia’s great chair. Lyra. Draco. The Bear standing on his tail, looking at the North Nail on which the heavens turned. Only they didn’t. The eighth sphere of stars only seemed to turn because the earth turned around once a day, spinning on its toe like an arlecchino.

  Perhaps there was no eighth sphere.

  With a sound of not-being, a kind of tinkling indrawn breath, the eighth sphere went away. The stars, liberated, rushed away outward from the earth and from one another; the smaller ones (rushing away even faster) were perhaps not smaller, they were only farther off. Yes! And there might be—must be!—others, too far off to be seen at all.

  His heart might burst, filled with cold starlight. The Milky Way, a powder like snow, might be stars simply too far away to distinguish from one another, like the blue haze of a far-off vineyard, which is nothing but all the blooming grape-globes seen together.

  How far off?

  What could mark the limit? What reason could there be for them to end?

  Infinite, Lucretius said, who could think of no reason. Cusanus said: a circle, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.

  No. Cusanus had only spoken so of God. It was he, Giordano Bruno, who was saying it of God’s creation, the shadow of God that was the universe. If there was an end to the stars then God was not God.

  It was not only clear to him, neck bent staring upward, as clear as this air, it was self-evident; he seemed to have always known it, and had simply never said it aloud. Infinite. He felt its infinity tugging at his heart and eyes, and he felt an answering infinity within himself: for if it was infinite outside, then it must be infinite inside as well.

  Infinite. He stirred his cold feet in the snow, and turned back toward the hostel. The little ponies stamped in their pens, breathing whitely, their shaggy manes powdered with hoarfrost. In the windows of the hostel, candles flickered, and furry smoke filled with sparks rose from the chimney; someone laughed within. Wake up.

  It wasn’t far from the village to the top of the pass. The sky had only begun to pale, and the dimmest stars—or those farthest off—had disappeared, when the caravan began clambering up the path toward the summit. The great starless darknesses on either hand were not sky but mountains, coming suddenly clear as though they had just awakened and stood up. Between them in the azure there flamed the morning stars. Mercury. Venus. Wet to the knees with snow-melt, Giordano climbed toward them.

  Earth was a star as they were; and the bright beings who inhabited them, looking this way, saw not a cold stone but another like themselves, aflame in the sun’s light. He hailed them: Brother. Sister. A strange and soundless hum seemed to be filling up his ears and his being, as though the dawn itself were to make a sound in breaking, continuous and irreversible. The star he rode was turning pell-mell toward the sun with all of them aboard it, dwarfish stolid carters, chairs, animals, and men; Bruno laughed at his impulse to fall and clutch the hurtling ball with hands and knees.

  Infinite.

  You made yourself equal to the stars by knowing your mother Earth was a star as well; you rose up through the spheres not by leaving the earth but by sailing it: by knowing that it sailed.

  Sunlight struck the lifting white heads of the peaks, though the snow of the pass was still blue. Giordano had been taught that on the highest mountains the air is eternally still, but dawn winds pierced his robes here, and from the summits glittering streams of snow were slowly blown like banners. The peaks all had names, and the huffing carter who climbed beside Giordano named them, pointing. They sailed too.

  The caravan stumbled and slid through the cold roaring throat of the Col, out of sight of the dawn, passed by a multitude going the other way, all jostling as in a city alley. Then they came out onto a field of shattered flints and a steep path downward. They had crossed the ridge. The sky was huge and blue, but the far lands Bruno looked out over were still soft and asleep, mountains folded rank on rank, the rest of his lif
e. The path that way—it brought his heart to his mouth to trace it—traversed the mountainsides switching back and forth like a whip; you could see, far far below, the turns you would have to take, and the travelers there who toiled upward. Along the fingernail of silver path that edged the precipice a shepherd walked his sheep along in a single file.

  Earth turned, coming about like a trireme, beating East; and thus the sun rose, gigantic spark, God visible. Bruno, stock still, hum in his ears and heart in his throat, felt its smile on his cheek.

  Hermes said: make yourself as God. And Bruno could feel his smile too, like the sun’s. Make yourself as God: Infinite. And Bruno had been infinite even as he had read the words and longed to understand them.

  Earth gave up its valleys to the sun. The burdened men, cheeks warmed, laughing with relief and apprehension, started downward. Day had come.

  * * *

  The next morning Bruno reached the Dominican monastery at Chambéry, in France: he was Brother Teofilo, witch-hunter of Naples. As he stood explaining himself to the puzzled prior in the sunstruck garden, the earth took a sudden northward tilt, and the flagstones rose up to meet his darkening sight. He woke in the infirmary, where he spent Holy Week, sticking-plaster over his eye, head and heart empty, as still and weary as though he had moved the sun all by himself. He could take nothing but broth, and the Host; he slept long, and when he slept he dreamed of Ægypt.

  They were returning, as he had seen them returning: they were returning now. The new sun of Copernicus was the sign of it; Copernicus might not know it, but Giordano Bruno knew it, and would cry it now like a bantam cock through the world. Sunrise.

  Once back on the road, Bruno was rarely to cease journeying his whole life long: but even as he walked the old tracks and high roads of Europe he walked in Ægypt too, its painted temples, the glitter of its sands, its blue skies dark. Sleeping and dreaming, working and wooing, he walked toward a city built in the east or in the west of Ægypt, in the region of the rising or the setting sun, a city whose name he knew.

  Those who everywhere took him in—in Paris, in Wittenberg, in Prague—those Giordanisti who furthered his fortunes, or dressed him, or printed his books; who won him interviews with the great; who fed him; who hid him: they seemed often to recognize him too, or to remember him from some other time or place, to have once known but forgotten him or forgotten that it was he who was to come and not some other: Oh yes I see (holding out slowly their hands to him, eyes searching him), yes I know you now yes yes come in.

  He left the house at Chambéry as soon as he was well, bored to madness by the monks’ thick stupidity, the endlessness of their talk, like prayer, and their prayer, like talk. In 1579 he reached Geneva; he won the protection there of a Neapolitan nobleman, the Marchese de Vico, who told him for God’s sake to get out of those robes of black and white, and who bought him a suit of clothes; but Bruno dismissed with a joke the Marchese’s Calvinism, on account of which the Marchese had given up all he had. He registered at the University under the name Phillippus, and there began to read the Reformers, with a mixture of amusement and contempt. What poor stuff. He stood in a lecture hall full of ticking automata, planetary clocks, moon machines, and listened to a puppet-boned fellow tell how he was attempting to make a machine, an automaton, that would somehow so exactly replicate in its geometries the workings of the universe that when something happened in the universe an identical thing would be caused to happen in the model, however differently manifested: another universe, in fact, only smaller, like the image in a mirror.

  But Giordano knew that such a machine, such a model, already existed. The name of the machine was Man.

  The Genevans didn’t like him; no more did he like them. The Marchese interceded for him when he insulted the famed theologian Antoine de la Faye and got himself arraigned before the Theological Consistory, men in deep black who had no use for notions; he wasn’t tried, but he was pitched out of town and down the Rhone. Enough of Calvin’s city.

  Lyon, a center of the book trade, but he could gain no living there, a cold wind seemed to be blowing through the world of learning, anyway Giordano felt it. Shake the dust from his feet. He did better at Toulouse; he was elected to the University (guided by good advisers and just for the moment willing to say and do what he was advised to say and do) and for a year and a half taught philosophy and the Sphere.

  In the quiet Languedoc months he began casting what he had learned so far into the form of gods and goddesses; not only the great planetary gods and their horoscopi but lesser gods too, Pan and Vertumnus and Janus and he who swaggers drunk on his ass, Silenus. On these small gods—still and pale when he set them up within as old statues along a Roman road—he would work Ægyptian magic, he would feed them from his own storehouses, and flush their cheeks, and make them speak. Had not Hermes said that a multitude of gods were distributed through all things that exist? Then they were distributed through his own shadow universe within as well, the small gods of endless becoming.

  Toulouse was a Huguenot city, and in that year the armies of the Catholic League were advancing on its walls; there were riots in town and outrages at the University; Bruno moved on.

  He was in Paris in 1582, the largest city in Europe but not too large to fit within the walls of Bruno’s city inside. He lectured at the University, a free lance, tilting with pedants, Aristotelians, followers of Petrus Ramus; he published at last his enormous book, an Art of Memory that anyone who dared to look into it could see was a work of magia deep-dyed and horribly potent: he even gave it a title taken from that book of Solomon’s he had hidden in the privy long ago: De umbris idearum, About the Shadows of Ideas.

  Now his universe moved as the universe outside him moved: they were the same. And so if he chose to cause a thing to happen in his world within, then … He laughed, he laughed and could not stop: had he not moved the sun from its sphere? There was no knowing what he might not do if he chose.

  The King heard of him and invited him to the Louvre, and opened Bruno’s book upon his knee in wonder; he was given a glass of wine with the Queen Mother, and the Queen Mother sat him down with her astrologer and cunning-man, whose name was Notre-dame or Nostradamus. Bruno thought the man a fraud and a fool, but asked him: In what country will my bones be buried? And the answer of Nostradamus was: In no country.

  In no country was a good answer. Perhaps he would just go on circling outward forever, sailing the earth like a ship, not ever to die at all.

  At spring’s end in 1583, in the entourage of the new French ambassador to England, he took ship from Calais with his books, and his systems, and his knowledge; with a purse fat with louis d’or; with a mission from the King engraved on his endless memory. The English ambassador in Paris wrote to Walsingham: Doctor Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor of philosophy, intends to pass into England, whose religion I cannot commend. But what religion did he carry?

  The ship raised sail, Bruno stepped on its deck, the mate whistled, the lines were loosed. Bruno for the first time lost sight of land, and with the sight felt something fall away from him; something that would not ever be taken up again. Wherever he went from here he would never be going back. Æolus sang in the rigging, cold spray dashed in his face; the crew was aloft, the captain asleep below, his belly filling and luffing like his sails; the little ship clambered through the flinty seas, crowded with animals, people, and goods, a red Mexican parrot furious and swearing out the forecastle window.

  —And a fire burning on its yardarms, Mr. Talbot said. St. Elmo’s fire, one flame on the right side, one flame on the left. Castor and Pollux, the Twins.

  —Spes proxima, said Doctor Dee.

  The angel who showed them this ship within the showstone (she was a laughing and changeable child, and named Madimi) bent the skryer’s head closer to the stone and the ship and the man in the bows holding tight.

  —He, said Mr. Talbot.

  —That is he, the angel said. That is he of whom I told you.

 
; —Can she speak more plainly? Doctor Dee said. Ask her.

  —The one I told you of, said the angel Madimi. The Jonah that the fish spat out, the brand to be plucked from the burning, the stone rejected by the builders that will be the corner of the house, the last house left standing. Our adorp, our dragon flying in the west, our philosophical Mercury. Our Grail of the quintessence, our sal cranii humani, for if the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? Our pretty rose. Our Bruin sleeping in a cave through winter. Our Mr. Jordan Brown whose religion I cannot commend. He has stolen fire from heaven and there are spheres where he is not loved. He is coming to this house, though he knows it not; he is not going back the way he came; and nothing now will ever be the same again.

  TEN

  The only way to experience the semiannual festival sponsored by the Faraway Ærostatic Society and held at Skytop Farm high up on Mount Merrow is to be up before dawn, and drive to Skytop early enough to see the daybreak ascensions: for lighter-than-air flight, improbable in the best of cases, is most possible at dawn, and at evening, when the air is cool and still.

  So, shivering somewhat in the chill of predawn, Pierce Moffett sat on his front steps, waiting for the lights to come on in the house opposite and Beau Brachman to come out, ready more or less for this adventure but thinking chiefly of the gray box of yellow paper on Fellowes Kraft’s desk in Stonykill miles away. It seemed to glow, in his mind, like a hooded sun.