The Island of the Day Before

by Umberto Eco

  "Bravo, Signor Roberto! You would not allow that the heavens are of crystal, because you were afraid the comets would break them, but you like them to be liquid, so the birds inside them drown! Further, this idea of vortices explains that the earth turns around the sun, but does not turn on itself as a child's top spins!"

  "Yes, but that philosopher said also that in this case it is the surface of the seas and the superficial crust of our globe that revolve, while the deep core remains still. I think."

  "More stupid than ever. Where did this gentleman write this?"

  "I do not know, I think he gave up the idea of writing it, or of publishing it in a book. He did not want to irritate the Jesuits, whom he loves very much."

  "Then I prefer Signor Galilei, who had heretical thoughts but confessed them to very loving cardinals, and nobody burned him. I do not like this other gentleman who has thoughts even more heretical and does not confess, not even to Jesuits his friends. Perhaps one day God will Galilei forgive, but not your friend."

  "Anyway, it seems to me he revised that first idea. Apparently all the accumulation of matter that goes from the sun to the fixed stars turns in a great circle, borne by this wind...."

  "But did you not say the heavens were liquid?"

  "Perhaps not. Perhaps they are a great wind...."

  "You see? You do not know even—"

  "Well, this wind makes all the planets turn around the sun, and at the same time it makes the sun turn around itself. So there is a minor vortex that makes the moon move around the earth and the earth turn in place. And yet it cannot be said the earth moves, because what moves is the wind. In the same way, if I were sleeping on the Daphne, and the Daphne went towards that island to the west, I would move from one place to another, and yet no one could say that my body has moved. And as far as daily movement is concerned, it is as if I were seated on a great potter's wheel that moves, and surely you would first see my face, then my back, but it would not be I that moved, it would be the wheel."

  "This is the hypothesis of a malicious who wants to be heretic but not seem one. But you tell me now where are the stars. All of Ursa Major, and Perseus—do they turn in the same vortex?"

  "Why, all the stars we see are so many suns, and each is at the center of its own vortex, and all the universe is a great circle of vortices with infinite suns and infinite planets, even beyond what our eye sees, and each with its own inhabitants."

  "Ach! Now I have got you and your hereticissimi friends! This is what you want: infinite worlds!"

  "Surely you will allow me at least more than one. Otherwise where would God have set Hell? Not in the bowels of the earth."

  "Why not in the bowels of the earth?"

  "Because"—and here Roberto was repeating in a very approximate fashion an argument he had heard in Paris, nor could he guarantee the precision of his calculations—"the diameter of the center of the earth measures two hundred Italian miles, and if we cube that, we have eight million miles. Considering that one Italian mile contains two hundred and forty thousand English feet, and since the Lord must have allowed to each of the damned at least six feet, Hell could contain only forty million damned, which seems few to me, considering all the sinners who have lived in this world of ours from Adam until now."

  "That would be true," Caspar replied, not even deigning to go over the calculation, "if the damned were inside their bodies. But this is only after the Resurrection of the Flesh and the Last Judgement! And then there will no longer be either earth or planets, but other heavens and other earths!"

  "Agreed, if the damned are only spirits, there will be a thousand million even on the head of a pin. But there are stars we cannot see with the naked eye, and instead are seen with your spyglass. Well, can you not think of a glass a hundred times more powerful which will allow you to see other stars, and then one a thousand times more powerful which will allow you to see stars even more distant, and so on ad infinitum? Would you set a limit to Creation?"

  "The Bible does not speak of this."

  "The Bible does not speak of Jove, either, and yet you were looking at it the other evening with that damned glass of yours."

  But Roberto already knew what the Jesuit's real objection would be. Like that of the abbé on that evening of the duel when Saint-Savin provoked him: If there are infinite worlds, the Redemption can no longer have any meaning, and we are obliged either to imagine infinite Calvaries or to look on our terrestrial flowerbed as a privileged spot of the Cosmos, on which God permitted His Son to descend and free us from sin, while the other worlds were not granted this grace—to the discredit of His infinite goodness. And, in fact, this was the response of Father Caspar, which allowed Roberto to attack.

  "When did the sin of Adam take place?"

  "My brothers have perfect calculations mathematically made, on the basis of the Scripture: Adam sinned three thousand nine hundred and eighty-four years before the coming of Our Lord."

  "Well, perhaps you do not know that travelers who arrived in China, including many brothers of yours, found lists of the monarchs and dynasties of the Chinese, from which it can be determined that the kingdom of China existed more than six thousand years ago, hence before Adam's fall, and if this is true of China, who knows for how many other peoples it may also be true. Therefore the sin of Adam, and the redemption of the Hebrews, and the great truths of our Holy Roman Church deriving from them, affect only one part of humanity, since there is another part of the human race that was not touched by original sin. This does not in any way affect the infinite goodness of God, who behaved towards the Adamites like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, sacrificing His only Son for them. But just as the fact that the father of the parable sacrificed the fatted calf for his son the sinner does not mean he loved his good and virtuous children any less, so our Creator loves the Chinese and any others born before Adam, and is happy that they did not incur original sin. If this happened on earth, why should it not have happened also on the stars?"

  "Who told you this pack of bull Scheise?" Father Caspar shouted in a fury.

  "Many speak of it. And an Arab sage said it could be deduced from a page of the Koran."

  "You say me the Koran proved the truth of a thing? Oh, God omnipotens, I implore Thee strike down this vain, windy, bloated, arrogant, turbulent, rebellious beast of a man, the demon, dog, devil, cursed infected hound, let him not set foot on this ship!"

  And Father Caspar lifted and snapped the rope like a whip, first striking Roberto on the face, then letting go of the line. Roberto fell back with his head down, groped and gasped, could not pull the rope hard enough to tauten it, cried for help as he swallowed water, and Father Caspar shouted to him that he wanted to see him give up the Geist and choke to death so he would sink straight to Hell as befitted the ill-born of his race.

  Then, since the Jesuit was a Christian soul, when he considered Roberto sufficiently punished, he pulled him up. And for that day both the lesson in swimming and that in astronomy came to an end, and the two went off to sleep, each in his own direction, without exchanging a word.

  They made peace the next day. Roberto admitted that he did not believe in this vortex hypothesis, and considered, rather, that the infinite worlds were an effect of an eddying of atoms in the Void, and that this did not in any way exclude the possibility of a provident Divinity commanding these atoms and organizing them in accord with His decrees, as Roberto had learned from the Canon of Digne. Father Caspar, however, rejected this idea also, which required a Void in which atoms could move, and Roberto had no desire to argue further with this generous generalizer who, rather than sever the cord that kept him alive, gave it all too much play.

  After receiving a promise there would be no more threats of death, Roberto resumed his swimming experiments. Father Caspar tried to persuade him to move in the water, as this is the fundamental principle of the art of natation, and he suggested slow movements of the hands and the legs, but Roberto preferred to lie idle, floating.
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  Father Caspar allowed him to linger, and exploited this inaction to rehearse his other arguments against the movement of the earth. In primis, the Argument of the Sun. Which, if it remained motionless and we were to look at it precisely at noon from the center of a room through a window, and the earth turned with the supposed velocity—and it would require a great velocity to make a complete revolution in twenty-four hours—then in an instant the sun would vanish from our sight.

  The Argument of Hail followed. It falls sometimes for a whole hour but, whether the clouds go to east or west, north or south, it never covers the countryside for more than twenty or thirty miles. But if the earth revolved, and the hail clouds were carried by the wind in its course, hail would necessarily fall over at least three or four hundred miles of countryside.

  Then there was the Argument of White Clouds, which drift through the air when the weather is calm, and seem always to proceed with equal slowness; whereas, if the earth revolves, those that go westward should advance at immense speed.

  He concluded with the Argument of Terrestrial Animals, which by instinct should always move towards the east, to comply with the movement of the earth that is their master; and they should show great aversion to westward movement, sensing that this movement is against nature.

  Roberto accepted all these arguments for a little while, but then he took a dislike to them, and opposed all that learning with his own Argument of Desire.

  "But finally," he said to the Jesuit, "do not deprive me of the joy of thinking that I could rise in flight and see in twenty-four hours the earth revolve beneath me, and I would see so many different faces pass by, white, black, yellow, olive, with caps or with turbans, and cities with spires now pointed, now round, with the Cross and with the Crescent, and cities with porcelain towers and lands of bells, and the Iroquois preparing to eat alive a prisoner of war, and the women of the land of Tesso busy painting their lips blue to please the ugliest men of the planet, and those of Camul, whose husbands pass them to the first newcomer, as Messer Milione tells in his book...."

  "You see? As I say: when you in the tavern think of your philosophy, it is always thoughts of lust! And if you did not these thoughts have, you could this voyage make if God granted you the gratia to revolve yourself around the earth, which is a gratia as gross as leaving you in the sky suspended."

  Roberto was unconvinced, but he could think of no further rebuttal. Then he took a longer way, setting out from arguments he had heard, which similarly did not seem to him in conflict with the idea of a provident God, and he asked Caspar if he agreed in considering Nature a grand theater, where we see only what the Author has put on stage. From our seat we do not see the theater as it really is: the decorations and the machines have been set up to make a fine effect from a distance, whereas the wheels and the counterweights that produce the transformations have been hidden from our view. And yet if in the stalls there was a man practiced in the art, he could guess how a mechanical bird could suddenly be made to fly up. So should the philosopher think when faced by the spectacle of the universe. To be sure, the difficulty for the philosopher is greater, because in Nature the ropes of the machines are hidden so well that for a long time everyone wondered who operated them. And yet, even in this theater of ours, if Phaeton rises towards the sun, it is because a rope pulls him and a counterweight descends.

  Ergo (in the end, Roberto was confident, rediscovering the reason why he had initiated this divagation) the stage shows us the sun revolving, but the nature of the machine is quite different, nor can we be aware of it at the outset. We see the spectacle but not the winch that makes Phoebus move, for indeed we live on the wheel of that winch—but here Roberto became lost, because if the metaphor of the winch was accepted, then that of the theater was lost, and all his reasoning became so pointu—as Saint-Savin would have said—that it was pointless.

  Father Caspar replied that to make a machine sing it was necessary to shape wood or metal and arrange holes, or attach strings and scrape them with bows, or even—as he had done on the Daphne—invent a water device; but if we opened the throat of a nightingale, we saw no machine of this sort there, a sign that God followed paths different from ours.

  Then he asked if, as Roberto looked with such favor on infinite solar systems revolving in the sky, he could not admit that each of these systems might be part of a larger system that revolved in its turn within a system still larger, and so on—for, proceeding from such premisses, you became like the virgin prey of a seducer: she grants him first a small concession but soon will have to grant him more, and then more, and once embarked on that road, she might arrive at any terrible extremity.

  Of course, Roberto said, one can conceive anything. Vortices without planets, vortices that bump into one another, vortices that are not round but hexagonal, so that each face or side fits into another vortex, all of them together forming a kind of hive with its cells, or else they are polygons that, pressed one against the other, create voids that Nature fills with other, lesser vortices, all cogged among themselves like the works of a clock—their entirety moving in the universal sky like a great wheel that turns and propels inside itself other wheels that turn, each with smaller wheels turning within, and all that great circle making in the sky an immense revolution that lasts millennia, perhaps around another vortex or vortices of vortices....At which point Roberto risked drowning, because of the great vertigo that overwhelmed him.

  And it was at this moment that Father Caspar had his triumph. Then, he explained, if the earth revolves around the sun, but the sun revolves around something else (and omitting the question of whether this something else revolves around a something else of yet another something else), we have the problem of the roulette—of which Roberto must have heard talk in Paris, since from Paris it went into Italy among the Galileans, who would think up anything provided they could disturb the world.

  "What is the roulette?" Roberto asked.

  "You can call it also trochoid or cycloid, but it is much the same. Imagine a wheel."

  "Like before?"

  "No. Now imagine you the wheel of a wagon. And imagine on the rim of the wheel a nail. Now imagine the wheel not moving, and the nail just above ground. Now you think that the wagon moves and the wheel turns. What to the nail happens?"

  "Well, if the wheel turns, at a certain point the nail will be on top, but when the wheel has made its complete revolution, the nail is again close to the ground."

  "So you think this wheel has like a circle moved?"

  "Why, yes. Certainly not like a square."

  "Now you listen, booby. You say the nail finds itself on the ground where it before was?"

  "Wait a moment.... No, if the wagon went forward, the nail would be on the same ground, but much farther ahead."

  "Therefore it has not made circular movement."

  "No, by all the saints in Paradise!"

  "You must not say Byallsaintsofparadise."

  "Forgive me. But what movement has it made?"

  "It has made a trochoid, and for you to understand I say it is like the movement of a ball you throw before you, then it touches ground, then makes another arc of circle, then again—but, while the ball makes smaller and smaller arcs, the nail makes always regular arcs, if the wheel always at the same speed goes."

  "And what does this mean?" Roberto asked, anticipating his defeat.

  "This means you would have so many vortices and infinite worlds, and that the earth turns, and here your earth turns no more, but goes through the infinite sky like a ball, tumpf tumpf tumpf.... Ach! what a fine movement for this most noble planet! And if your vortex theory gut ist, all heavenly bodies would go tumpf tumpf tumpf.... Now let me laugh, for this is finally the most gross amusement of mein Leben!"

  It was difficult to reply to an argument so subtle and geometrically perfect—and what is more, in perfect bad faith, because Father Caspar should have known that something similar would have happened also if the planets revolved as Tycho posite
d. Roberto went off to sleep, damp and downcast as a dog. In the night he reflected, wondering if it was not best for him now to abandon all his heretical ideas on the movement of the earth. Let me see, he said to himself, if Father Caspar is right and the earth does not move (otherwise it would move more than it should and be impossible to stop again), does this endanger his discovery of the antipodal meridian, and his theory of the Flood, and also the fact that the Island is there a day before the day it is here? Not at all.

  So, he said to himself, perhaps it is best for me not to debate the astronomical opinions of my new teacher, and instead devote myself to swimming, to achieve what really interests me, which is not to prove that Copernicus and Galilei were right, or that other old bloat Tycho of Uraniborg—but to see the Orange Dove, and set foot in the day before—something that not Galilei, not Copernicus, not Tycho, nor any of my masters and teachers in Paris ever dreamed of.

  So, then, the next day he presented himself again to Father Caspar as an obedient pupil in matters both natatory and astronomical.

  But Father Caspar, with the excuse of a rough sea and some further calculations that he had to make, postponed that day's lesson. Towards evening he explained that to learn natation, as he said, requires concentration and silence, and you cannot have your head among the clouds. Seeing that Roberto tended to do just that, it was the Jesuit's conclusion that the young man had no aptitude for swimming.

  Roberto asked himself why his master, so proud of his mastery, had renounced his plan so abruptly. And I believe the conclusion he came to was the correct one. Father Caspar had got it into his head that lying or even moving in the water, under the sun, had produced in Roberto an effervescence of the cerebrum, which led him to dangerous thoughts. Finding himself in intimacy with his own body, and immersing himself in the liquid, which was also matter, had somehow bestialized him and led him to those thoughts that are peculiar to insane and animal natures.