Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  When he returned to the house they could tell whether he was feeling in good health that day or not. If he was, then all was well. The house would begin to buzz with the work of the day. If he wasn’t, he would crawl back into his bed and cry hoarsely for La Piera, the only one who could deal with him in these crises. “Pee!—air!—aaaaah!” Then everyone would fall silent, and a gloom would settle on the place as we prepared to wait out another period of illness. There were so many of them.

  But if things were well with him, he would go to a big marble-topped table that he had had set up under the arches on the front side of the villa, in the shade and the cool, out of the rain but in the clean air, and the light that he required. He sat before it in a chair with cushioning contoured to support his hernia, which allowed him to take off his iron truss. His Padua notebooks and the fair copies made by Guiducci and Arrigheti lay stacked on the desk according to a system that the servants all had to respect unfailingly or else they would be kicked and struck and horribly cursed. As the morning progressed, he paged through these volumes thoughtfully, studying them as if they had been written by someone else; and then, leaving one or two of them open, he would take up blank sheets of parchment, his quill and inkpot, and begin to write. He would only write for an hour, two at the most—either chuckling or swearing under his breath, or heaving great sighs; or reading sentences aloud, amending them, trying different versions, writing drafts on blank loose sheets or the backs of notebook pages that had not been filled. Later he would transcribe what he liked onto new blank pages, and when they were full, file them with the other finished pages in a particular pigeonhole of a cabinet set on the desk. Sometimes when finishing for the day he would shuffle the pages to make the stack of them appear higher. Some days he wrote a page or two, other days twenty or thirty.

  Then with a final loud groan he would stand, stretching like a cat, and call for wine. He drank the cups off in a couple of swallows, then strapped on his truss and took another walk in his fields. If it was late enough for good shade, he would sit on a stool and move down the rows of vegetables, pulling out weeds with the stab of a little trowel. He took great satisfaction in killing weeds, filling bushels with them for the compost heap down by the jakes. Sometimes he would hurry back up to the villa to write down something good that had occurred to him in the garden, orating the idea so as not to forget it. “Oh, the inexpressible baseness of abject minds!” he would shout as he limped up the hill. “To make themselves slaves willingly! To call themselves convinced by arguments that are so powerful that they can’t even tell what they mean. What is this but to make an oracle out of a log of wood, and run to it for answers! To fear it! To fear a book! A hunk of wood!”

  Another time, limping hastily uphill: “For every effect in nature, some idiot says he has a complete understanding! This vain presumption, of understanding everything, can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the understanding of one single thing, thus truly tasting how knowledge is accomplished, would then recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing.” Shouting this at the top of his lungs, down at Florence, out at the world. Writing it down as he pronounced it again. Back and forth, from desk to garden to desk.

  In the late afternoon, if it was nice, he would usually stay in the arcade until sundown, writing faster than ever, or reading in his notebooks as he drank more wine. He would watch the sunset, for those few moments seeming at ease. He would sketch the clouds if there were any. The blue of the sky was something he never tired of. “It’s just as beautiful as the colors of a rainbow,” he would insist. “Indeed, I say the sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.”

  On many afternoons a letter would arrive from Maria Celeste. These he always opened and read immediately, frowning with worry as he began, but often enough then smiling, even bursting into laughter. He loved these letters and the candied fruit that often accompanied them, tucked in a basket that he would then send back to her filled with food. He often sat down and wrote his reply to her on the spot, eating candies as he wrote, then calling for La Piera to prepare the basket for return that same day.

  He liked to write, it appeared; and when he was writing, life at Bel-losguardo was good. There were hours when he would just sit there contentedly, staring at nothing, grattare il corpo as the saying goes, scratching his belly in the sun: very rare for Galileo. He withdrew from the world at large, and ignored even matters he should have attended to. He neglected his court duties, and paid no attention to the larger European situation, or indeed anything outside the villa beyond his scientific correspondence, which was always voluminous. The household was happy.

  But ignoring the European situation was a mistake. And he should have been paying more attention to what people were learning about Pope Urban VIII as the months and years passed. For people in Rome were telling stories. It was said, for instance, that Galileo had again been denounced to the Inquisition. The denunciation was anonymous, but was said to have been made by one of his enemies among the Jesuits, perhaps even Grassi, whom he had made such fun of in Il Saggiatore. Because Grassi had hidden behind a pseudonym, Galileo had been free to stick his supposedly unknown opponent mercilessly. Sarsi’s subsequent rebuttals had been just as sharp; he had referred to Il Saggiatore as L’Assaggiatore, The Wine-Taster, which everyone laughed at, except Galileo.

  But that was just a joke. A denunciation to the Holy Office of the Congregation was a very different thing. One rumor said that the denunciation had nothing to do with the banned Copernican world system, but rather with something about the atomistic views of the Greeks. Bruno had spoken for atomism; the war with the Protestant countries in northern Europe was supposedly being fought over atomism, because of what it implied about transubstantiation. So it was potentially more dangerous even than discussing the two world systems, and yet Galileo was unaware that it even constituted a problem.

  Then there were other, more public signs of trouble. Urban was beginning to flex his papal powers, taking on with gusto the traditional task of rebuilding Rome. He decided to build an arch over the altar in St. Peter’s, under which only he could conduct services. And since beams long enough to span the altar were no longer available on the deforested slopes of the Apennines, his builders raided the Pantheon and took most of its beams away, almost wrecking the ancient building. “What the barbarians failed to do, the Barberini finished off,” people said of this vandalism. Slogans like this were only the surface of a growing undercurrent of dislike for the new pope. “On ascension, the bees turned to horseflies,” people were saying. The Avvisi began to print rhymed attacks on the pope, and alarming horoscopes that predicted his imminent death. Urban had a now rather old-fashioned obsession with astrology, and these scurrilous dark horoscopes disturbed him so much that he made it a capital crime to predict a pope’s death. After that no more were published, but the word was out, the feeling was abroad. Popes were appointed in old age for a reason; good or bad, they did not last long, and the frequent succession of doddering elders kept churning the pots of patronage. But Urban was hale in his fifties, and full of nervous choleric energy.

  His ambitions and problems of course ranged far beyond Rome. He continued to favor the French over the Spanish in their war, and so came to fear Spanish spies in the Vatican. And rightfully so, as there were many of them. He had not been pleased, people said, to learn of Galileo’s attempt to sell the celatone and jovilabe to the Spanish military. And when he was not pleased it could go very badly. Once someone sneezed during a service he was conducting in St. Peter’s, and afterward he decreed that anyone taking snuff in church would be excommunicated. Even more of an eye-opener was his decision to have Archbishop Mark Anthony de Dominis burned at the stake for heresy. De Dominis had already been dead for three months when this happened, having expired in the Castel Sant’Angelo after an interrogation by the Inquisition, but no matter; on the feast
day of Doubting St. Thomas, the body was exhumed and taken to Campo dei Fiori and burned at the stake, its ashes then thrown into the Tiber. The offense that had outraged the pontiff to such a degree involved speaking about precisely this matter of atomism and transubstantiation for which Galileo had been secretly denounced.

  But a heretic was a heretic, and anything could happen to them. Servants all across Italy were much more shocked by a new story that spread with the speed of amazement; Urban, oppressed by all his worries, had been having trouble sleeping at night, and it seemed to him that it was the chirping and singing of the birds in the Vatican gardens that was keeping him awake, and so he ordered them all killed. “He ordered his gardeners to kill every bird in the Vatican!” people said. “All the birds killed, so he can sleep better in the morning!” This was the man Galileo was trying to reason with.

  OFTEN AS HE WROTE HE SIGHED. So many had died. His parents and Marina, Sarpi and Sagredo and Salviati, Cesarini and Cosimo … The world of his youth, and of the years in Padua, seemed to have disappeared into the darkness of a previous epoch. He had lived on into a more troubled time. When he was sick it often seemed to the household that it was sorrow that kept him in bed more than any pains of the flesh.

  To comfort himself for two of these losses, Galileo structured his new treatise as a series of dialogues between Filippo Salviati, Giovan-francesco Sagredo, and a third character named Simplicio. Salviati would express the views that Galileo himself was trying to teach, although Salviati also referred from time to time to an “Academician,” which the context made clear was Galileo himself. Sagredo, the man Galileo had eulogized as “my idol,” was then the voice of an intelligent courtier of the time, curious and open-minded, willing to be educated by Salviati’s explanations. This was so much the way they had been in real life—not just patrons to Galileo, but friends, teachers, brothers—like the elder brothers he had never had, and had so much enjoyed having. There had to be someone you could boast to who would enjoy hearing it, who would be proud to hear it of you; and wiser heads who would look after you too. He wrote with his heart full and his throat tight:

  Now, since bitter death has deprived Venice and Florence of those two great luminaries in the noon of their years, I have resolved to make their fame live on in these pages, so far as my poor abilities will permit, by introducing them as interlocutors in the present argument. May it please those two great souls, forever cherished in my heart, to accept this public monument of my eternal love. And may the memory of their eloquence assist me in delivering to posterity the promised reflections.

  The character Simplicio, on the other hand, was indeed a simpleton, as the name suggested—although there had been a Roman philosopher with such a name centuries before. But his meaning was obvious. He stood for all the enemies Galileo had ever sparred with, the whole crowd mashed together, not only the many who had denounced him openly but also the many more who had spoken in private, or in lectures or sermons all over Italy. Simplicio’s lame arguments would illustrate every one of the logical errors and deliberate misunderstandings, the exaggerations and false syllogisms and irrelevancies, the sheer stubborn stupidity, which Galileo had faced over the years. Often he laughed aloud as he wrote—not his low “huh huh huh huh” of true amusement, but the single bark of his sarcastic laugh.

  The book was structured as four days of dialogue between the three men, gathered to talk at Sagredo’s palazzo in Venice, that pink ark where Galileo had spent so many magnificent hilarious nights. The first day’s discussion concerned his astronomical discoveries, including many new observations about the moon that he had made since publishing the Sidereus Nuncius. Along the way he interspersed jokes, wordplay, odd little observations that were mysterious even to him:

  From the oldest records we have it that formerly, at the Straits of Gibraltar, Abila and Calpe were joined together with some lesser mountains which held the ocean in check; but these mountains being separated by some cause, the opening admitted the sea, which flooded in so as to form the Mediterranean. Consider the immensity of this….

  Well, yes; but this event had happened a million years before, and the “oldest records” he spoke of did not exist. How did Galileo know about it? He himself was not completely sure. His old dreams haunted him; he remembered them in fluctuating detail, sometimes even dreaming he was out in space again. He knew for sure he had unfinished business there, but he was less and less sure what it was. He knew that his mind had been tampered with, and more than once overwhelmed.

  Thus he had his Sagredo ask, when they were discussing the telescope,

  Will the new observations and discoveries made with this admirable instrument never cease?

  And his Salviati answered, If its progress follows the course of other great inventions, one may hope that in time things will be seen which we cannot even imagine at present.

  Indeed.

  Later in that First Day, he wrote, But we are not keeping track of the flight of time…. a person’s memory becomes so confused with such a multitude of things.

  So true.

  Later still he wrote, But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who are not yet born, and will not be born for a thousand or even ten thousand years …

  What sublimity of mind, indeed! People really had no idea. He revised the passage so that it seemed to refer to language and to writing, but for him it also referred to something both more immediate and more mysterious. To speak with people who would not be born for a thousand years….

  The Second Day of his dialogues concerned the movement of the Earth—the evidence for it, and the explanations for why it was not immediately evident to those standing on the Earth’s moving surface. This required a detailed description of some parts of his motion studies, and Galileo could not help having Salviati say about this: How many propositions I have noted in Aristotle (meaning always his science) that are not only wrong, but wrong in such a way that their diametrical opposites are true.

  Ha! But Simplicio was a stubborn character, in the book as in the world. Sagredo tried to explain to him the concepts of relative motion. He tried everything. He used for an example the effect of backspin on tennis balls; he even proposed a clever thought experiment concerning shooting crossbow bolts from a moving carriage, forward and back, to see if the bolts flew longer or shorter distances if shot in the direction of the carriage’s movement or against it. He pointed out, almost kindly, after the failure of one such Socratic lesson, that Simplicio could not seem to free his mind from his preconceptions enough to perform a thought experiment. None of this made any difference to Simplicio, and the Second Day came to an end without him being illuminated by any new understanding.

  The Third Day was then a technical discussion of the astronomical issues, which Galileo augmented with many small geometrical line drawings, to make clearer his meaning concerning the Earth’s movement. Some of Tycho’s data were included, and a dense discussion of all Galileo’s telescopic work: the attempt to find parallax, the phases of Venus, the odd motions of Mars, the difficulty of seeing Mercury. It turned out to be the longest dialogue of the four, and inevitably, it seemed, the least entertaining.

  The Fourth Day was a revision of Galileo’s earlier treatise on tides and how they provided clear evidence of the Earth’s rotation. This meant that the final fifty pages of his masterpiece were devoted to a false argument. Galileo was obscurely aware of this, but he wrote the chapter out anyway, following the plan he had set down years before—because, among other reasons, it seemed to him that his Jovian understanding of the cause of tides was too weird to be true, as well as impossible to describe. “I don’t like this,” he grumbled to Cartophilus one night. “It’s giving me that feeling again. I’m just doing what I always have done.”

  “So chang
e it then, maestro.”

  “The changes too have already happened,” Galileo growled. “Fate changes, not us.” And dipped his pen and forged on. It was the book of his life; he had to finish it in style. But would it be enough to convince Urban VIII of its views?

  By now Galileo over the course of his life had accrued three kinds of enemies. First came the Dominicans, the Dogs of God (cani Domini), who since Trent had been using the Inquisition to smash all challenges to orthodoxy. Then there were the secular Aristotelians, all the professors and philosophers and laymen who stood by the Peripatetic philosophy. Lastly and most recently, for they had supported Galileo during his first trips to Rome, the Jesuits too had turned on him, perhaps because of his attack on Sarsi; no one was quite sure about that, but enemies they now were. It was getting to be quite a crowd. His character Simplicio would be certain to offend scores, even hundreds of men. Galileo was perhaps being ironical when he had Simplicio say, late in the Second Day, The further this goes on, the more confused I become, and Sagredo then replies, This is a sign that the arguments are beginning to change your mind.

  Or perhaps it was a sign that Galileo still had not learned that arguments never change anyone’s mind.

  One day, returning from the convent of San Matteo alone, his mule Cremonini shied away from a startled rabbit and threw the inattentive Galileo to the ground. Galileo was too sore to remount, and had to limp all the way home.

  “We’re too far away,” he declared when he got there. “We need to move closer to San Matteo.” He had said this often before, but now he meant it.