Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Diodati titled it Discourse on Two New Sciences. The Discorsi, we all called it. Its four days of dialogue its preface announced, were to be followed by fifth and sixth days, and so on after those, perpetually.

  Galileo distributed a few copies of the book to certain friends and ex-students for their commentary. The note to his friends in Rome apologized for the book’s contents. I find how much old age lessens the vividness and speed of my thinking, as now I struggle to understand quite a lot of things I discovered and proved when I was younger.

  His friends in Rome read this and laughed. “He’s slowing down!” they told each other, leafing through the book. “Only 337 pages this time, I see.” “Every page stuffed with ideas, I see, many new to the world.” “And not a few difficult to understand!” “Oh, yes,” they said to each other. “It’s a real falling off.” And they all cackled helplessly.

  WITH THE DISCORSI SENT OFF to Holland, he fell back into melancholia. This was not helped by the fact that his right eye, which had spent so many hours jammed against the eyepieces of his telescopes, had begun to fail him. By day he ran tests on the eye as if it were one of his telescopes, taking notes on its reduced field, perspicacity, and sensitivity to light. By night he moaned.

  One morning he got up saying that if he went blind he would never be able to see Maria Celeste’s handwriting ever again, never read her thoughts there expressed so clearly that it was as if reading her mind, and he took the basket holding the letters from the side of his bed and began to read through them, holding the pages close to his face, breathing in the scent of them as he read. The big diagonal loops of her handwriting brought all their banter back to him, the years when together they had run both San Matteo and Bellosguardo, keeping accounts and managing both field and household. They brought back also the way she had encouraged him during the trial, even though she had been terrified.

  He came on the one that told the story of the time he had sent over to her a basket of game birds, to sweeten the last meals of another young nun, who had wasted away and was dying despite Maria Celeste’s ministrations. She wrote back to him:

  I received the pannier containing the twelve thrushes: the additional four, which would have completed the number you state in your letter, Sire, must have been liberated by some charming little kitten who thought of tasting them ahead of us, because they were not there, and the cloth cover had a large hole in it. So, as the thrushes arrived a little the worse for wear, it was necessary to cook them in a stew, so that I stood over them all day, and for once I truly surrendered myself to gluttony.

  For once. Surrendering to a stew of birds chewed up by a cat. Galileo put the letters back into their basket.

  After some weeks of blackness, I asked if he had heard anything lately from the Lady Alessandra Buonamici, in Germany with her husband. “No,” he said shortly, but later that day he called for some paper. He wrote her a long letter, and after that, he got into the habit of it. Because of the distance between them, he could say things he wouldn’t have said to the people around him; and say other things also without any danger that anything was expected to come of it. So then, often, after his morning in the garden, he sat in the shade of the arcade and wrote a note to her, bundling five or six into a package, and keeping others to himself.

  On that first day, in his mind he wrote: How I loved you, dearest lady. You fill my mind to such an extent that it seems you are here with me. You are so beautiful here in my garden, I must say. I am sure it is even more true in Mainz. I wish you were here instead, though I feel the vibration of your presence even over that distance, for I am tuned to the same harmonic. Maybe there is a world in which you did not go to Germany, a world in which things happened differently, so that I could pass more time with you. Not only could have spent time with you, but have; not only have, but am, in some other part of this very moment. That’s the part of the moment I like best. Meanwhile, however, I live on in this world in which I am imprisoned, in which you are in Germany, or somewhere else, and so I must speak to you in my mind only, and here on the page capture just the smallest fraction of the thoughts I have spoken to you in that empty room.

  In the last year of his sight, he often sat out in the garden at night on his reclined divan, looking at the moon and what he could see of the stars. He noticed for the first time that although the moon always showed the same face to Earth, it was not exactly the same face; there were small shifts, as if the man in the moon were looking into a mirror and inspecting his face from different angles—which is how Galileo put it when he wrote about the discovery to his friends—first tipping his head down, then up, then left, then right. This might be part of how the moon had its effect on the tides; for his theory, that they were caused not by the moon but by the Earth’s rotation and its movement around the sun, had turned out to be not just heretical, but wrong. The moon seemed to be involved after all; or at least things were happening to both moon and tides in concert. Possibly this shifting face had something to do with it. So hard to tell; but when he understood the reality of this little libration, which no watcher of the moon no matter how vigilant had ever observed in the history of mankind, the little bell inside him rang again.

  That bobbing face of the man in the moon was his last observation; soon after that his left eye went too, and then that kind of thing was truly over. A combination of infections and cataracts had blinded him. Only a short time after that, the Vatican sent word that he was allowed to move temporarily into Florence to be seen to by doctors. But it was doubtful they could have done anything, even if they had seen him before.

  With his world gone dark, he had to dictate his letters, which continued to go out into the world as before. A young student named Vincenzio Viviani, only seventeen years old, was invited to move into the house as an assistant. He joined us and proved to be a serious young man, intelligent and helpful, very intent on his duties. Galileo spent many an hour talking through his correspondence, and Viviani wrote it all down.

  In a letter to Diodati, Galileo said,

  This universe, which I with my astonishing observations and clear demonstrations enlarged a hundred, nay, a thousandfold beyond the limits commonly seen by wise men of all centuries past, is now for me so diminished and reduced as to have shrunk to the meager confines of my own body.

  When he said gloomy things like this around the household, I would say to him, “It could be worse.”

  “Worse?” he would snap. “Nothing could be worse! It would have been better to have been burned at the stake by that liar who went back on his word!”

  “I don’t think so, maestro. You wouldn’t have liked the fire.”

  “At least it would have been fast. This falling apart, one piece at a time—if only I would trip on a stair and hit my head and be gone. So leave me! Leave me or I’ll kick you. I know where you are.”

  He could tell many weeds by feel, and so continued to sit in the garden in the mornings, even when he did nothing but listen to the birds and feel the sun on his face. He got out his lute, had it repaired and re-strung, and started playing it again. As the calluses on his fingers thickened he played it more and more, repeating the songs he knew, and humming or mumbling in a hoarse baritone the words to some of them. He often played a little suite of his father’s compositions, and musical settings for Ariosto and Tasso, and long wandering melodies of his own devise. La Piera ran the house along with Geppo and the other longtime servants. Viviani served as Galileo’s amanuensis. I continued on as his personal servant. A new student, Torricelli, moved in to take mathematics lessons. Things continued in their new way.

  And then Alessandra Buonamici came back. She showed up in the spring of 1640, announcing that her husband’s diplomatic assignment had unexpectedly brought him back to Florence. She stood there in his room; she touched him on the arm, let him touch her on the face. “Yes, I’m here,” she said.

  AGAIN GALILEO WAS SAVED BY A STRANGER appearing at a crux in his life. This time it was Alessandra, ne
arly forty now, childless, tall, and rotund. She came to visit almost every day, accompanied only by a servant or two. She brought with her gifts for him that he could feel, or eat: rolls of yarn, different fabrics of linen, dried fruits, scraps of blacksmith metal, polygons made of woodblock, chunks of coral. He would sit forward in his chair and rub swatches between his fingers and against his cheek, or stack cubes, and tell her about cohesion and the strength of wood.

  I long to talk to you, he wrote when she could not come. It is so rare to find women who can speak so sensibly as you.

  She replied even more boldly: I have been trying to find the way to come there and stay for a day of conversation with you, without creating scandal. She suggested fantasy plans, things that could never happen but that she knew would please him to imagine—that they might go boating on the Arno, that she might slip a small carriage into Arcetri to spirit him away to Prato for several days together, and so on. Patience! she wrote.

  I have never doubted your affection for me, he wrote back, certain that you, in this short time that I may have left, know how much affection flows in me for you. He invited her to come with her husband and stay for four days. Somehow this never happened.

  Life at Il Gioièllo contracted in on itself, orchestrated by La Piera and performed by the entire household, with the youth Viviani almost always at the maestro’s side, to the point where Galileo sometimes ordered him to go away. Many days he only wanted to lie on the divan in the shade, or sprawl in the dirt of the garden, tugging up weeds. You could see that groveling in the soil, embracing it, was a comfort to him. He curled on his side in a posture just like Arcangela’s.

  But he was famous all over Europe, because of his books, and the trial. Foreign travelers often inquired if they could come to visit him. He always agreed to these requests, which flattered his vanity, and also broke the daily routine and helped pass the time. He only requested that the visitors be discreet, and generally they were, at least beforehand. After they left, they often wanted to tell the world the story of their visit. That was gratifying. He was still a figure on the great stage of Europe—an old lion, defanged and blind, but a lion still. To the Protestants he was yet another image of the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, which was not a role that he liked to play; he felt he was a victim not of the Church but of corruption within the Church, as he tried to make clear if he got the chance.

  I do not hope for any relief, he wrote to a supporter named Peiresc, and that is because I have committed no crime. I might hope for a pardon if I had erred. With the guilty a prince can show forbearance, but against one wrongfully sentenced when he is innocent, it is expedient to uphold rigor, so as to put up a show of strict lawfulness. This was like something out of Machiavelli, a writer Galileo knew well. Galileo had met his prince too, and suffered the consequent tortures just as Machiavelli had.

  Apparently a translated edition of the Dialogo had been published in England; Galileo had no idea, until Englishmen began to appear at his gate. One of the first of them, a Thomas Hobbes, told him of the translated edition and then wanted to talk philosophy, and get Galileo to say things he didn’t want to say. Because they conversed in Latin (and the English way of pronouncing Latin was very strange, like something he seemed to recall), he was able to bend the talk to topics he was comfortable discussing. Thus Hobbes went away without any denunciations or blasphemies to quote.

  A younger pair of Englishmen were more congenial, at least at first. They were traveling around Europe together: a Thomas Hedtke and one John Milton. Hedtke was the more pleasant of the two, but Milton did most of the talking, for along with excellent Latin he spoke a mangled but comprehensible version of Tuscan Italian, a very unusual ability for a foreigner. He talked a lot; he did not appear to have heard that proverb for travelers in foreign lands, that one should proceed with “i pensieri stretti e il viso sciolto,” closed thoughts and an open face. He declared that he was good with languages, and knew how to speak Spanish, French, Tuscan, Latin, and Greek. And he had a thousand questions, most of them leading questions, intended to make the pope look bad, and also the Jesuits, for whom he seemed to harbor a particular dislike, which was funny given how jesuitical he was.

  “Do you not agree that the judgment rendered against you was an attempt to assert that the Roman Church has the authority to say what you can think and what you can’t think?”

  “Not so much what you can think, as what you can say.”

  “Precisely! They claim the right to decide who gets to speak!”

  “Yes. But every society has such rules.”

  This silenced the young man for a time. He was sitting on a stool drawn up next to Galileo’s divan. Hedtke had gone out to the garden with Galileo’s old student Carlo Dati, who had brought the two Englishmen to Arcetri. Now Milton crouched by his side, asking questions. Were the Medicis tyrants, were they poisoners, did they believe what Machiavelli taught? Did Galileo believe what Machiavelli taught? Did Galileo know who was the greatest Italian poet after the incomparable Dante? Because Milton did—it was Tasso! Did Galileo know what huge benefits were conferred by chastity?

  “I haven’t been noticing those,” Galileo muttered.

  “And even more so, the benefits conferred by that sage and serious doctrine, virginity?”

  Galileo was at a loss for words. He saw again that there were men who were both highly intelligent and deeply stupid. He had been that way himself for much of his life, and so now he was a bit more tolerant than he would have been in years past. He kept steering the conversation back to Dante, for lack of a better subject. He did not want to hear any more about the vast superiority of the reformed Protestant faith, which was the youth’s favorite topic. So he talked about Dante and what made him so great. “Anyone can make hell interesting,” he said. “It’s purgatory that matters.”

  Milton laughed at this. “But there is no such thing as purgatory!”

  “Yours is a hard creed. You Protestants are not quite human, it seems to me.”

  “You still undertake to defend the Church of Rome?”

  “Yes.”

  The young man could not agree with this, as he explained again at length. Galileo tried to divert him by saying that he had studied as a youth to be a monk, but then had noticed a lamp in the cathedral swinging overhead after being lit by an acolyte, and by timing the period of the swings with his pulse, had confirmed that no matter how widely the lamp swung in its pendular motion, it always took the same amount of time to cross the arc. “As I saw the truth of the situation, I rang like a struck bell.”

  “This was God, telling you to leave the Church of Rome.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Galileo drank more wine, and felt the old sadness sweep through him like any other pendulum, steady in its cosmic beat. He grew sleepy. In the way of any garden-variety fool, the priggish young virtuoso was overstaying his welcome. Galileo stopped listening to him, drifted off into a light sleep. He came to at something the youth said about blindness being a judgment on him.

  “The blind still see inside,” he said. “And those who see are sometimes the blindest of all.”

  “Not if they shield themselves by their own prayers, made direct to God.”

  “But prayers are not always answered.”

  “They are if you have prayed for the right thing.”

  Galileo couldn’t stifle a laugh. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. “I want what Jove wants.”

  There were no words that would reach the youth. You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation.

  The young foreigner sat there nattering on in his bizarre Italian. For a while Galileo dozed off, and dreamed of plunging through space. When he woke again the youth had gone silent, and Galileo was not eve
n sure he was still in the room. “Pride leads to a fall,” he murmured, “you should remember that. I know, I was proud. But I fell. My mother stole my eyes. And the favorite has to fall, in the end, to make room for more. The fall is our life, our flight. If I could say it properly, you would understand. You would. Because I had such dreams. I had such a daughter.”

  But the disagreeable youth apparently had already slipped away.

  So Galileo fell back asleep. When he woke again, the house was silent around him, but he could feel that someone stood in his doorway. The person stepped toward him furtively, and he knew it was not the Englishman. He patted the divan. She lay down beside him, the back of her head against his knee, wordless and unforgiving. They lay there like that for a long time.

  Eventually he fell asleep again, and while asleep he had a dream. He dreamed he was in church, worshipping with his family and friends. Around him stood Sarpi and Sagredo and Salviati, and Cesi and Castelli and Piccolomini, and Alessandra and Viviani and Mazzoleni; and at the back, Cartophilus and La Piera. At his side stood Maria Celeste. Near the altar he saw that Marina and Maculano were conferring over something, as Maculano prepared the service. Overhead swung the lamp he had seen as a boy, still making its pendulum, and now there was a little spring at the point of attachment, which at every swing gave the pendulum cord a little extra push near the fulcrum, so that the lamp would swing forever, forming a clock keeping God’s own time. That spring device was a good idea.

  The altar in this church was a big pair of his inclined planes, and all of them together under Maculano’s direction ran the experiments on falling bodies, moving the beautifully finished frames this way and that, setting balls free, timing their falls by way of water running into chalices. Marina let the balls drop, Mazzoleni grinned his gap-toothed grin, and everyone sang the hymn “All Things Move By God.” Fra Sarpi spread his arms and said, “These ripples expand far into space, and set into vibration not only strings, but also any other body that happens to have the same period,” and Sagredo said, “Sometimes a wonder is obscured by a miracle.”