The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  Upon finishing his Magdeburg tapestry, his finest, he resigned as Imperial Embroiderer, renounced the sensuous and the superficial, fled from Vienna, and came back here, to the mountains of Bohemia, where, if his father would forgive him for leaving the first time, he wanted to stay and help him pierce the heavens, the tapestry-weaver said, the astronomer told Leibniz.

  And the astronomer did forgive him. And the tapestry-weaver stayed.

  And that same night the astronomer peered through the tube, and his son wielded the quadrant, and kept an eye on the clock, and together they catalogued 9,137 stars.

  And not long after that something seemingly miraculous took place.

  “Five minutes,” said the astronomer, peering into his telescope.

  It required two regiments of Wallenstein’s men and two of Count Tilly’s to carry up the hillside the tube that arrived the next morning, this very instrument, the astronomer told Leibniz, patting the telescope, “two hundred and twenty-five feet long, per my specifications, and with the power to magnify objects that many times, a tube far longer and far more powerful than any of its predecessors.” “Who knows,” he had mused as the Sun went down, “how many stars we shall see tonight,” and his son had replied: “Who knows?” But by the time the Sun came up again they had catalogued 9,137 stars—not a single star more than they’d seen through the previous tube. Through two tubes of vastly different lengths the sky looked exactly the same. “The star catalogue was complete,” the astronomer told Leibniz. He added: “And how gratifying, how wonderful, how very providential, I thought, to complete my catalogue in my son’s presence—the very opposite of my father never completing his box in mine.” In case he had missed something up there, the astronomer did not stop in the weeks and months that followed to peer at the sky through his tube. But he had missed nothing; now and then he might see some celestial phenomenon he had not observed before, the tail, say, of a new comet, or the rings of Mars, which he was the first (“so I thought!”) to discover, as well as the rings (“so I thought!”) of Venus, but never again a new star, nor even a nebulosity that might be resolved into one. He felt less and less compelled to peer into his tube, until one day he ceased peering into it at all. Thereafter he and his son lived together in silence, just as they had when the boy was little, but it was now a different silence, a richer, warmer silence, actually an infinitely rich warm silence, there are two kinds of silence, this, the astronomer thought, was the other one. At Lützen, meanwhile, the King of Sweden was slain by a shot to the temple, Germany was saved, the war turned decisively in Ferdinand’s favor. Then years passed, and then decades, the astronomer became an old man and then a very old man, first a little bit bent over and then bent over a lot. He was one of those old men who was bent but serene, content with how he’d lived his life and what he had done in it.

  “Until one night…”

  Although he had long since stopped conducting his nocturnal observations, the sleeplessness of old age gradually returned him to the schedule of his youth, and on the night in question he lay in bed wide awake as his son snored. He experienced, Leibniz wrote, an unusual urge: to see the night sky, but to see it as he had seen it in his childhood—not through the tube, in other words, but with the naked eye. “I wanted to see with my own two eyes the New Star with which I had once tied into knots the old Aristotelians of Prague,” he told Leibniz. Quietly, without waking his son, he crept out of the observatory and gazed in stupefaction at the stars, in stupefaction and satisfaction, for those were his stars, he’d catalogued them completely, and he strolled here and there, and gazed every which way, and strolled and gazed and strolled and gazed until the moment (“Three minutes, darker and darker, it is almost upon us!”) when, out of nowhere, he collided with something soft, “with something very soft and very velvety, Herr Leibniz.” He asked Leibniz: “Do you understand?” He added: “I had to think: Am I crazy? And what was worse is I had to think: I am not crazy, there really is a bolt of very soft, very black velvet standing aloft here in the middle of the hills studded with twinkling bits of salt and quartz and other minerals!” How big, he wondered, naturally enough, is this bewildering bolt of soft black velvet? And after running his hands along it up and down and side to side he realized—“I had to think: Am I crazy?”—that it was very big indeed, that it soared high overhead and encircled the observatory completely. “This was a truly huge bolt of prettily ornamented black velvet which girdled my observatory hemispherically with a radius of precisely two hundred and thirty feet, so I determined.” He asked Leibniz: “Now do you understand? I had not yet connected this mystifying bolt of black velvet to the Empire’s victory over Gustavus Adolphus, you my dear Leibniz probably have, you probably see the link between the velvet and Lützen, you are a bright young man! Two minutes.” While the astronomer was inspecting the velvet and wondering what it was doing there, he saw that his son had now awoken, and had emerged from the observatory, and was sprinting toward him as fast as he could, and crying something unintelligible, and it was only then (“I’m not crazy but I am slow!”) that it dawned on him that his son was still the Imperial Embroiderer, had never ceased being it, that he was still Ferdinand’s loyal subject, and that this enormous vault of black velvet into which the astronomer had been made to stare for ten, twenty, thirty years: this was his son’s magnum opus, a tapestry not of the Sack of Magdeburg but of the night sky over Bohemia, rotated incrementally overhead minute by minute every night by a hidden crew of astronomically astute assistants. With a few exceptions—the rings of Venus!—the tapestry was remarkably accurate, his son must have had an intimate and sophisticated understanding of the astronomer’s work in order to weave it, “it suggested to me a prolonged period of time during which he had done nothing but study my work, scrutinize it, live with it, in it. I would almost have been proud of him for what he had made, were it not for the purpose to which he had put it.” That is what the astronomer was thinking when his son ran up to him, dug his fingers into his sockets, and tore out his eyes, so he could never again demand from the Emperor another tube. The astronomer burst into laughter: “Of course, when I came to and discovered that my eyes were gone, he tried to convince me that I like some latter-day Oedipus had plucked them out myself, with my own two hands! Sixty seconds.”

  Since that time he had lived alone apart from the company of cats, of Linus now—“Where are you, Linus, old friend, the world is drawing to a close,” said the astronomer on his hands and knees beneath the armillary sphere, where he found Linus lazily sprawled out to maximal length and buried his face briefly in what he identified as “the softest part of the cat,” his underbelly—and before Linus Linus’s mother, Urania, in whose sensory organs, so different from his own, he developed a keen interest. “Forty-five seconds!” He in his newfound blindness had bumped into things all the time, she even at night never did, she smelled him all the time, he smelled her almost never. “It is the same with Linus: he is always smelling me, I almost never him.” It was considerations such as these that moved him, one night, years after his son had torn out his eyes and torn down the enormous tapestry and returned to Vienna, to peer once again, without quite knowing why, into his tube. And what the astronomer saw there astonished him. For he saw not his usual blackness but actually the very same stars he had seen back before he’d been blinded. Through the tube, the night sky looked as it always had! The astronomer said: “And I realize: from deep down inside my head I am peering out at the inner surface of the outer wall of my head, if that makes sense. Of my head, I mean, not yours, and not anyone else’s either. I realize: Aristotle was not wrong to posit his celestial spheres, it is true we are not in the infinite cosmos of Democritus, we are bound, it is true, by something, but in positing fifty-five spheres Aristotle posited fifty-four too many of them! In my much simpler system there is only one sphere. The curvature of the sky is the curvature of my skull. Ten seconds.” He stood now beside his telescope with one arm resting upon it. He said: “And as for th
e stars in the sky, Herr Leibniz, basically I had blasted them up there myself, onto the inner wall of my own skull, boom, boom, if that makes sense. That is why in my heart of hearts I call this instrument of mine neither the telescope nor even the astral tube but actually the astral cannon…”

  Then he cried: “Now! Now! Look! Look!”

  It was noon.

  * * *

  AND THE ASTRONOMER ushered Leibniz onto the three-legged stool, and with a firm hand on the back of the young philosopher’s skull he pressed Leibniz’s eye to the eyepiece. And Leibniz looked through it. The astronomer cried: “It is dark, yes? Absolutely dark, yes? You see that, do you not? You confirm it?” And though Leibniz, who’d grown oddly fond of the lonely old lunatic, had decided to tell him (“What would be the harm?”) that he saw the eclipse whether or not he did in fact see it, he was amazed to see that it really was dark, the Moon really had come between the Sun and the Earth, he would not have to lie. “I see it!” Leibniz exclaimed. “Yes, I see it, I see the eclipse, it is pitch-black! Oh, how strange it is, and how beautiful!” And very near his ear the astronomer said: “And just like that, it is over.” But although the forecasted four seconds had indeed elapsed, and then five seconds, and then six, it was still dark through the telescope, absolutely dark. And Leibniz (“I am not crazy,” he wrote, “but I am slow”) now realized the obvious, which is that the telescope was broken. He lifted his eyes from it and looked at the sliver of sky visible through the warped slat of the window blind. It was bright and blue. Then he peered through the telescope again. There it was still dark, and absolutely so. “I decided to say nothing to the old man.” But when Leibniz turned to the astronomer, he wasn’t there. Then Leibniz noticed that the candle had gone out, smoke now rose from it, it had been snuffed out it seems by a breeze blowing through one of the little windows overlooking the void, which had been shut until now but which now was wide open, and through which, it was not hard to deduce, the astronomer had just flung himself. It seemed he had leapt with his ledger in hand, and for a moment Leibniz thought he had taken Linus with him also. But, as Leibniz illustrates in a final diagram on the final page, the cat lay under the armillary sphere still, in the same position as before, though he had lifted his head a little, “not to look at the window out of which his master had fallen” (so the caption reads) “but to sniff with interest at the smoke from the candle.”

  * * *

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON Leibniz embarked on his return to Germany, first by foot, then by horse, and finally by carriage, wondering all the while if he had profited at all from lending his ear to a tale so mad or if he had merely squandered a part of his brief time on Earth. The incident must, however, have had some effect on him, for by the time he neared the gates of Leipzig he had resolved to abandon academia and to pursue his fortune as a man of letters, and he told the coachman not to stop there. Not long afterward he was appointed Privy Counselor of Justice in the court of the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, where in autumn 1666 and winter 1667 he composed this account. He would not have written it, he informed the editor of the Philosophical Transactions, in my translation, were it not for the fact, which disquieted him at first but which he later found apt and even amusing, that in every town he passed through from Saxony to the Rhineland no one spoke of anything but the total eclipse that had occurred a few weeks earlier, at noon on the thirtieth of June, and which had plunged Germany for four seconds into darkness. “If we assume,” Leibniz writes, “that Central Europe is not all in cahoots,” then he himself, with his eye to a broken telescope, had been perhaps the only person on the continent not to see it.

  ALSO BY ADAM EHRLICH SACHS

  Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of the collection Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems, which was a semifinalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and n+1, among other publications, and he was named a 2018 NEA Literature Fellow. He has a degree in the history of science from Harvard, where he was a member of The Harvard Lampoon. He lives in Pittsburgh. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Also by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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  Copyright © 2019 by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

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  First edition, 2019

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71996-8

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  Thank you to Molly Atlas, Jeremy M. Davies, Lauren Roberts, Maris Dyer, Claire Nozieres, Enrichetta Frezzato, Karolina Sutton, the Rohr family and the Jewish Book Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Nina and Tatyana.