Here I live on in a silence, frequently paying visits to the neighboring convent, where I had two daughters who were nuns and whom I dearly loved, but the eldest in particular, who was a woman of exquisite mind and singular goodness, and very fond of me. She had suffered much from ill health during my absence, and had not paid enough attention to herself. At length dysentery came on, and she died after six days’ illness, leaving me shattered and unable to speak. And by a sinister coincidence, on returning home from the convent, in company with the doctor who had just told me her condition was hopeless and that she would not survive the next day, as indeed came to pass, I found the Inquisitor’s Vicar here, who informed me of a mandate from the Holy Office in Rome that I must desist from asking for grace or they would take me back to the actual prison of the Holy Office. From which I can infer that my present confinement is to be ended only by that other one which is common to all, most narrow, and enduring forever.
To another distant acquaintance he wrote:
I feel immense sadness and melancholy, together with extreme loss of appetite. Perpetual sleeplessness makes me afraid. I am hateful to myself, and continually hear my beloved daughter calling to me.
La Piera kept the household going through the long silence. She dropped his food before him with the same absent methodical air she had when she chopped the heads off the chickens. Galileo ate as if he were dead. He too had heard the silence, which came out of an abyssal blackness. He knew now that all the wailing after his trial had been at nothing. To be distressed at the judgment of other men, over nothing more than an idea; it was absurd. Well, grief too was an idea. And as you got older, your grief grew in you. Probably there was an equation for this change in grief, a rate of acceleration. Like a dropped rock. You collect all your selves together just in time to smash to the ground, and so it all goes to waste. The dust devil falls to the ground, its whirlpool of wind gone. The atoms, the affectinos of that particular field disperse. If anything is conserved, he thought as he sat in the garden, looking at the signs of spring in all the plants, it must be in the generations that follow. Something that could be put to use. This was all that would remain in time.
One afternoon he walked down to the convent and found Suor Arcan-gela. She was startled to see him and turned her face away.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’ve brought some candied citron.” And he sat on a bench in the sun. She would not speak, but the citron slices were hard to resist. Eventually she sat on the far end of the bench. She took the slices and ate them, all the while looking the other way. After a while she curled on the bench like a cat, her back to him, but in such a way that the back of her head just touched the side of his leg. It seemed she fell asleep.
Galileo sat there looking at the strawberry plants at his feet. The new leaves came out of the ground neatly folded. Any new leaf was a remarkable thing when considered closely. The little plant emerged from brown mud that was granulated and unpromising. Wet dirt, nothing more. And yet there were the new leaves. Earth, water, air, the subtle fire of sunlight, driving the life into everything. Something in the mix of these, and something beyond them … For a long time he sat there staring, feeling on the edge of understanding, of seeing things clearly. The feeling swelled in him as he realized that it was an emotion he felt all the time, that his entire life had been one protracted case of presque vu. Almost seen! Almost understood! The blue sky quivered with this feeling.
On his way home he stopped to see the abbess. Recently Arcangela had been leaving the convent and wandering Arcetri and the country lanes around the village, until someone noticed and she had to be retrieved. Now Galileo said to the abbess, “Just let her go if she goes. She’ll always come back in time for supper. If she doesn’t I’ll send one of the boys out to get her.”
THEN, BECAUSE HE WAS OLD, because he had lost everything and all the people he loved most had died, because life had no meaning and there was nothing left to do to fill his preposthumous hours, he occupied his time writing up his results from the experiments he and Mazzoleni had performed in Padua, forty years before.
To get him started, we put his old folios out on the table under the arcade, as if taking them out there to be dusted. Sometimes he would turn the pages, and then with a heavy sigh he would take up a pen and jot down some notes, or transcribe some conversation going on in his head. It was only a way to pass the time before death took him; at least at first.
Then somehow it got its hooks into him, and made him sweat and grunt in the old way. Work, work, work; the work of thinking, the work of understanding something that had never been understood before; this was the hardest work in the world. And he liked that. He needed that. Arcangela still would not speak to him, even though she sometimes wandered up to the house, skulking around the gate like a stray dog. The Lady Alessandra was still in Germany, and his letters to her could only be so long, especially when so much of what he wanted to say to her could not be written down, but only translated into comments on gardening and the weather. After the mornings when he wrote those letters, the hours hung heavy on him. And yet the book of his life was still there to be written. So, hey to.
Almost all of the material had been in his mind, or at least in his notes, since before 1609, when the arrival of the telescope had upended his life. He had noted and sketched the various raw propositions during the intense collaboration with Mazzoleni in the Padua workshop, thinking at the time that he would write them up formally in book form during the following school year. Now it was thirty years since he had stopped, and some of the notes had been transcribed by Guiducci and Arrigheti, but most of the notebooks he had not even opened again since that time. Some pages he even had serious trouble understanding. It was like reading the handwriting of another man; and he supposed that was actually the case, because now he was only revising the work of an entirely different Galileo, a younger and more nimble mind. What if all those past selves don’t count, he thought as he looked at the notebooks, no matter how much they wrote down? What if the person you are now is really the only person that matters? Because that’s how it is.
So he worked, and lost himself in geometries. The horrible year 1634 passed. A whole crop grew in the fields, there was weed after weed to kill, and after a while he grew unable to recognize his grief as something discrete. It was now simply the world, the way things were.
Pages piled up. He kept using the format of dialogues between Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio. This little defiance was a good sign, we all thought; using those names had not been forbidden, the dialogue form had not been forbidden, and yet they would remind everyone of the book that had been forbidden. Of course it was likely they would ban this one before it was ever published. The Dialogo and the Discorsi—two very dangerous books, being so real.
He found it interesting to read over his old notes and diagrams. As he did so, he could not help but recall also all the other things that had happened in Padua when he had been writing these pages. Eighteen long years of teaching mathematics to the students at Il Bo and living in the house on Via Vignali—lecturing, tutoring, working on the military compass, inventing new devices, trying to determine various qualities and properties in the workshop demonstrations. Here was a page on the weight of air as compared to water, for instance. Then also taking the barge out to Venice, to eat and drink and talk with his friends, and play with the 248 girls, and later to see Marina. It was all a jumble, like a kind of carnival inside him, and he could not in fact associate any given experiment with any given year, it was all as one and of a piece: Padua. It was strange how that time felt like it had happened just yesterday, and yet also was separated from him by an abyss of a million years—yet another example of time’s odd doubled aspect. Strange also that he had fought with such fury to escape that life, when it had turned out to be precisely the happiest time he would ever have! How could he have been so stupid? How could he not have known what he had? There was a deep stupidity in ambition, a blindness in it, the way it was so serious, so unplayful. It failed to value the moment, and so failed to recognize happiness, even though that was the most important consideration of all. It failed to value the ringing feeling that had come over him, as when he saw a proof, or on that first night with Marina, or sometimes on the dawn barges back over the lagoon to terra-firma. These were the moments that mattered.