I shall attempt to remove, or at least diminish, one improbability by introducing a similar or greater one, just as sometimes a wonder is diminished by a miracle.

A wonder diminished by a miracle. That had happened to him fairly often, it seemed. He had lived in a miracle.

At times these voices from the page said things with a mysterious power to move him.

Please observe, gentlemen, how facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

He had seen that, he felt; seen the cloak drop, and beauty stand forth. An image evoked by the phrase pushed at the back of his eyes, naked and simple, not seen but almost seen. A beauty like Marina, but taller.

Later a strange sensation struck him again, very powerfully, when he read over a passage in which Salviati and Sagredo began talking about musical strings vibrating either in time or out of time, spro-porzionatamente, and Salviati suggested that within those interference patterns, every wave held secret lives. As he read over the passage, Galileo did not quite remember writing it.

A string which has been struck begins to vibrate and continues the motion as long as one hears the sound (risonanza); these ripples expand far into space, and set into vibration not only strings, but also any other body which happens to have the same period as the plucked string. The undulations of the medium are widely dispersed about the sounding body, as shown by the fact that a glass of water may be made to emit a tone merely by the friction of the fingertip upon the rim of the glass; for in this water is produced a series of regular waves. Would it not be a fine thing if one had the ability to produce waves which would persist for a long while, even months and years—even centuries?

Sagredo: Such an invention would, I assure you, command my admiration.

Salviati: The device is one which I hit upon by accident; my part consists merely in the observation of it, and in the appreciation of its value as a confirmation of something which I plunged into quite deeply.

Wave interference. The long reach across time. Something that I plunged into quite deeply. A secret at the heart of time, deep inside him…. He could not quite say it. So much was always almost seen, at the tip of the tongue. Had it ever been any different? Was it only that now he was noticing it more?

He could only keep writing.

This Discorsi, then, was to him something living and breathing. It was not the kind of book one wanted to finish. Best for it to go on and on, page after page, forever. He understood now those obsessed alchemists who wrote right into the grave, never even attempting publication. My restless brain goes grinding on, he wrote a correspondent.

Finally Diodati persuaded him to declare the book done by suggesting that it was not really done at all, but only being published in pieces, with these four parts being only the first of many to follow. This was brilliant. Diodati got a book to publish, while at the same time Galileo could still write, still live.

So the book was published. Galileo’s suggested title was:

Dialogues of Galileo Galilei, Containing Two Entire Sciences, All New and Demonstrated from Their First Principles and Elements, so That, in the Manner of Other Mathematical Elements, Roads Are Opened to Vast Fields, with Reasonings and Mathematical Demonstrations Filled with Infinite Admirable Conclusions, from Which Far More Remains to be Seen in the World Than Has Been Seen Up to the Present Time.

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.