Indeed the time was out of joint, things blooming out of season. Really there was nothing but asynchronous anachronism. Time was a manifold full of exclusions and resurrections, fragments and the spaces between fragments, eclipses and epilepsies, isotopies all superposed on one another and interweaving in an anarchic vibrating tapestry. And since to relive it at one point was not to relive it at another, the whole was unreadable, permanently beyond the mind. The present was a laminate event, and obviously the isotopies could detach from each other, slightly or greatly. He was caught in a mere splinter of the whole, no matter how entangled with the rest of it. Caught in what his poor brilliant daughter called the darkness of this short winter of our mortal life, the words of her letter jumping off the page, the phrase something he had always read, like a prayer said every night of his life. Each moment reiterated. The darkness of this short winter of our mortal life.
He followed himself out into the garden. The world became as it was as it was. The day would be what it had always been. Sun struck the back of his neck. The great Saint Augustine had also felt this pseudoiterative feeling, he would notice in his desperate reading. Had the deepest of all the Christian philosophers also had an encounter with the stranger? No one else Galileo knew had ever written about time the way Augustine did:
Which way soever then this secret fore-perceiving of things to come, be; that only can be seen, which is. But what now is, is not future, but present. When then things to come are said to be seen, it is not themselves, which as yet are not, (that is, which are to be) it is rather their causes perchance or their signs that are seen, which already are. Therefore they are not future but present to those who now see that from which the future, being fore-conceived in the mind, is foretold. Which fore-conceptions again now are; and those who foretell those things, do behold the conceptions present before them.
That was right there in The Confessions, Book XI. Augustine made no conclusions in the long feverish chapter that held his meditation on time, but only confessed to his own confusion. Of course he was confused, and so was Galileo. These thoughts had always been there, and now he read them just after they generated themselves spontaneously in his head. It gave him a headache to read like that.
But in the garden he would sit still, and think. It was possible, there, to collapse all the potentialities to a single present. This moment had a long duration. Such a blessing; he could feel it in his body, in the sun and air and earth sustaining him. Blue sky overhead—it was the part of the rainbow that was always visible, stretching all the way across the dome of sky. Sitting there, he knew he would go back inside and eat, and try to write to Castelli. He was going to shit without shitting his guts out his second asshole. It was going to hurt. He would be standing at the edge of his field at sunset, watching the last light burnish the tops of the ripe barley, praying for the consolation of the sky. There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future. He would precede and follow his own footsteps. It would happen later, as he had already seen. It had already happened, as he would see later. Finally, one spring morning just after sunrise, Galileo roared furiously from his bedroom. What inspired his defiance of the pseudoiterative no one knew, and to him it was still just a matter of obeying the compulsion of the now; but after the trembling happy boys had helped him to dress, cringing at his every move, each of which looked like the start of a blow, which they would have welcomed to see even as they dodged, he hobbled out to the narrow terrace that overlooked Florence in the valley below them to the north. Down there the Duomo stood above the sea of tile rooftops like something from a different world, bigger and more geometrical. Like a little moon come down to earth, or like the clouds rafting over it.
Over his shoulder he growled to La Piera, “Bring me breakfast. Then have the boys move my desk out here. No doubt I have letters to catch up on. I’ll just have to follow myself out there and work through it. Hopefully it will feel like being a scribe making copies. Someone else can do the thinking.”
Everyone in Bellosguardo ignored his grousing, pleased by his actions. The maestro had returned to life—surly life, it was true, ill-tempered, whining life—but better than the miserable limbo of the winter. He would spend much of the next few weeks writing fifteen or twenty letters a day; it always happened that way when he snapped out of his funks. He was sick so often that even his recovery period was a ritual they all knew.
“Send me Cartophilus,” he said to La Piera, when she brought out food and wine at the end of a long day of scribbling and cursing.
When he had finished eating, staring at each biscuit and capon leg as if it were entirely new to him, the ancient servant stood before him.
Galileo surveyed him wearily. “Tell me more about déjà vu.”
“There isn’t much to say. It’s a French term, obviously. The French language has always been very analytical and precise about mental states, and they will work out these terms. Déjà vu is the feeling something has happened before. Presque vu is the feeling that you almost understand something, usually something important, but you don’t quite.”
“I feel that all the time.”
“But mystically, I mean. A really big existential tip of the tongue moment.”
“Pretty often, even so. I feel like that pretty often.”
“And then jamais vu is a sudden loss of comprehension of anything, even just the ordinary day.”
“I’ve felt that too,” Galileo said thoughtfully. “I’ve felt all of those.”
“Yes. We all do. When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal.”
“That’s for sure. Right now I am stuck in it all the time.”
Cartophilus nodded. “Why didn’t she give you the amnestics when she returned you?”
“There wasn’t time! I barely got out of there alive. I told you, I need to go back. Hera’s in trouble. They all are. They need an outside force to arbitrate.”
“I can’t do it without them doing their part at their end. You know.”
“I don’t know. I want you to get me back. I can’t stand this, it’s like torture. It will kill me.”
“Soon,” the old man said. “Not right now. I’ll ask again, but there hasn’t been a response. It may be some while. But that won’t matter in the end, if you see what I mean.”
Galileo glared at him. “I don’t, actually.”
Cartophilus picked up an emptied platter. “You will, maestro. You will or you won’t, but nothing to be done about it now.” And he slunk away in his usual craven manner.
The latest letter from Maria Celeste had come. He will open it.
You having let the days go by, Sire, without coming to visit us, is enough to provoke some fear in me that the great love you have always shown us may be diminishing somewhat. I am inclined to believe that you keep putting off the visit because of the little satisfaction you derive from coming here, not only because the two of us, in what I suppose I would call our ineptitude, simply do not know how to show you a better time, but also because the other nuns, for other reasons, cannot keep you sufficiently amused.
“Get some food on the mule,” Galileo had snapped at the boys. “Be ready in an hour. Go.”
Galileo had long since beaten a path of his own over the hilltops between Bellosguardo and the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri. Every time he walked or rode over, he took a basket of the food he grew in Bellosguardo’s extensive gardens. For the sake of the nuns he had shifted the focus of his gardening to staple crops, so on this morning the mule was loaded down with bags of beans, lentils, wheat, and garbanzos; also zucchini, and the first of the gourds. He would add a bouquet of lupines he found in bloom around the borders of the piazza. Already it was well into spring; he had missed a lot of the year.