Galileo heaved a sigh. “I’m under a prohibition, Mazzo. Besides, I’m sick of it. All these questions from the nobility. They never stop, but to them it’s just a game. It’s banquet entertainment, you understand? Why do things float or sink? What are tides? What are sunspots? How should I know? These are impossible questions. And when you try to answer them, you can’t help but run afoul of fucking Aristotle, and thus the Jesuits and the rest of the dogs. And yet really we don’t know enough to say one way or the other. You know what it’s like—we can barely figure out how fast a ball rolls down a table! So answering these silly people’s questions just gets me in trouble.”
“But you have to do it.”
“Yes.” Galileo gave him a sharp look. “It’s my job, you mean, as court philosopher.”
“Yes. Isn’t that right?”
“I suppose it is.”
“You thought when you stopped teaching in Padua, you would be able to do anything you wanted.”
“I suppose so.”
“No one gets that, maestro.”
Another sharp look. “You impertinent old fool. I’ll send you back to the Arsenale.”
“I wish.”
“Go away or I’ll beat you. In fact, go get me Guiducci and Ar-righetti. I’ll beat them.”
These two young men, private students he had taken on as a favor to Grand Duchess Christina, joined him in the workshop where his crew had made the celatones. He showed the two youths his old folios, filled with the notes and theorems from all his work on motion in Padua. “I want you to make fair copies of these,” he told them. “We worked fast back then, and we didn’t have much paper. See, there are often several propositions per page, and on both sides. What I want you to do is move each proposition or set of calculations onto a single sheet, using one side only. If you have any questions as to what’s what, ask me. When you’re done then maybe we can make some progress on all this.”
At the same time, however, despite his fears and premonitions, his near certainty that it was a bad idea, he watched himself begin to write a treatise on the controversy concerning the comets.
Now the truth was, as he would explain in conversation when friends visited Bellosguardo, he really had been sick, and had only observed the comets when they were visible once or twice, out of curiosity. So he did not know what they were, and probably would not have known even if he had observed them more. He could only offer suppositions based on what he had heard. So on the one hand as he wrote he questioned the whole basis of the phenomenon, and wondered if a comet was merely sunlight on a disturbance in the upper atmosphere, like a night rainbow. And then also he suggested, with his usual edge, that whatever it was, it certainly did not fit any of Aristotle’s celestial categories. Along the way he could make fun of “Sarsi’s” lame logic, for Grassi had made some real howlers attempting to explain what he had no grounds for understanding. And so, as Galileo sat on his high chair before his desk, writing in the shade on the terrace in the mornings, he would add observations and arguments that made for a defense of his method of observation and experiment, of mathematical explanations. Of avoiding the why of things, and concentrating first on the what and the how. Mornings spent writing about these matters were a good distraction from everything else, and the pages piled one on the next. Sometimes it was nice to just be following yourself through the motions of the day. It certainly made writing easier.
In Sarsi I seem to discern the firm belief that in philosophizing one must support oneself upon the opinion of some famous author, as if our minds remain sterile and barren unless wedded to the reasoning of some other person. Possibly he thinks that philosophy is a book of fiction by some writer, like The Iliad or Orlando Furioso—productions in which the least important thing is whether what is written there is true. Well, Sarsi, that is not how matters stand. Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and recognize the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is completely impossible to understand a single word of it. Without these, one wanders in a dark labyrinth.
While with these concepts, on the other hand—Galileo thought but did not write, looking at his words and feeling the bulk of futurity in him—with these concepts, the universe is blasted by a light, as if a great flash has exploded in your eyes. Everything is clear, all too clear, to the point of transparency, and one walks as if in a world of glass—seeing too far, running into things not quite noticed, the present moment just one abstraction among a host of others. Hera was right; no one should know more than his moment can hold. The future inside you pushes for its release, and the pain of living with that canker is like no other pain.
There was no recourse but to try to forget. He became expert at forgetting. As part of the work of that forgetting, he wrote. To write was to live in the moment, and say what one could there, put it down and forget it, letting the rest fall away.
Once again he told the story of how he had first learned of the telescope.
In Venice, where I happened to be at the time, news arrived that a Fleming had presented to Count Maurice a glass by means of which distant objects might be seen as distinctly as if they were nearby. That was all.
Well, not exactly; not at all, in fact. But he felt defensive about it. Someday people would know. But there was nothing for it, so he returned to the demolishing of the malevolent “Sarsi.”
There is no doubt whatsoever that by introducing irregular lines Sarsi may save not only the appearance being discussed, but any other. Lines are called regular when, having a fixed and definite description, they can be defined and can have their properties listed and demonstrated. Thus the spiral, or the ellipse. Irregular lines then are those which have no determinacy whatever, but are indefinite and casual and hence undefinable. No property of such lines can be demonstrated, and in a word, nothing can be known about them. Hence to say, “Such events take place thanks to an irregular path” is the same as to say, “I do not know why they occur.” The introduction of such supposed explanations is in no way superior to the “sympathy,” “antipathy,” “occult properties,” “influences,” and other terms employed by some philosophers as a cloak for the correct reply, which would be: “I don’t know.” That reply is as much more tolerable than the others, as candid honesty is more beautiful than deceitful duplicity.
But long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.
While he was at work on this new treatise, Pope Gregory died, as expected. Galileo was not unlike many others in feeling this was foreordained and unsurprising, as if it had already happened. And over a long malarial summer, the convocation of cardinals would be held to decide on the new pope.
But this time, they couldn’t do it. They appeared to be truly deadlocked. Weeks passed, the maneuvering between the great families was intense but stalemated, and rumors in Rome and all over Italy flew like clouds of flies. It went on so long that six of the eldest cardinals died of exhaustion. Only late in August did the white puff of smoke emerge from the chimney in the Vatican.
The announcement was brought up to Bellosguardo in person by the Medici’s secretary Curzio Picchena, emerging from his coach onto the terrace resplendent in his best finery, his arms outspread, a big smile lighting his face.