Galileo's Dream (27 page)

Over the years the household had learned to deal with these paradoxical rapid shifts. But this time was the worst ever.

The villa in Bellosguardo was at least a good place to be hypochondri-acal. On its hill, with a good prospect down onto the city, one could sit and rest, and observe the valley of tile rooftops and the great Duomo that appeared to sail east in the midst of a fleet. Villa del Segui, the House of the Pursuit (or the Pursued). He had signed a five-year lease for a hundred scudi a year. La Piera ran the place and disposed of everything to her own satisfaction. She and the whole household enjoyed the not very drafty building and its expansive grounds. It was a good house, and with it their livings were secure.

Giovanfrancesco Sagredo came over from Venice to visit his sick friend in the new home he had not seen yet, and this got Galileo out of
bed and out into his new gardens, which were extensive and not too overgrown. Sagredo walked beside him and commiserated with him about Bellarmino's prohibition, never once saying “I told you so” about his Roman troubles, while also frequently congratulating him on the new house and grounds. Sagredo was a sanguine man, a rare combination of joy and wisdom. How he loved life. In the three years Galileo had taught him in Padua, Galileo had barged into Venice to stay with him at his pink palazzo often, and come to love Francesco's calm enthusiasm for everything. He ate and drank with a will, swam in the Grand Canal, conducted experiments in magnetism and thermometry tended his menagerie like the abbot of a monastery of beasts; and was always carefree about the task of the moment.

“This is a beautiful place,” he said now. “Look at how you can use the little barn as your workshop, and from there have a view onto the city! What a prospect. You can fly over the people whose lives you will be changing forever by the work in your shop.”

“I don't know,” Galileo groused, unwilling to be satisfied. Like a lot of melancholics, he could ape a sanguine manner in a sanguine person's company, but he trusted Francesco enough to reveal his true feelings. “I have this awful feeling of being gagged. I shouldn't let it bother me, but it does.”

Afterward, recalling Galileo's moaning and groaning, Sagredo wrote to him:
Vivere et laeteri; Hoc est enim donum Dei. Live and enjoy; this is a gift from God
. Later he wrote again on the same theme:
Philosophize comfortably in your bed and leave the stars alone. Let fools be fools, let the ignorant plume themselves on their ignorance. Why should you court martyrdom for the sake of winning them from their folly? It is not given to everyone to be among the elect. I believe the universe was made for my service, not I for the universe. Live as I do and you will be happy
.

That was probably true, but Galileo couldn't do it. He needed to work; without work he tended to go mad. But now the Copernican theory lay at the base of all he was interested in, and he was forbidden to discuss it. And Galileo had been Copernicanism's chief advocate—in Italy for sure, and really in Europe generally, Kepler being so betan-gled—so without him, it wouldn't go anywhere. Everyone understood his silence on the matter to be the result of a specific warning to him, no matter what the written testimonial from Bellarmino said. It was not as if he could whip it out every time he met someone and say, I was
not really rebuked, see? And of course much of the tale-telling was happening behind his back anyway, as he well knew. Yet he could not reply to them, for there was a crowd of vigilant enemies all ready to leap on anything he might publish or write privately, or even speak aloud. For the spies were everywhere, and the air of Florence was thick with sacerdotal menace.

It was obvious to all that he was on a short leash. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. In the past he had been made happy by opposition, for that meant opponents trampled in debate, gloriously thrashed by his deadly combination of reason and wit. Now that was gone. “I am forbidden to pursue the truth!” he whined pompously to his friends and his household. “Forbidden by vague, confused, and completely unnecessary strictures of a Church in which I am a member in good standing, a true believer. And it isn't even the Church as represented by the pope that is persecuting me, for he met with me and gave me his blessing, but rather a cabal of envious, lying, secret enemies, who have harmed the Church with their poison even more than they have harmed me! There is no hatred like that of ignorance for knowledge. Because ignorance could know too, if it wanted to, but it's too damned lazy!” He went on like this, reciting his entire rosary of resentment many times a day, until the household grew heartily sick of it, and of him. And he grew sick of himself. He wanted to work. He wrote to a correspondent:
Nature likes to work, generate, produce, and dissolve always and everywhere. These metamorphoses are her highest achievements. Who therefore wants to fix a limit for the human mind? Who wants to assert that everything which is knowable in the world is already known?

Eventually he got bored even with his anger, and turned his attention to other things. He went out into the garden in the mornings—always a sign of returning sanity. He wrote long letters through the afternoons. Only on the clearest nights did he gaze at the stars, as he had so religiously before the trip to Rome, and now when he did it seemed he was in the grip of a compulsion to punish himself, as the sights he saw through the telescope only caused him to moan and curse his fate. It was like pushing at a sore tooth with your tongue.

He would sit on his stool looking through his latest telescope,
thinking through the night. Once it occurred to him that as there was no natural longitudinal equivalent of the equator, the Earth's zero meridian for longitude ought to be designated as running right through the place in the world most aware of the Earth as a planet, meaning his house, or even his telescope, or his mind.
“I
am the zero meridian of this world,” he muttered irritably. “That's what makes these bastards so envious.”

By day he tried to focus on other matters. Letters came in from old students, suggesting questions and projects to pursue. As the months passed, he worked with varying low levels of enthusiasm on many things: magnetism; the condensation of water; luminous stones; the proper way to price a horse; the strength of materials, an old interest; and the probabilities involved in the casting of dice, a new interest. In this field the quickness of his intuition was startling, but he only scowled at Cartophilus after a day of working on the matter. “An ugly feeling,” he said darkly, “to already know what you know.” At this Cartophilus skulked away, and Galileo went back to work on probability, then on a new kind of post digger. Anything but astronomy.

Mornings were best. He wandered his new gardens and the newly-planted orchard and vineyard like a retired professor, chatting with Virginia and giving her errands, like planting things or running fruit into the kitchen, or sitting beside him and weeding together. Livia would not come out of the house. Vincenzio too had come to live with them once La Piera had arrived, but he was an unsatisfactory boy, balky and lazy. The children's mother was now out of their life; she had married a Paduan merchant named Bartoluzzi, to Galileo's great relief.

But he had new problems to worry about. And he was once again becoming obsessed with money. He was always looking for ways to make more, as the income from Cosimo was a fixed sum of a thousand crowns per year, and once again his finances were skating the edge of debt. He sat at a big table under the arcade of the villa and answered correspondence, often complaining to old friends or students, or his fellow scholars in the Academy of Lynxes.

One afternoon a knock came at the gate, and who was ushered in but Marc'Antonio Mazzoleni.

“Maestro,” Mazzoleni said, his raffish grin a little more gap-toothed, a little more crooked. “I need a job.”

“So do I,” Galileo said. He regarded the old mechanician curiously. “How have you been?”

Mazzoleni shrugged.

When Galileo had first hired him out of the Arsenale, Mazzoleni had been shockingly poor, a single bag containing his entire household. Galileo had had to buy clothes for his family, who turned up in tatters. What he had been up to since Galileo's move, Galileo had no idea; he had left Venice and Padua behind and never looked back. He had given up making his compasses, and Mazzoleni had never inquired about keeping that business going. Perhaps the old man had been grinding lenses in the manufacturies. Anyway here he was, looking a little bit desperate.

“All right,” Galileo said. “You're hired.”

That was a good day. About a week later, Galileo banged open the doors of the little unused barn next to the villa's stable, and declared it the new workshop. They patched the roof, a big worktable was knocked together, other tables were made from planks and sawhorses, and the boxes filled with his workbooks and papers were brought out from the main house and arrayed on shelves, as before. Soon his sketches and calculations began to litter the table and the floor around it. The days began as of old:

“Mat—zo—len—iiiiiii!”

The maestro was back to work. Everyone in Bellosguardo sighed with relief.

As the pope and his Inquisition had forbidden all discussion of the Copernican theory, naturally Galileo's first public act once he had gotten on his feet again was to announce to the world a way of using the moons of Jupiter to determine longitude. This stayed within the letter of the prohibition, while defiantly reminding people of his great telescopic discoveries. And it seemed like it could be a device of great practical application to navies and seafarers of all kinds. It also put to use the hundreds of nights he had spent looking at Jupiter and plotting its moons' orbits. With this dogged effort, extended over years, he had managed to time the orbits so precisely that he could construct tables that predicted their locations for many months into the future.
With those tables he had therefore a kind of clock, visible from anywhere on Earth, as long as you had a good enough telescope. As with any clock you could trust to be accurate, you could tell how far away you were in longitude from Rome by the discrepancy between local time and the Roman times listed in the ephemerides he could write for the Jovian moons.

Mazzoleni's gap-toothed grin greeted the first explanation of this. “I think I get it,” he said.

Galileo slapped him on the side of the head. “Of course you get it—and if you can get it, anyone can!”

“True. Maybe make a demonstration with little balls, to make it easier to understand.”

“Bah.” Although that started him thinking about a kind of astrolabe.

The first potential customer to show interest in such a device was the military attaché of King Philip III of Spain. When he came over from Genoa, in the company of the Tuscan ambassador to Spain, Count Orso d'Elci, Galileo described the possibilities for such a device enthusiastically. Everyone nautical agreed that determining longitude was the most important outstanding problem in seafaring navigation, and if it were solved it would provide a service of inestimable value (although a fee could be named). Come to Genoa, the Spanish officer said in reply, and give my colleagues there a demonstration.

Galileo prepared for the meeting with his usual thoroughness. It was not unlike his demonstration of the telescope to the Venetian senate. A bit more technical, he admitted to Mazzoleni. His artisan carefully did not point out that his experiences with the military compass had never supported his belief that a computing device could help make people more intelligent than they really were. Something in Mazzoleni's face must have conveyed the thought to the maestro, however, because he decided that two devices would be needed—one mainly to remind people of how the Jovian system worked, and what the tables were describing. Together they constructed in the new workshop a thing that he called a “jovilabe,” much like an astrolabe, the usefulness of which was long established. The new brass device was set on a handsome solid tripod: it held a ring set flat, marked by degrees around its edge, and connected by an elaborate armature to a
smaller disk that moved through the signs of the zodiac and contained tables for each of Jupiter's moons. It was a beautiful thing, displaying all that he had learned in his observations of the Jovian system.

“But you still will need to be able to see Jupiter and his wives from a ship at sea,” Mazzoleni said. “Bouncing on the billowing waves, dodging whales and enemy cannonballs and who knows what. Who's going to have their hands free to do the looking?”

“Good point.”

The solution to that problem was so complex that he went over to Pisa to get some technical advice from his old associates in its little Arsenale. But in the end, as so often in the past, most of his real help came from the ingenious Mazzoleni. Together they built Galileo's most complicated contraption to date, an object he called a “celatone.” Every time Mazzoleni looked at it, he cackled. It was a bronze and copper helmet, with several telescopes attached to it, each of which could be rotated on armatures until it was in front of the eyes of the person wearing the helmet, giving sharp views of sights at various distances. One looked where one wanted by turning one's head, and one's hands therefore remained free, to steer a ship or do anything else.

Galileo showed this beauty off to the court in Florence, and one of his old enemies there, Giovanni de Medici, was so impressed he declared it a more important invention than the telescope itself. It could be of crucial help in battles at sea, he declared.

With these new devices perfected, Galileo went to Genoa to speak to the Spanish officials. Whether he was aware that Pope Paul at that moment was trying more and more desperately to stay neutral in the growing crisis between Spain and France, no one could tell. Sometimes Galileo ignored things on purpose; other times he was simply oblivious.

He met with the officials in the great hall of the Genovan palazzo that the Spanish had rented, under north windows that provided excellent light. Galileo unrolled the large sheets of parchment on which he had drawn more of his characteristic diagrams, their elegant circles only slightly marred by malfunctions of his compass-quill, their converging lines drawn straight with the help of a rule or a plumb, the page inscribed everywhere with his neatest script, with all its incomprehensible
abbreviations and capital letters. The Spanish officers crowded around the table.