Galileo's Dream (48 page)
Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
But he wrote one last passage to add to
Il Saggiatore
before sending it off for publication in Rome. The added passage was a curious thing, unlike anything he had written before:
Once upon a time, in a very lonely place, there lived a man endowed by nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating mind. For a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed, and he observed with great admiration the happy method by which they could transform at will the very air they breathed into a variety of sweet songs.
One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his house, and being unable to connect it with anything but some small bird, he set out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he found a shepherd boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while moving his fingers about the wood, thus drawing from it a variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by quite a different method. Puzzled, but impelled by his natural curiosity, he gave the boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to solitude.
The very next day he happened to pass by a small hut within which he heard similar tones, and in order to see whether this was a flute or a bird he went inside. There he found a boy who was holding a bow in his right hand and sawing upon some fibers stretched over a hollowed piece of wood such that he drew from this a variety of notes, and most melodious ones too, without any blowing. Now you who participate in this man's thoughts and share his curiosity may judge of his astonishment. Yet finding himself now to have two unanticipated ways of producing notes and melodies, he began to perceive that still others might exist.
His amazement was increased when upon entering a temple he heard a sound, and upon looking behind the gate discovered that it came from the hinges as he opened it. Another time, led by curiosity, he entered an inn expecting to see someone lightly bowing the strings of a violin, and instead saw a man rubbing his fingertip around the rim of a goblet and drawing forth a pleasant tone from that. Then he observed that wasps, mosquitoes, and flies do not form single notes by breathing, as did the birds, but produce their steady sounds by swift beating of their wings. And as his wonder grew, his conviction proportionately diminished that he understood how sounds were produced.
Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist, when he believed that he had seen everything, he suddenly found himself plunged deeper than ever into ignorance and bafflement. For having captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its body, or any other part of it. At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath. Thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature, he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to complete ignorance, so that when asked how sounds were created, he answered trembling that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.
I could illustrate with many more examples Nature's bounty in producing her effects, as she employs means we could never think of without our senses and our experiences to teach usâand sometimes even these are insufficient to remedy our lack of understanding. The difficulty of comprehending how the cicada forms its song, even when we have it singing to us right in our hands, ought to be more than enough reason for us to decline to state how comets are formed or anything else.
When Cesi read this addition to the new book he was puzzled, and wrote back to ask what it meant. Was it a way of saying that Coperni-canism might not be the correct explanation for the movement of the planets after allâthe cicada's song representing therefore something like the music of the spheres?
Galileo wrote back tersely.
I know certain things which have been observed by no one but myself. From them, within the limits of my human wisdom, the correctness of the Copernican system seems incontrovertible
.
Maffeo Barberini becoming pope had been a miracle; him making his nephew Francesco into a cardinal just three days after Francesco had joined the Lincean Academy was another miracle. The year before, Galileo had helped Francesco to get his doctorate from the University of Pisa, for which favor his uncle the new pope had sent Galileo a gracious letter of thanks. Now Francesco was one of Urban's closest advisors and confidants.
Then another of Galileo's disciples, and one of his most enthusiastic supporters, a young man named Giovanni Ciampoli, was appointed to the powerful position of papal secretary. This almost defied belief, given Ciampoli's grandiloquent self-importance relative to his actual accomplishments and station. He was a rooster, in fact, and yet now he was gatekeeper to the pope and in his company every dayâadvising, conversing, even reading aloud to him as he ate his meals. Ciampoli read
Il Saggiatore
to him, in fact, and afterward wrote to Galileo and the Lynxes to say that Urban had often laughed out loud as he listened to it.
And not just the pope was reading
Il Saggiatore
, it seemed, but everyone in Romeâthe literati, the virtuosi, the philosophers, the Jesuits,
and everyone else with an interest in intellectual matters. It was the book of the hour; it had completely transcended the original question of the comets, or any of the individual scientific controversies Galileo had gotten embroiled in. It was a rock that people were using to shatter the heavy, somnolent, resentful conformity of the Pauline years. Someone had spoken freely at last, and in the vernacular, about all the new things being discovered. High Barberinian culture was born, emerging like an Athena. Galileo was no longer alone, or part of a faction, but the leader of a movement. With Urban VIII on the Throne of Peter, anything was possible.
Again, however, Galileo's trip to Rome was delayed by illnesses, and not all of them his own. Urban VIII was so exhausted by his intense campaign for the papacy that he retired into the Vatican for over two months. By the time he was well enough to receive supplicants and visitors, and Galileo had recovered from his own ailments enough to travel, it was the spring of 1624.
But finally the time came. On his last day at Bellosguardo, Galileo rode his mule over to San Matteo to say good-bye to Maria Celeste.
She knew perfectly well why he had to go. She felt that this new pontiff was a direct answer to her prayers, an intercession from God in their favor; she was the one who had first called it a “miraculous conjunction,” giving Galileo both the idea and the phrase. In her letters to him, she had revealed her ignorance of courtly protocol by expressing the hope that he would write Urban VIII to congratulate him on his ascension, not understanding that one at Galileo's level could not address directly someone so much higher, but must express thanks and best wishes through an intermediary, which Galileo had of course done, using for the purpose Cardinal Francesco Barberini, as he had explained to her in his return letter.
Now Maria Celeste clung to him in her usual way, trying not to cry. Just in the way that she held him, he could feel that no one had ever loved him so intensely. And so of course she always hated it when he went away.
“Are you sure I can't ask His Holiness to give you all some property?” he said, trying to distract her.
But Maria Celeste said, “What we need is better spiritual guidance!
These so-called priests they have inflicted on us, wellâyou know what they have done. It's really too much. If we could only have a decent priest, a real priest.”
“Yes yes,” Galileo said. “But not perhaps some land that you could rent? Or an annuity?”
Maria Celeste frowned her quick frown. This was not the kind of thing one asked the pope for, her look said. “I'll ask the abbess,” she temporized.
Back at Bellosguardo, making his final preparations, a letter from her was brought to him by the convent's servant Geppo. Please ask Urban for a real priest, it reiterated.
Someone educated, and at least somewhat pure of spirit
.
Galileo cursed as he read this. There on the page lay his daughter's beautiful Italian script, the big loops inclining in perfect diagonals to the northeast and northwest, if it had been a map; a true work of art, as always, written by candle in the middle of the night, after the day's chores were finally done and she had some time to herself. In so many of these beautiful letters, she excused herself for falling asleep as she wrote, and it often took several nights for her to compose one. She apologized also for mentioning the most pressing physical need of the moment, for begging a blanket, or his oldest hen to thicken their broth. And yet now she asked him to ask the new pope for a better spiritual advisor.
“I see the way it is,” he said gloomily as he stared through her letter. “In order to be a Poor Clare and yet not go mad, you have to believe it all, utterly and to the depths of your soul. Otherwise despair would drown you.”
As it had Arcangela, and several other of the sisters, including the poor abbess. Maybe you could even say that most of them were sunk into despair, weighed down by hunger and cold and illness, while Maria Celeste buoyed herself with her belief, and held the rest of them up with her otherworldly goodness. Galileo muttered sulphurously as he considered his two daughters, stuck in the same situation and thereby illustrating a truly Aristotelian either-or in their response to it. Neither was quite sane; but Maria Celeste was beautiful. A saint.
Later, in Rome, when he made the request she had asked for, he also asked for a sinecure for his son Vincenzio, combined with a papal indulgence
that would legitimize his birth. This too was granted. The sinecure gave the youth sixty crowns a year, but since it came with the requirement that he perform some religious exercises, he refused to accept it. At this news, Galileo threw up his hands. “I've done my duty by these people!” he roared. “They won't get another scudi from me, not another quattrini. Family, what a fraud! Blood is no thicker than water, as you see when you cut yourself.”
“When it congeals it gets thicker,” Cartophilus pointed out.
“Yes, and when it dries it sticks to you. And so family is the scab on a wound. I'm sick of it. I renounce them all!”
Cartophilus ignored this, knowing it was just talk. And by then there were more pressing problems.
Unfortunately the Grand Duchess Christina was not convinced of the necessity of this trip to Rome, and did not want to pay for it. The new Medici ambassador to Rome, a Francesco Niccolini, cousin to the previous ambassador but one, was informed in a letter from the young Grand Duke Ferdinando II that Galileo was not invited to stay at the embassy or at the Villa Medici. So Galileo had to make arrangements to stay with his ex-student Mario Guiducci, who lived near the church of Santa Maria Maddalena.
This was the first sign that the
mirabile congiunture
was not quite as miraculous as it had seemedâor that it was already disjuncting, in the way of many a spectacular but brief astrological conjunction.
The second sign of disjunction was far worse. He was still on his way to Rome, resting at Cesi's villa in Acquasparta, when the news came that Virginio Cesarini, that brilliant and melancholy young cardinal, had died.
This was a real blow, for Cesarini had been perhaps the leading figure in all the competing intellectual circles of the cityâknown to everyone, high up in the Vatican, and at the same time very much a Lynx, a true Galilean. No one had expected his death, despite his slight frame; but these things happened.
His vacant position at the Holy Office was soon given to the enormously fat Fra Niccolo Riccardiâa priest who seemed sympathetic to the Lynxes, and who loved Galileo's new book, but who was also anxious to please everybody. He would be little help to them.
Conjunctions and disjunctions; there was nothing for it but to get to Rome as soon as possible, and do what he could. So it was back into the litter to endure again the jounce and squeak of the ruined springtime roads.
On the day of his arrival in the sprawling smoky city, Galileo stayed up late with his host Guiducci, and was brought up to date on the situation. As Galileo had seen in the tight crowded streets, the capital of the world was in a state of high excitement because of the new order of things. For the first time in decades, a pope with ambition was on the Throne of Peter, calling for new building projects, clearing whole quarters of the city, staging gigantic festivals for the populace, and encouraging literary societies and new organizations like the Linceans. No one remembered a time quite like it; it was not just the Lynxes who had felt the miraculous. To have the Borgias out of power (and the Medicis), all replaced by a vigorous, curious intellectualâit was springtime for everyone.
The next morning, therefore, Galileo's hopes were high as he went to the Vatican to pay his respects. The familiar buildings and gardens had been recently washed. They looked bigger and more imposing, the gardens more luxuriant and beautiful. Giovanni Ciampoli, beaming happily, led him through the papal foyer and the outer salons to the inner garden, now bursting with flowers. There, taking a walk with his brother Cardinal Antonio Barberini, was the new pope, God's envoy on Earth.
In the first second of the audience, Galileo saw that Maffeo Barberini was a changed man. It was not just the white robes, the surplice, the red vestment over his shoulders framing his elegant goateed head, the ermine-lined red cap, nor the deferent retainers on all sides, and the Vatican itself, although all these things were of course new. It was the look in his eye. Gone was the gleam of mischief Galileo remembered so well, and the look of open admiration for Galileo's achievements, and the desire to be admired in return. Urban VIII was not present in the same way. His skin was smooth and pink, his domed forehead and long nose shiny. His eyes, round rather than oval, were now like watchful dark pebbles, alert even though his gaze angled away from
Galileo's as if looking at something else. He expected obedience, even obeisance, and already he was used to getting it. He was not even suspicious that he might not get it.