Ah but yet, there is something in the tone of your letter which will not be gainsaid. The fault in this matter, I believe, is in my character. For it has always been thus with me, that I find it hard, despite all my efforts, to make friends, and when I do, I cannot keep them. When I meet those whom I feel I might love, I am like a little dog, with a wagging tail amp; lolling tongue, showing the whites of my eyes: yet sooner or later I am sure to flare up amp; growl. I am malicious, and bite people with my sarcasm. Why, I even like to gnaw hard, discarded things, bones amp; dry crusts of bread, and have always had a dog-like horror of baths, tinctures amp; lotions! How, then, may I expect people to love me for what I am, since what I am is so base?
Tycho the Dane I loved, in my way, though I think he never knew it-certainly I never attempted to tell him, so busy was I in trying to bite the hand, his hand, that was feeding me. He was a great man, whose name will last forever. Why could I not have told him that I recognised greatness in him? We fought from the start, and there was no peace between us, even on the day he died. True, he was eager for me to found my work upon his world system instead of on that of Copernicus, which was something I could not do: but could I not have dissembled, lied a little for his sake, soothed his fears? Of course, he was arrogant, and full of duplicity amp; malice, and treated me badly. But now I see that was his way, as mine is mine. And yet I cannot fool myself, I know that if he were to be resurrected and sent back to me now, there would be only the old squabbling. I am not expressing myself well. I am trying to explain how it is with me, that if I growl, it is only to guard what I hold precious, and that I would far rather wag my tail and be a friend to all.
You think I consider myself a lofty personage. I do not. High honours amp; offices I have never had. I live here on the stage of the world as a simple, private man. If I can squeeze out a portion of my salary at court, I am happy not to have to live entirely on my own means. As for the rest, I take the attitude that I serve not the Emperor, but rather the whole human race amp; posterity. In this confident hope, I scorn with secret pride all honours amp; offices, and also those things which they bestow. I count as the only honour the fact that by divine decree I have been put near the Tychonic observations.
Forgive, then, please, any slights that have been offered you in ignorance by
your friend, K
Wenzel House Prague Christmastide 1606
Hans Georg Herwart von Hohenburg: at München
Salve. This will, I fear, be but the briefest of scribbles, to wish you amp; your family all happiness of the season. The court is busy with preparations for the festivities, and consequently I am forgotten for the moment, and hence am allowed a little time to pursue my private studies undisturbed. Is it not strange, how, at the most unexpected of moments, the speculative faculty, having just alighted from a long amp; wearisome flight, will suddenly take wing again immediately, and soar to even loftier heights? Having lately completed my Astronomia nova, and looking forward to a year or two of much needed rest amp; recuperation, here I am now launching out again, with renewed fervour, upon those studies of world harmony, which I interrupted seven years ago in order to clear away the little task of founding a new astronomy!
Since, as I believe, the mind from the first contains within it the basic amp; essential forms of reality, it is not surprising that, before I have any clear knowledge of what the contents will be, I have already conceived the form of my projected book. It is ever thus with me: in the beginning is the shape! Hence I foresee a work divided into five parts, to correspond to the five planetary intervals, while the number of chapters in each part will be based upon the signifying quantities of each of the five regular or Platonic solids which, according to my Mysterium, may be fitted into these intervals. Also, as a form of decoration, and to pay my due respects, I intend that the initials of the chapters shall spell out acrostically the names of certain famous men. Of course, it is possible that, in the heat of composition, all of this grand design might be abandoned. But it will be no matter.
I have taken as my motto that phrase from Copernicus, in which he speaks of the marvellous symmetry of the world, and the harmony in the relationships of the motion amp; size of the planetary orbits. I ask, in what does this symmetry consist? How is it that man can perceive these relationships? The latter question is, I think, quickly solved-I have given the answer just a moment ago. The soul contains in its own inner nature the pure harmonies as prototypes or paradigms of the harmonies perceptible to the senses. And since these pure harmonies are a matter of proportion, there must be present figures which can be compared with each other: these I take to be the circle and those parts of circles which result when arcs are cut off from them. The circle, then, is something which occurs only in the mind: the circle which we draw with a compass is only an inexact representation of an idea which the mind carried as really existing in itself. In this I take issue strenuously with Aristotle, who holds that the mind is a tabula rasa upon which sense perceptions write. This is wrong, wrong. The mind learns all mathematical ideas amp; figures out of itself; by empirical signs it only remembers what it knows already. Mathematical ideas are the essence of the soul. Of itself, the mind conceives equidistance from a point, and out of that makes a picture for itself of a circle, without any sense perceptions whatever. Let me put it thusly: If the mind had never shared an eye, then it would, for the conceiving of the things situated outside itself, demand an eye and prescribe its own laws for forming it. For the recognition of quantities which is innate in the mind determines how the eye must be, and therefore the eye is so, because the mind is so, and not vice versa. Geometry was not received through the eyes: it was already there inside.
These, then, are some of my present concerns. I shall have much to say of them in the future. For now, my lady wife desires that the great astronomer issue forth into the town to purchase a fat goose.
Fröhliche Weihnachten! Johannes Kepler
Loretoplatz Hradcany Hill Prague Easter Day 1605
David Fabricius: in Friesland
As I have delayed long in my promise of a further letter, so it is right all the same that I should sit down now, on this festival of redemption, to tell you of my triumph. As, my dear Fabricius, what a foolish bird I had been! All along the solution to the mystery of the Mars orbit was in my hands, had I but looked at things correctly. Four long years had elapsed, from the time I acknowledged defeat because of that error of 8 minutes of arc, to my coming back on the problem again. In the meantime, to be sure, I had gained much skill in geometry, and had invented many new mathematical methods which were to prove invaluable in the renewed Martian campaign. The final assault took two, nearly three more years. Had my circumstances been better, perhaps I would have done it more quickly, but I was ill with an infection of the gall, and busy with the Nova of 1604, and the birth of a son. Still, the real cause of the delay was my own foolishness amp; shortness of sight. It pains me to admit, that even when I had solved the problem, I did not recognise the solution for what it was. Thus we do progress, my dear Doctor, blunderingly, in a dream, like wise but undeveloped children!
I began again by trying once more to attribute a circular orbit to Mars. I failed. The conclusion was, simply, that the planet's path curves inwards on both sides, and outwards again at opposite ends. This oval figure, I readily admit, terrified me. It went against that dogma of circular motion, to which astronomers have held since the first beginnings of our science. Yet the evidence which I had marshalled was not to be denied. And what held for Mars, would, I knew, hold also for the rest of the planets, including our own. The prospect was appalling. Who was I, that I should contemplate recasting the world? And the labour! True, I had cleared the stables of epicycles amp; retrograde motions and all the rest of it, and now was left with only a single cartful of dung, i.e. this oval-but what a stink it gave off! And now I must put myself between the shafts, and draw out by myself that noisome load!
After some preliminary work, I arrived at the
notion that the oval was an egg shape. Certainly, this conclusion involved some geometrical sleight of hand, but I could not think of any other means of imposing an oval orbit on the planets. It all seemed to me wonderfully plausible. To find the area of this doubtful egg, I computed 180 sun-Mars distances, and added them together. This operation I repeated 40 times. And still I failed. Next, I decided that the true orbit must be somewhere between the egg shape amp; the circular, just as if it were a perfect ellipse. By this time, of course, I was growing frantic, and grasping at any straw.
And then a strange amp; wonderful thing occurred. The two sickle shapes, or moonlets, lying between the flattened sides of the oval and the ideal circular orbit, had a width at their thickest points amounting to 0.00429 of the radius of the circle. This value was oddly familiar (I cannot say why: was it a premonition glimpsed in some forgotten dream?). Now I became interested in the angle formed between the position of Mars, the sun, and the centre of the orbit, the secant of which, to my astonishment, I discovered to be 1.00429. The reappearance of this value-. 00429-showed me at once that there is a fixed relation between that angle, and the distance to the sun, which will hold good for all points on the planet's path. At last, then, I had a means of computing the Martian orbit, by using this fixed ratio.
You think that was the end of it? There is a final act to this comedy. Having tried to construct the orbit by using the equation I had just discovered, I made an error in geometry, and failed again. In despair, I threw out the formula, in order to try a new hypothesis, namely, that the orbit might be an ellipse. When I had constructed such a figure, by means of geometry, I saw of course that the two methods produced the same result, and that my equations was, in fact, the mathematical expression of an ellipse. Imagine, Doctor, my amazement, joy amp; embarrassment. I had been staring at the solution, without recognising it! Now I was able to express the thing as a law, simple, elegant, and true: The planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus. God is great, and I am his servant; as I am also,
your humble friend, Johannes Kepler
V Somnium
Already the light was failing when he arrived in Regens-burg at last. A fine rain drifted slantwise through the November dusk, settling in a silver fur on his cloak, his breeches, the nag's lank mane. He crossed the Steinerne Brücke over the sullen surge of the Danube. Dim figures, faceless and intent, passed him by in the streets. There was an ominous hum in his ears, and his hands, clutching the greasy reins, trembled. He told himself it was fatigue and hunger: he could not afford to be ill, not now. He had come to accost the Emperor, to demand a settlement of what he was owed.
The lamps were lit in Hillebrand Billig's house. From a way off he spied the yellow windows and the taverner and his wife within. It was an image out of a dream, that light shining through the brown gloom and the rain, and folk attending his coming. The old horse clattered to a stop, coughing. Hillebrand Billig peered at him from the doorway. "Why, sir, we did not expect you until the morrow. "
Always the same, too late or too early. He was not sure what day of the week it was.
"Well, " stamping his numbed feet, tears in his eyes from the cold, "here I am!"
He was put to dry by the fire in the kitchen, with a platter of ham and beans and a pint-pot of punch, and a cushion for his seething piles. An elderly dog snoozed at his feet, gasping and growling in its sleep. Billig fussed around him, a large leather-clad man with a black beard. At the stove Frau Billig stood paralysed by shyness, smiling helplessly upon her saucepans. Kepler no longer remembered how or when he had come to know the couple. They seemed to have been always there, like parents. He smiled vacantly into the fire. The Billigs were twenty years younger than he. Next year would be his sixtieth.
"I am bound for Linz," he said. He had just remembered that. There was interest on some Austrian bonds to be collected.
"But you'll bide with us a while?" said Hillebrand Billig, and, with ponderous roguishness: "The rate here, you know, heh, is cheap. " It was his only joke. He never tired of it. "Is that not so, Anna?"
"O yes," Frau Billig managed, "you will be very welcome, Herr Doctor."
"Thank you," Kepler murmured. "I must, yes, spend a few days here. I have to see the Emperor, he owes me moneys."
The Billigs were impressed.
"His majesty will soon be returning to Prague," said Hillebrand Billig, who prided himself on knowing about these matters. "The congress has finished its business, I hear."
"But I will catch him, all the same. Of course, as to whether he will be prepared to settle his account with me, that is another question. " His majesty had larger matters on his mind than the imperial mathematician's unpaid salary. Kepler sat upright suddenly, slopping his punch. The saddlebags! He rose, making for the door. "Where is my horse, what has become of my horse?" Billig had sent it to the stables. "But my bags, my my… my bags!"
"The boy will bring them. "
"O." Kepler, moaning, turned this way and that. All of his papers were in those satchels, including a stamped and sealed imperial order for the payment of 4,000 florins from the crown's debt to him. The merest tip of something unspeakable was shown him briefly with a grin and then whisked away. Aghast, he sat down again, slowly. "What?"
Hillebrand Billig leaned down to him, mouthing elaborately. "I say, I will go out myself and bring them in, your bags, yes?"
"Ah."
"Are you unwell, Doctor?"
"No no… thank you."
He was trembling. He remembered out of his childhood a recurring dream, in which a series of the most terrible tortures and catastrophes was unfolded leisurely before him, while someone whom he could not see looked on, watching his reactions with amusement and an almost friendly attention. Just now that vision, whatever to call it, had been like that, the same slick flourish and the sense of muffled gloating. That was more, surely, than simply fear for his possessions? He shivered. "Eh?" Frau Billig had spoken. "Beg pardon, ma'am?"
"Your family," she said, louder, smiling nervously and plucking at her apron; "Frau Kepler, and the children?"
"O, they are very well, very well. Yes." A faint spasm, almost a pain, passed through him. It took him a moment to identify it. Guilt! As if by now he were not familiar with that. "We have lately had a wedding, you know. "
Hillebrand Billig returned then, with rain in his beard, and set down the saddlebags on the hearth.
"Ah, good," Kepler mumbled, "very kind." He put up his feet on the bags, offering his toes to the blaze: let the chilblains suffer a little too, and serve them right. "Yes, a wedding. Our dear Regina has gone from us. " He looked up into the Billigs' puzzled silence. "But what am I saying? I mean of course Susan. " He coughed, raking up an oyster. His head hummed. "The match was made in heaven, when Venus whispered in the ear of my young assistant, Jakob Bartsch, a stargazer also, and a doctor of medicine." And when the goddess had become discouraged, seeing what a timid specimen was this Adonis, Kepler himself had taken up her task. Pangs of guilt then, too. Such bullying! He wondered if he had done right. There was much of her mother in that girl. Poor Bartsch. "Young Ludwig, my eldest boy, also is going for medicine." He paused. "And neither have I been idle: another little one, last April, a girl," leering sheepishly at the fire. Frau Billig rattled the pots on the stove: she disapproved of his young wife. So had Regina. It would be a marriage, she had written to him, if my Herr Father had no child. A curious way of putting it. He had read much into that letter, too much. Foolish and sinful dreams. She was only hinting again about that damned inheritance. And he had replied that she might mind her own business, that he would marry when, and whom, he liked. But ah, Regina, what I could not say was that she reminded me of you.
Three times the name Susanna had occurred in his life, two daughters, one dead in infancy, one married now, and then at last a wife. Someone had been trying to tell him something. Whoever it was, was right. He had chosen her out of eleven candidates. Eleven! The comedy of it struck him only afterwards
. He could no longer remember them all. There had been the widow Pauritsch of Kunstadt, who had tried to use his motherless children in plying her case, and that mother and daughter, each one eager to sell him the other, and fat Maria with her curls, the Helmhard woman who was built like an athlete, and that titled one, what was her name, a very Gorgon: all with advantages, their houses, their rich fathers, and he had chosen a penniless orphan, Susanna Reuttinger of Eferding, despite universal opposition. Even her guardian, the Baroness von Star-hemberg, had considered her too lowly a match for him.
She was twenty-four the first time he met her, at the Star-hembergs' house in Linz: a tall, slightly ungainly and yet handsome girl, with fine eyes. Her silence unnerved him. She spoke hardly a word that first day. He had thought she would laugh at him, a fussy middle-aged little man with weak sight, his beard already streaked with grey. Instead she attended him with a kind of tender intensity, leaning down to him her solemn grey eyes and downturned mouth. It was not that she much resembled Regina, but there was something, an air of ordered self-containment, and he was pierced. She was a cabinetmaker's daughter, like you, like you.
Kepler Page 16