Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  I was of course astonished to hear him speak thus, astonished and filled with joy, for this, this was that Copernicus whom I had come to Frauenburg to find, and had not found, until now; and I turned to him with tears in my eyes, and began to yelp and caper in a paroxysm of agreement with all that he had said. Too late I noticed that small grey grin, the malicious glint in his look, and realised that I had fallen, O arse over tip, into a trap. He drew back, as one draws back from a slavering lunatic, and considered me with a contempt so profound it seemed near to nauseating him. He said:

  “I was speaking less than seriously, of course. Italy is the country of death. You remind me sometimes of my late brother. He also was given to jabbering about progress and renascence, the new age whose dawn was about to break. He died in his beloved Italy, of the pox.”

  It was not the words, you understand, but the tone in which they were spoken, that seemed to gather up and examine briefly all that I was, before heaving it all, blood and bones and youth and tears and enthusiasm, back upon the swarming midden-heap of humanity. He did not hate me, nor even dislike me; I think he found me … distasteful. Hut what did I care? It is true, when I came to him first there was no thought in my head of fame and fortune for myself; I had one desire only, to make known to the world the work of a great astronomer. Now, however, all that had changed. I was older. He had aged me a decade in a year. No longer was I the young fool ready to fall to his knees before some manufactured hero; I had realised myself. Yet perhaps I should be grateful to him? Was it not his contempt that had forced me to look more closely at myself, that had allowed me to recognise in the end that I was a greater astronomer than he? Yes! yes! far greater. Sneer if you like, shake your empty heads all you wish, but I— / know the truth. Why do you think I stayed with him, endured his mockery, his pettiness, his distaste? Do you imagine that I enjoyed living in that bleak tower, freezing in winter and roasting in summer, shivering at night while the rats danced overhead, groaning and straining in that putrid jakes, my guts bound immovably by the mortar of his trollop’s gruel, do you think I enjoyed all that? By comparison, this place where I am now in exile is very heaven.

  Well then, you say, if it was so terrible, why did I remain there, why did I not flee, and leave Copernicus, wrapped in his caution and his bitterness, to sink into oblivion? Listen: I have said that I was a greater astronomer than he, and I am, but he possessed one precious thing that I lacked—I mean a reputation. O, he was cautious, yes, and he genuinely feared and loathed the world, but he was cunning also, and knew that curiosity is a rash which men will scratch and scratch until it drives them frantic for the cure. For years now he had eked out, at carefully chosen intervals, small portions of his theory, each one of which—the Commentariolus, the Letter contra Werner, my Narratio—was a grain of salt rubbed into the rash with which he had inflicted his fellow astronomers. And they had scratched, and the rash had developed into a sore that spread, until all Europe was infected, and screaming for the one thing alone that would end the plague, which was De revolutionibus orbium mundi, by Doctor Nicolas Copernicus, of Torun on the Vistula. And he would give them their physic; he had decided, he had decided to publish, I knew it, and he knew I knew it, but what he did not know was that, by doing so, by publishing, he would not be crowning his own reputation, but making mine. You do not understand? Only wait, and I shall explain.

  *

  But first I must recount some few other small matters, such as, to begin with, how in the end he came to give me his consent to publish. However, in order to illuminate that scene, as it were, I wish to record a conversation I had with him which, later, I came to realise was a summation of his attitude to science and the world, the aridity, the barrenness of that attitude. He had been speaking, I remember, of the seven spheres of Hermes Trismegistus through which the soul ascends toward redemption in the eighth sphere of the fixed stars. I grew impatient listening to this rigmarole, and I said something like:

  “But your work, Meister, is of this world, of the here and now; it speaks to men of what they may know, and not of mysteries that they can only believe in blindly or not at all.”

  He shook his head impatiently.

  “No no no no. You imagine that my book is a kind of mirror in which the real world is reflected; but you are mistaken, you must realise that. In order to build such a mirror, I should need to be able to perceive the world whole, in its entirety and in its essence. But our lives are lived in such a tiny, confined space, and in such disorder, that this perception is not possible. There is no contact, none worth mentioning, between the universe and the place in which we live.”

  I was puzzled and upset; this nihilism was inimical to all I held to be true and useful. I said:

  “But if what you say is so, then how is it that we are aware of the existence of the universe, the real world? How, without perception, do we see?”

  “Ach, Rheticus!” It was the first time he had called me by that name. “You do not understand me! You do not understand yourself. You think that to see is to perceive, but listen, listen: seeing is not perception! Why will no one realise that? I lift my head and look at the stars, as did the ancients, and I say: what are those lights? Some call them torches borne by angels, others, pinpricks in the shroud of Heaven; others still, scientists such as ourselves, call them stars and planets that make a manner of machine whose workings we strive to comprehend. But do you not understand that, without perception, all these theories are equal in value. Stars or torches, it is all one, all merely an exalted naming; those lights shine on, indifferent to what we call them. My book is not science—it is a dream. I am not even sure if science is possible.” He paused a while to brood, and then went on. “We think only those thoughts that we have the words to express, but we acknowledge that limitation only by our wilfully foolish contention that the words mean more than they say; it is a pretty piece of sleight of hand, that: it sustains our illusions wonderfully, until, that is, the time arrives when the sands have run out, and the truth breaks in upon us. Our lives—” he smiled “—are a little journey through God’s guts…” His voice had become a whisper, and it was plain to me that he was talking to himself, but then all at once he remembered me, and turned on me fiercely, wagging a finger in my face. “Your Father Luther recognised this truth early on, and had not the courage to face it; he tried to deny it, by his pathetic and futile attempt to shatter the form and thereby come at the content, the essence. His was a defective mind, of course, and could not comprehend the necessity for ritual, and hence he castigated Rome for its so-called blasphemy and idol-worship. He betrayed the people, took away their golden calf but gave them no tablets of the law in its place. Now we are seeing the results of Luther’s folly, when the peasantry is in revolt all over Europe. You wonder why I will not publish? The people will laugh at my book, or that mangled version of it which filters down to them from the universities. The people always mistake at first the frightening for the comic thing. But very soon they will come to see what it is that I have done, I mean what they will imagine I have done, diminished Earth, made of it merely another planet among planets; they will begin to despise the world, and something will die, and out of that death will come death. You do not know what I am talking about, do you, Rheticus? You are a fool, like the rest… like myself.”

  *

  I remember the evening very well: sun on the Baltic, and small boats out on the Frisches Haff, and a great silence everywhere. I had just fin ished copying the manuscript, and had but put down the last few words when the Canon, perhaps hearing some thunderclap of finality shaking the air of the tower, came down from the observatory and hovered in my doorway, sniffing at me enquiringly. I said nothing, and only glanced at him vacantly. The evening silence was a pool of peace in which my spirits hung suspended, like a flask of air floating upon waters, and wearily, wearily, I drifted off into a waking swoon, intending only to stay a moment, to bathe for a moment my tired heart, but it was so peaceful there on that brimming
bright meniscus, so still, that I could not rouse myself from this welcome kind of little death. The Canon was standing at my shoulder. The sky outside was blue and light, enormous. When he spoke, the words seemed to come, slowly, from a long way off. He said:

  “If at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which, writhing with obscure passions, produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all, what then would life be but despair}”

  I said:

  “/ hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.”

  He said:

  “Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience.”

  I said:

  “If you would know the reality of nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.”

  He said:

  “It is of the highest significance that the outer world represents something independent of us and absolute with which we are confronted.”

  I said:

  “The death of one god is the death of all.”

  He said:

  “Vita brevis, sensus ebes, negligentiae torpor et inutiles occupationes, nos paucula scire permutent. Et aliquotìens scita excutit ab animo per temporum lapsum fraudatrix scientiae et inimica memoriae praeceps oblivio.

  Night advanced and darkened the brooding waters of the Baltic, but the air was still bright, and in the bright air, vivid yet serene, Venus shone. Copernicus said:

  “When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that in it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.”

  Dark dark dark.

  I said:

  “And yet, Herr Doctor, the truth must be revealed.”

  “Ah, truth, that word I no longer understand.”

  “Truth is that which cannot be concealed.”

  “You have not listened, you have not understood.”

  “Truth is certain good, that’s all I know.”

  “I am an old man, and you make me weary.”

  “Give your agreement then, and let me go.”

  “The mirror is cracking! listen! do you hear it?”

  “Yes, I hear, and yet I do not fear it.”

  The light of day was gone now, and that moment that is like an ending had arrived, when the eyes, accustomed to the sun, cannot yet distinguish the humbler sources of light, and darkness seems total; but still it was not dark enough for him, and he shuffled away from me, away from the window, and crawled into the shadows of the room like some poor black bent wounded thing. He said:

  “The shortness of life, the dullness of the senses, the torpor of indifference and useless occupations, allow us to know but little; and in time, oblivion, that defrauder of knowledge and memory’s enemy, cheats us of even the little that we knew. I am an old man, and you make me weary. What is it you require of me? The book is nothing, less than nothing. First they shall laugh, and later weep. But you require the book. It is nothing, less than nothing. I am an old man. Take it…”

  *

  That was the last I was to see of him, in this world or, I trust, in any other. I left the tower that very night, carrying with me my books and my belongings and my bitter victory. I did not remark the abruptness of this going, nor did he. It seemed the correct way. The inn to which I fled was a pigsty, but at least the air was cleaner there than in that crypt I had left, and the pigs, for all their piggishness, were alive, and snuffling happily in the good old muck. Yet, though I abandoned the tower without a thought, I found it not so easy to do the same with Frauenburg; that was August, and not until September was in did I at last depart. I spent those few final weeks kicking my heels about the town, drinking alone, too much, and whoring joylessly. Once I returned to the tower, determined to see him again, yet at a loss to know what more there was to be said; and perhaps it was as well that the Schillings planted herself in the doorway and said that the old man would not see me, that he was ill, and anyway had given her strict instructions not to let me in if I should dare to call. Even then I did not go, but waited another week, although I should have been in Wittenberg long before. What was it that held me back? Maybe I realised, however obscurely, that in leaving Prussia I would be leaving behind what I can only call a version of myself; for Frauenburg killed the best in me, my youth and my enthusiasm, my happiness, my faith, yes, faith. From that time on I believed in nothing, neither God nor Man. You ask why? You laugh, you say: poor fool, to be so affected by a sick old man’s bitterness and despair; O, you say, you ask, all of you, why, and how, and wherefore, you are all so wise, but you know nothing— nothing! Listen.

  * * +

  I wished to go straightway to Petreius, but if I were to keep my post at Wittenberg, I needs must return there without further delay, for the authorities at the university were beginning to mutter threateningly over my unconscionably long absence. And indeed they seemed very glad to have me back, for I had hardly arrived before I was elected Dean of the faculty of mathematics! I might have been excused for thinking that it was my own brilliance that had won this honour, but I was no fool, and I knew very well that it was not me, but my connection with the Great Man of Frauenburg that they were honouring, in their cautious way. It was no matter, anyway, for I was confident that before long the goddess Fama would turn her tender gaze on me. However, the promotion imposed new tasks on me, new responsibilities, and it would be spring, I now saw, before I could find the freedom to go to Nuremberg and Petreius; might not the goddess tire before then of waiting for me? With this thought in mind, I decided to have printed immediately, there in Wittenberg, a short extract from the manuscript, which would not reveal the scope of the entire work but only hint at it. (You see how I had learned from the master?) Thus originated De lateribus et angulis triangulorum. It caused no little stir in the university, and even in the town itself, and helped me to squeeze out of the burghers and the clerics, and even out of Melanchton himself, several valuable letters of recommendation, which I carried with me to Nuremberg.

  *

  I arrived there at the beginning of May, and at once set about the printing of De revolutionibus orbium mundi in its entirety. Petreius’s craftsmen made swift progress. I lodged in the town in the house of a certain Lutheran merchant, Johann Müller, to whom I had been recommended by Melanchton. He was a bearable fellow, this Müller: pompous, of course, like all his kind, but not unlearned—he even displayed some interest in the work on which I was engaged. Also, his beds were soft, and his wife exceeding handsome, though somewhat fat. All in all, then, I was well content at Nuremberg, and I might even say I was happy there, had not there been lodged in my black heart the ineradicable pain that was the memory of Prussia. From there not a word came, of discouragement or otherwise, until Petreius broached the subject of finance, and I told him it was not my affair, that he should send to Frauenburg. This he did, and after some weeks a reply came, not from Koppernigk, but from Bishop Giese, who said that he had just that day arrived there from Löbau, having been summoned by Anna Schillings to attend the Canon, who was, so Giese said, sick unto death. This news moved me not at all: living or dead, Koppernigk was no longer a part of my plans. True, I spent an anxious week while Petreius underwent an attack of nerves, brought on by the realisation that he would have to finance the publication of the book himself, now that the author was dying, but in the end he went ahead, a decision he was not to regret, since he fixed the price per copy, of the thousand copies that he printed, at 28 ducats 6 pfennigs, the greedy old bastard.

  My plans. How cunning they were, how cold and clever, and, in the end, how easily they were brought thund
ering down in rubble about my ears. The first signals of impending disaster came when I had been but two months in Nuremberg. Petreius had already set up thirty-four sheets, or about two-thirds of the book, and had begun to invite into the printing house some of the leading citizens of the town, so that they might view the progress of the work, and, being impressed, advertise it abroad. Now, it seemed to me only to be expected that these men of influence should above all wish to meet me, the sponsor of this bold new theory, but, though I spent the most part of my days in the caseroom, where the sheets were proofed for their viewing, I found to my surprise, and vague alarm, that they avoided me like the plague, and some of them even fled when I made to approach them. I spoke to Petreius of it, and he shrugged, and pretended not to understand me, and would not look me in the eye. I tried to dismiss the matter, telling myself that businessmen were always in awe of scholars, fearing their learning et cetera, but it would not do: I knew that something was afoot. Then, one evening, the good Herr Müller, twisting his hands and grimacing, and looking for all the world like a reluctant hangman, came to me and said that if it suited me, and if it was not a great inconvenience, and if I would not take his words amiss, and so on and so forth—and, well, the matter was: would I kindly leave his house? He made some lame excuse for this extraordinary demand, about needing the extra room for an impending visit by some relatives, but I was in a rage by then, and was not listening, and I told him that if it suited him, and if it was not a great inconvenience, he might fuck himself, and, pausing only to inform him that I was grateful for the use of his jade of a wife, whom I had been merrily ploughing during the past weeks, I packed my bags and left, and found myself that night once again lodging at an inn. And there, shortly afterwards, Osiander visited me.