Doctor Copernicus (32 page)

Although this pompous letter angered and disturbed me, I soon came to regard it as an omen, and began again to toy with the idea of returning to Frauenburg. Not, you understand, that I was ready
to go rushing off northwards once more, with cap in hand, and panting with enthusiasm, to make a fool of myself as I had done before, O no; this time if I journeyed it would be for my own purposes
that I would do so, to find my lost self, as it were, and rid myself of this spell, so as to come home to my beloved Wittenberg again, and find it whole, and be at peace. Therefore, as soon as I
was free, I set out with a stout heart, by post-carriage, on horseback, sometimes on foot, and arrived at Frauenburg at summer’s end, 1540, and was relieved to find Copernicus not yet dead,
and still in possession, more or less, of his faculties. He greeted me with a characteristic display of enthusiasm, viz. a start, an owlish stare, and then a hangman’s handshake. The
Schillings was still with him, and Dantiscus, need I say it, was still howling for her to be gone. For a long time now he had been using Giese to transmit his threats. Sculteti, Copernicus’s
ally in the affair of the
focariae
, whom Dantiscus had mentioned, had it seemed been expelled by the Chapter, and had flown to Italy. This departure, along with Dantiscus’s
increasingly menacing behaviour, had forced Copernicus to make a last desperate effort to get rid of her, but in vain. There had been a furious argument (smashed crockery, screams, pisspots flying
through windows and striking passers-by: the usual, I suppose), which had ended with the
Mädchen
packing up her belongings and sending them off, at great expense (the Canon’s), to
Danzig, where some remnant of her tribe kept an inn, or a bawdyhouse, I forget which. However, it seems she considered this so to speak symbolic departure a sufficiently stern rebuke to Copernicus
for his ill nature, and in reality had no intention of following after her chattels, which in due time returned, like some awful ineluctable curse. So we settled down, the three of us, in our
tower, where life was barely, just barely, tolerable. I kept out of the way of the Schillings, not for fear of her, but for fear of
throttling
her; between the two of us the old man cowered,
mumbling and sighing and trying his best to die. Soon, I could see, he would succeed in doing that. Death was slinking up behind him, with its black sack at the ready. I would have to work quickly,
if I were to snatch his book from him before he took it with him into that suffocating darkness. Yet, if his body was weakening, his mind was still capable of withholding, in an iron grip, that for
which I had come: the decision to publish.

*

I stayed with him for more than a year, tormented by boredom and frustration, and an unrelenting irritation at the impossible old fool and his ways. He agreed that I might make
a copy of the manuscript, and that at least was some occupation; the work might even have calmed my restless spirit, had he not insisted on reminding me every day that I must not imagine, merely
because he had relented thus far, that he would go farther, and allow me to take this copy to Petreius. So that there was little more for me in this scribbling than aching knuckles, and the
occasional, malicious pleasure of correcting his slips (I crossed out that nonsensical line in which he speculated on the possibility of elliptical orbits—
elliptical orbits
, for
God’s sake!). Various other small tasks which I performed, to relieve the tedium, included the completion of a map of Prussia, which the old man, in collaboration with the disgraced Sculteti,
had begun at the request of the previous Bishop of Ermland. This, along with some other trivial things, I sent off to Albrecht, Duke of Prussia, who rewarded me with the princely sum of one ducat.
So much for aristocratic patronage! However, it was not for money I had approached this Lutheran Duke, but rather in the hope that he might use on my behalf his considerable influence among German
churchmen and nobles, who I feared might make trouble should I win Copernicus’s consent, and appear in their midst with a manuscript full of dangerous theories clutched under my arm. The
Duke, I found, was more generous with paper and ink than he had been with his ducats; he sent letters to Johann Friedrich, Elector of Saxony, and also to the University of Wittenberg, mentioning
how impressed he had been with the
Narratio prima
(
clever
old Giese!), and urging that I should be allowed to publish what he called
this admirable book on astronomy
, meaning
De revolutionibus.
There was some confusion, of course; there always is. Albrecht, like Petreius, apparently had found it inconceivable that I should be so eager to publish the work of
another, and therefore he assumed that I was attempting some crafty ruse whereby I hoped to put out my own theories in disguise; did I think to fool the Duke of Prussia? thought haughty Albrecht,
and put down in his letters what to him was obvious: that the work was all my own. The cretin. I had no end of trouble disentangling that mess, while at the same time keeping these manoeuvres
hidden from the Canon, who was wont to spit at the mention of the name of Grand Master Albrecht, as he insisted on calling him.

This was not the only little plot I had embarked upon in secret—
and
in trepidation, for I was mortally afraid that if he found out, Copernicus would burn the manuscript on the
instant. Yet I had lapses, when my caution, which I had learned from him, deserted me. One day, shortly after my return to Frauenburg, I told him in a rash moment of frankness of my visit to
Dantiscus. It was one of the rare occasions when I witnessed colour invade the ghastly pallor of his face. He flew into a rage, and gibbered, spraying me copiously with spit, yelling that I had no
right to do such a thing, that I had
no right
! I was, he said, as bad as Giese, that damned meddler, who had sent the
Narratio prima
to Heilsberg even after he had been expressly
warned not even to consider doing such a thing. What was surprising about this outburst was not so much the fury as the fear which I could plainly see, skulking behind the bluster; true, he had
cause to be wary of Dantiscus, but this show of veritable terror seemed wholly excessive. What he feared, of course, although I could not know it then, was that I might have said something to
Dantiscus that would ruin the plot which the Canon and Giese had been working out against me for years in secret—but wait, I am impetuous; wait.

There were other things that puzzled and surprised me. For instance, I discovered another aspect of his passion for secrecy: the Schillings knew so little of his affairs that she thought his
astronomical work a mere pastime, a means of relaxing from the rigours of his true calling, which was, so she believed, medicine! And this woman shared his house, his bed!

And yet, perhaps he did regard astronomy as merely a plaything; I do not know, I do not know, I could not understand the man, I admit it. I was then, and I am still, despite my loss of faith,
one of those who look to the future for redemption, I mean redemption from the world, which has nothing to do with Christ’s outlandish promises, but with the genius of Man. We can do
anything, overcome anything. Am I not a living proof of this? They schemed against me, tried to ruin me, and yet I won, although even yet they will not acknowledge my victory. What was I saying . .
.? Yes: I look to the future, live in the future, and so, when I speak of the present, I am as it were looking backward, into what is, for me, already the past. Do you follow that? Copernicus was
different, very different. If he believed that Man could redeem himself, he saw in—how shall I say—in
immobility
the only possible means toward that end. His world moved in
circles, endlessly, and each circuit was a repetition exactly of all others, past and future, to the extremities of time: which is no movement at all. How, then, could I be expected to understand
one whose thinking was so firmly locked in the old worn-out frame? We spoke a different language—and I do not mean his Latin against my German, although that difference, now that I think
about it, represents well enough the deeper thing. Once, when we were walking together on the little path within the cathedral wall, which he paced each day, gravely, at a fixed hour and a fixed
pace, as though performing a penance rather than taking the air, I began to speak idly of Italy, and the blue south, where I spent my youth. He heard me out, nodding the while, and then he
said:

“Ah yes, Italy; I also spent some time there, before you were born. And what times they were! It seemed as though a new world was on the point of birth. All that was strong and youthful
and vigorous revolted against the past. Never, perhaps, have the social authorities so unanimously supported the intellectual movement. It seemed as though there were no conservatives left among
them. All were moving and straining in the same direction, authority, society, fashion, the politicians, the women, the artists, the
umanista.
There was a boundless confidence abroad, a
feverish joy. The mind was liberated from authority, was free to wander under the heavens. The monopoly of knowledge was abolished, and it was now the possession of the whole community. Ah
yes.”

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. But 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—
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.”