—No, he said to his gray visitor, who seemed to have grown older as the years of their dialogue went on, older and yet no wiser. No.
Then you must sign the papers, revocations, confessions, admissions that they wish you to sign. Or they will burn you.
—No. I never will. Were I to do that, then their small world would go on existing for centuries more, for no philosopher would dare to speak out and tell them otherwise, and in his telling make it so. If I show they have power only over this aggregate of atoms, which they may render or discompose as they like or must, then another man may take heart. Finally they will cease. In time men will laugh at their strictures rules bulls anathemata.
It seems a slight chance, to go and be burned for.
Bruno didn't need to look upon his visitor to know that he meant this as a challenge, or a tease, or even an awed compliment. The gods are astonished by men, who can choose to do or say or seek what will bring them to destruction; and not even the gods who destroy them can always say they are mistaken to do it: though as often as not they are.
That long epic in verse that once upon a time Giordano Bruno wrote—The Triumphant Beast Thrown Out, the one that puzzled the inquisitors—told of a conference of all the gods in which, having themselves grown old and unlovely, they vow to reshape the heavens, and make all things new: a job they cannot, in the end, agree on how to accomplish. And—fortunately for us—they give it up.
Those men who wish to bring about the same universal reformation—the alteration of the whole wide world, with the end of making all men happy forever—should likewise give it up. It's not that it can't be done: perhaps no man, or men, or men and others, will ever be powerful enough to do it, but Bruno was sure there was no limit to the power that was available to the soul willing and able to forgo everything else to gain it—self, and ease, and peace, and complimentary love, and natural procreation. But it was not wisdom to try; ruin was far more likely than glory; give the great ball a kick and you can't know where it will rebound, or how far it will roll.
That's what he had learned from the thousand journeys he had made in thought, all the beings he had seen and been, in all the years he had sat in his cell on his bed of stone. Not escape or salvation: or rather, no other one but this one. The turnkey (and after he was gone his son) had looked in now and then through the small barred window to see him there, his eyes sometimes a little crossed and his mouth sometimes working as though he spoke, then listened, then spoke again; his hands moving in air, meaninglessly—the turnkey didn't perceive the pages of the books he turned—and sometimes shifting his cold hams on the stone; meanwhile Bruno had been sifting the days of his past, and walking the roads of this future and that one, to see where they would lead; in one, looking into the house of that Englishman, the empty house, and the man himself old and empty too it seemed, selling to a vile tradesman a gray glass wherein a spirit was surely contained, although he said there was none. Oh she was there, she was: she saw Bruno looking in to see her there, and he knew that she knew him, and would live forever. But the old man—a greater and better man than he had ever been, as his wisdom was greater than Bruno's knowledge—had surrendered his own magic, given it up, and by his own renunciation bade magic depart from the world. Because the time was past in which even the strongest spirit could be sure he would draw only goodness out of the future for man's aid.
So he would do that too. He would burn his books—or they would burn them, the books of which he was composed, the Book of Everything and Other Things that he contained, that he was. Giving up magic as that old Englishman did or one day would do. Silence and prayer at the end.
And perhaps he was wrong after alclass="underline" perhaps no spirit was so strong as to refashion the earth, or even to choose to try. Maybe—it seemed to come to be so even as he thought it—maybe earth and time and the endless things were not to be ruled, for like cannot rule like. Was that another and opposite meaning of the tale of Actæon? Actæon: Why did the story seem to make a different sense to him now than it had made before?
If you won't bind the things of this world on men's behalf—as you have learned to do, and even to bind us gods on occasion—will you not stay to teach them to unbind themselves?
—To teach unbinding is only to bind further. Every man's bonds are his own: only that one who learns his unbinding from his own soul and the love of his neighbors and equals is truly unbound.
The reverend cardinals wish to teach the world that a free man can be destroyed as easily as a coward or a fool.
—That's not the lesson that the world will learn.
You must know that you renounce me in renouncing all that you have been and all that you have fashioned from the soul the gods gave you. I cannot aid you at the last.
—That soul was not mine to keep. It will go its own way. Animula vagula blandula. Let them catch it if they can.
Son.
The man Bruno crossed his arms before him, arms in his threadbare sleeves.
—Tell me only this, he said.
One last thing.
—Will it be you I see at the gates of Avernus? Conductor of souls, will it be you who guides me down?
But there was no answer, for there was no longer one who could answer. There was also no Avernus to go down to, there was no down, no up. With no further word, that genius or friend or master slapped his knees, rose, and departed: he would never in that age speak again to anyone, though many would think they heard him, and the images of him (finger to his lips and winged feet) would in those years vastly multiply. He went out, and up the dark passage into the sun. Then he took the few steps up to the doors of the papal apartment, to the Sala Paolina and its high frescoes—of the Archangel Michael sheathing his sword, the war in Heaven done; of the victories of Alexander the Great; the life of Saint Paul. If I give up my body to be burned, and I have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Having reached that room without being hindered, he opened a small door at the side, and put his foot upon a stair. Then he stopped—stood stock-still, as though he had thought of something, and if he could remember what it was, might turn and go back—but that wasn't it. It was that, with Bruno's refusal (whether because of it or merely on the occasion of it could not be known, and only Bruno himself could have thought adequately about the question), the gods, angels, monsters, powers, and principalities of that age began their retreat into the subsidiary realms where they reside today, harmless and unmoving, most of them anyway, for most of us most of the time. The bright god came to a stop there on his upward way, because the upward way just then ceased to be, and then the door that led to it ceased to be a door, and then he ceased to be himself, his head remaining half turned in wonder at what was coming over him. What wind is that? And there he is today, stopped in midstep, all in black, as flat and still as paint, unrecognizable even to those who most need to know him. Pierce Moffett, for instance, passing the same way nearly four centuries later, at a dark day's end climbing out from that prison too and reaching the same high still empty chamber, alone himself and grieving without reason: he turned his own head in that direction, where—according to his, that is Kraft's, guidebook—the chamber's decorator had painted a trompe-l'oeil door and staircase, apparently just to match a real one at the hall's far end. And on that imaginary stair was painted an imaginary young man in black, just going up, just turning to look back. Legend claims this to be a portrait of Beatrice Cenci's advocate, said that cunning heartless guidebook, but if it is he, then he must have wandered backward fifty years from Beatrice's time to when these walls were painted; actually no one knows who he is, if indeed he is anyone at all. And in the book's margin, beside the place, one of Kraft's little gray stars, nearly vanished.