He gained the common. The evening rested here, bronzed and quietly breathing, basking like an exhausted acrobat in the afterglow of marvellous exploits of light and weather. The elm tree hung intent above its own reflection in the pond, majestically listening. The children were still here. They greeted him with sullen glances, wishing not to know him: they had been having fun. Susanna slowly ambled away with her hands clasped behind her, smiling back in a kind of blissful idiocy at a file of confused and comically worried ducklings scrambling at her heels. Friedrich tottered to the water's edge carrying a mighty rock. His shoes and stockings were soaked, and he had managed to get mud on his eyebrows. The rock struck the water with a flat smack. "Look at the crown, papa, look look!-did you see it?"
"That's the king, all right," said Heinrich. He had come to fetch the children back. "Hejumps up when you throw something in, and you can see his crown with all the diamonds on it. That right, Johann? I told him that."
"I don't want to go home," the child said, working one foot lovingly into the mud and plucking it out again with a delicious sucking sound. "I want to stay here with Uncle Heinrich and my grandma. " His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "They have a
Pig-"
The surface of the pond smoothed down its ruffled silks.
Tiny translucent flies were weaving an invisible net among the reflected branches of the elm, and skimmers dashed out from the shallows on legs so delicate they did not more than dent the surface of the water. Myriad and profligate life! Kepler sat on the grass. It had been a long day, busy with small discoveries. What was he to do about Regina? And what of his mother, dabbling still in dangerous arts? What was he to do. He remembered, as if the memory might mean something, Felix the Italian dancing with his drunken whores in a back lane on Kleinseit. The great noisome burden of things nudged him, life itself tipping his elbow. He smiled, gazing up into the branches. Was it possible, was this, was this happiness?
IV Harmonice Mundi
Loretoplatz
Hradcany Hill
Prague
Ash Wednesday 1605
David Fabricius: in Friesland
Honoured friend! you may abandon your search for a new theory of Mars: it is established. Yes, my book is done, or nearly. I have spent so much pains on it that I could have died ten times. But with God's help I have held out, and I have come so far that I can be satisfied and rest assured that the new astronomy truly is born. If I do not positively rejoice, it is not due to any doubts as to the truth of my discoveries, but rather to a vision that has all at once opened before me of the profound effects of what I have wrought. My friend, our ideas of the world amp; its workings shall never be the same again. This is a withering thought, and the cause in me of a sombre amp; reflective mood, in keeping with the general on this day. I enclose my wife's recipe for Easter cake as promised.
You, a colleague in arms, will know how things stand with me. Six years I have been in the heat amp; clamour of battle, my head down, hacking at the particular; only now may I stand back to take the wider view. That I have won, I do not doubt, as I say. My concern is, what manner of victory I have achieved, and what price I amp; our science, and perhaps all men, will have to pay for it. Copernicus delayed for thirty years before publishing his majestic work, I believe because he feared the effect upon men's minds of his having removed this Earth from the centre of the world, making it merely a planet among planets; yet what I have done is, I think, more radical still, for I have transformed the very shape of things-I mean of course I have demonstrated that the conception of celestial form amp; motion, which we have held since Pythagoras, is profoundly mistaken. The announcement of this news too will be delayed, not through any Copernican bashfulness of mine, but thanks to my master the Emperor's stinginess, which leaves me unable to afford a decent printer.
My aim in the Astronomia nova is, to show that the heavenly machine is not a divine, living being, but a kind of clockwork (and he who believes that a clock has a soul, attributes to the work the maker's glory), insofar as nearly all the manifold motions are caused by a simple magnetic amp; material force, just as all the motions of the clock are caused by a simple weight. Yet, and most importantly, it is not the form or appearance of this celestial clockwork which concerns me primarily, but the reality of it. No longer satisfied, as I believe astronomy has been for milleniums, with the mathematical representation of planetary movement, I have sought to explain these movements ßom their physical causes. No one before me has ever attempted such a thing; no one has ever before framed his thoughts in this way.
Why, sir, you have a son! This is a great surprise to me. I put aside this letter briefly, having some pressing matters to attend to-my wife is ill again-and in the meantime from Wittenberg one Johannes Fabricius has written to me regarding certain solar phenomena, and recommending himself to me through my friendship for you, his father! I confess I am amazed, and not a little disturbed, for I have always spoken in my letters to you as to a younger man, and indeed, I wonder if I have not now and then fallen into the tone of a master addressing a pupil! You must forgive me. We should sometime have met. I think I am short of sight not only in the physical sense. Always I am being met with these shocks, when the thing before my nose turns out suddenly to be other than I believed it to be. Just so it was with the orbit of Mars. I shall write again and recount in brief the history of my struggle with that planet, it may amuse you.
Vale Johannes Kepler
Wenzel House Prague November 1607
Hans Geo. Herwart von Hohenburg: at München
Entshuldigen Sie, my dear good sir, for my long delay in plying to your latest, most welcome letter. Matters at court devour my time amp; energies, as always. His Majesty becomes daily more capricious. At times he will forget my name, and look at me with that frown, which all who know him know so well, as if he does not recognise me at all; then suddenly will come an urgent summons, and I must scamper up to the palace with my star charts amp; astrological tables. For he puts much innocent faith in this starry scrying, which, as you know well, I consider a dingy business. He demands written reports upon various matters, such as for instance the nativity of the Emperor Augustus and of Mohammed, and the fate which is to be expected for the Turkish Empire, and, of course, that which so exercises everyone at court these days, the Hungarian question: his brother Matthias grows ever more brazen in his pursuit of power. Also there is the tiresome matter of the so-called Fiery Trigon and the shifting of the Great Conjunction of Jupiter amp; Saturn, which is supposed to have marked the birth of Christ, and of Charlemagne, and, now that another 800 years have passed, everyone asks what great event impends. I ventured that this great event had already occurred, in the coming of Kepler to Prague: but I do not think His Majesty appreciated the witticism.
In this atmosphere, the New Star of three years past caused a mighty commotion, which still persists. There is talk, as you would expect, of universal conflagration and the Judgment Day. The least that will be settled for, it seems, is the coming of a great new king: nova Stella, novus rex (this last a view which no doubt Matthias encourages!). Of course, I must produce much wordage on this matter also. It is a painful amp; annoying work. The mind accustomed to mathematical demonstrations, on contemplating the faultiness of the foundations of astrology, resists for a long, long time, like a stubborn beast of burden, until, compelled by blows amp; invective, it puts its foot into the puddle.