John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

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.