John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

*

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 finished 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:

“ I 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 occupations, nos paucula scire permittent. Et aliquotiens 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: