John Banville: Doctor Copernicus

He taught the quadrivium of arithmetic and geometry, astronomy and music theory. He was a very bad teacher. His was not the disciplined mind that his subjects required. It was too excitable. In the midst of a trigonometrical exposition he would go scampering off after Zeno’s arrow, which will never traverse the 100 ells that separate the target from the bow because first it must fly 50 ells, and before that 25, and before that 12½, and so on to infinity, where it comes to a disgruntled kind of halt. But the farther that the arrow did not go the nearer Nicolas drew to this poor fat laughable master. They became friends, cautiously, timidly, with many checks and starts, unwilling to believe in their good fortune, but friends they did become, and even when one day in the airy silence of the organ loft in the cathedral Canon Wodka put one of his little withered claws on Nicolas’s leg, the boy stared steadily off into the gloom under the vaulted ceiling and began to talk very rapidly about nothing, as if nothing at all were happening.

In their walks by the river the Canon sketched the long confused history of cosmology. At first he was reluctant to implant new ideas in a young mind that he considered too much concerned already with abstractions, but then the wonder of the subject possessed him and he was whirled away into stammering starry heights. He spoke of the oyster universe of the Egyptians in which the Earth floated on a bowl of bitter waters beneath a shell of glair, of the singing spheres of the Greeks, Pythagoras and Herakleides, of the Church Fathers whose Earth was a temple walled with air, and then of the Gnostic heresiarchs and their contention that the world was the work of fallen angels. Last of all he explained Claudius Ptolemy’s theory of the heavens, formulated in Alexandria thirteen centuries before and still held by all men to be valid, by which the Earth stands immobile at the centre of all, encircled eternally in grave majestic dance by the Sun and the lesser planets. There were so many names, so many notions, and Nicolas’s head began to whirl. Canon Wodka glanced at him nervously and put his finger to his own lips to silence himself, and presently began to speak earnestly, like one doing penance, of the glory of God and the unchallengeable dogma of Mother Church, and of the joys of orthodoxy.

But Nicolas hardly listened to all that. He knew nothing yet of scruples such as those besetting his friend. The firmament sang to him like a siren. Out there was unlike here, utterly. Nothing that he knew on earth could match the pristine purity he imagined in the heavens, and when he looked up into the limitless blue he saw beyond the uncertainty and the terror an intoxicating, marvellous grave gaiety.

Together they made a sundial on the south wall of the cathedral. When they had finished they stood and admired in silence this beautiful simple thing. The shadow crept imperceptibly across the dial as the day waned, and Nicolas shivered to think that they had bent the enormous workings of the universe to the performance of this minute and insignificant task.

“The world,” he said, “is all an engine, then, after all, no more than that?”

Canon Wodka smiled. “Plato in the Timaeus says that the universe is a kind of animal, eternal and perfect, whose life is lived entirely within itself, created by God in the form of a globe, which is the most pleasing in its perfection and most like itself of all figures. Aristotle postulated as an explanation of planetary motion a mechanism of fifty-five crystalline spheres, each one touching and driving another and all driven by the primary motion of the sphere of the fixed stars. Pythagoras likened the world to a vast lyre whose strings as it were are the orbits of the planets, which in their intervals sing beyond human hearing a perfect harmonic scale. And all this, this crystalline eternal singing being, this you call an engine?”

“I meant no disrespect. Only I am seeking a means of understanding, and belief.” He hesitated, smiling a little sheepishly at the lofty sound of that. “Herr Wodka — Herr Wodka, what do you believe?”

The Canon opened wide his empty arms.

“I believe that the world is here ,” he said, “that it exists, and that it is inexplicable. All these great men that we have spoken of, did they believe that what they proposed exists in reality? Did Ptolemy believe in the strange image of wheels within wheels that he postulated as a true picture of planetary motion? Do we believe in it, even though we say that it is true? For you see, when we are dealing with these matters, truth becomes an ambiguous concept. In our own day Nicolas Cusanus has said that the universe is an infinite sphere whose centre is nowhere. Now this is a contradictio in adjecto , since the notions of sphere and infinity cannot sensibly be put together; yet how much more strange is the Cusan’s universe than those of Ptolemy or Aristotle? Well, I leave the question to you.” He smiled again, ruefully. “I think it will give you much heartache.” And later, as they walked across the cathedral close at dusk, the Canon halted, suddenly struck, and touched the boy lightly in excitement with a trembling hand. “Consider this, child, listen: all theories are but names, but the world itself is a thing .”

In the light of evening, the gathering gloom, it was as if a sibyl had spoken.

*

On Saturdays in the fields outside the walls of the town Caspar Sturm instructed the school in the princely art of falconry. The hawks, terrible and lovely, filled the sunny air with the clamour of tiny deaths. Nicolas looked on in a mixture of horror and elation. Such icy rage, such intentness frightened him, yet thrilled him too. The birds shot into the kill like bolts from a bow, driven it seemed by a seeled steely anguish that nothing would assuage. Compared with their vivid presence all else was vague and insubstantial. They were absolutes. Only Canon Sturm could match their bleak ferocity. At rest they stood as still as stone and watched him with a fixed tormented gaze; even in flight their haste and brutal economy seemed bent to one end only, to return with all possible speed to that wrist, those silken jesses, those eyes. And their master, object of such terror and love, grew leaner, harder, darker, became something other than he was. Nicolas watched him watching his creatures and was stirred, obscurely, shamefully.

“Up sir! Up!” A heron shrieked and fell out of the air. “Up!” Monstrous hawklike creatures were flying on invisible struts and wires across a livid sky, and there was a great tumult far off, screams and roars, and howls of agony or of laughter, that came to him from that immense distance as a faint terrible twittering. Even when he woke and lay terror-stricken in a stew of sweat the dream would not end. It was as if he had tumbled headlong into some beastly black region of the firmament. He pulled at that blindly rearing lever between his legs, pulled at it and pulled, pulling himself back into the world. Dimly he sensed someone near him, a dark figure in the darkness, but he could not care, it was too late to stop, and he shut his eyes tight. The hawks bore down upon him, he could see their great black gleaming wings, their withered claws and metallic talons, their cruel beaks agape and shrieking without sound, and under that awful onslaught his self shrank together into a tiny throbbing point. For an instant everything stopped, and all was poised on the edge of darkness and a kind of exquisite dying, and then he arched his back like a bow and spattered the sheets with his seed.

He sank down and down, far, far down, and sighed. The beasts were all banished, and his inner sky was empty now and of a clear immaculate blue, and despite the guilt and the grime and the smell like the smell of blood and milk and decayed flowers, he felt afar a faint mysterious chiming that was at once everywhere and nowhere, that was a kind of infinite music.