John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

Tell me, then. My book. ? my work. ?

You thought to discern the thing itself, the eternal truths, the pure forms that lie behind the chaos of the world. You looked into the sky: what did you see?

I saw. . the planets dancing, and heard them singing in their courses.

O no, no brother. These things you imagined. Let me tell you how it was. You set the sights of the triquetrum upon a light shining in the sky, believing that you thus beheld a fragment of reality, inviolate, unmistakable, enduring, but that was not the case. What you saw was a light shining in the sky; whatever it was more than that it was so only by virtue of your faith, your belief in the possibility of apprehending reality.

What nonsense is this? How else may we live, if not in the belief that we can know?

It is the manner of knowing that is important. We know the meaning of the singular thing only so long as we content ourselves with knowing it in the midst of other meanings: isolate it, and all meaning drains away. It is not the thing that counts, you see, only the interaction of things; and, of course, the names. .

You are preaching despair.

Yes? Call it, rather, redemptive despair, or, better still, call it acceptance. The world will not bear anything other than acceptance. Look at this chair: there is the wood, the splinters, then the fibres, then the particles into which the fibres may be broken, and then the smaller particles of these particles, and then, eventually, nothing, a confluence of aetherial stresses, a kind of vivid involuntary dreaming in a vacuum. You see? the world simply will not bear it, this impassioned scrutiny.

You would seduce me with this philosophy of happy ignorance, of slavery, abject acceptance of a filthy world? I will have none of it!

You will have none of it. .

You laugh, but tell me this, in your wisdom: how are we to perceive the truth if we do not attempt to discover it, and to understand our discoveries?

There is no need to search for the truth. We know it already, before ever we think of setting out on our quests.

How do we know it?

Why, simple, brother: we are the truth. The world, and ourselves, this is the truth. There is no other, or, if there is, it is of use to us only as an ideal, that brings us a little comfort, a little consolation, now and then.

And this truth that we are, how may we speak it?

It may not be spoken, brother, but perhaps it may be. . shown.

How? tell me how?

By accepting what there is.

And then?

There is no more; that is all.

O no, Andreas, you will not trick me. If what you say were true, I should have had to sell my soul to a vicious world, to embrace meekly the hideousness, yes — but I would not do it! This much at least I can say, that I did not sell—

— Your soul? Ah, but you did sell it, to the highest bidder. What shall we call it? — science? the quest for truth? transcendent knowledge? Vanity, all vanity, and something more, a kind of cowardice, the cowardice that comes from the refusal to accept that the names are all there is that matter, the cowardice that is true and irredeemable despair. With great courage and great effort you might have succeeded, in the only way it is possible to succeed, by disposing the commonplace, the names, in a beautiful and orderly pattern that would show, by its very beauty and order, the action in our poor world of the otherworldly truths. But you tried to discard the commonplace truths for the transcendent ideals, and so failed.

I do not understand.

But you do. We say only those things that we have the words to express: it is enough.

No!

It is sufficient. We must be content with that much.

The candleflames like burning blades pierced his sight, and the grave voice intoning the final benediction stormed above him.

Too late!—

You thought to transcend the world, but before you could aspire to that loftiness your needs must have contended with. . well, brother, with what?

Too late! — Death’s burning seal was graven upon his brow, and all that he had discarded was gone beyond retrieving. The light, O! and the terrible birds! the great burning arc beyond the window!

With me, brother! I was that which you must contend with.

You, Andreas? What was there in you? You despised and betrayed me, made my life a misery. Wherever I turned you were there, blighting my life, my work.

Just so. I was the one absolutely necessary thing, for I was there always to remind you of what you must transcend. I was the bent bow from which you propelled yourself beyond the filthy world.

I did not hate you!

There had to be a little regard, yes, the regard which the arrow bears for the bow, but never the other, the thing itself, the vivid thing, which is not to be found in any book, nor in the firmament, nor in the absolute forms. You know what I mean, brother. It is that thing, passionate and yet calm, fierce and coming from far away, fabulous and yet ordinary, that thing which is all that matters, which is the great miracle. You glimpsed it briefly in our father, in sister Barbara, in Fracastoro, in Anna Schillings, in all the others, and even, yes, in me, glimpsed it, and turned away, appalled and. . embarrassed. Call it acceptance, call it love if you wish, but these are poor words, and express nothing of the enormity.

Too late! — For he had sold his soul, and now payment would be exacted in full. The voice of the priest engulfed him.

“Only after death shall we be united with the All, when the body dissolves into the four base elements of which it is made, and the spiritual man, the soul free and ablaze, ascends through the seven crystal spheres of the firmament, shedding at each stage a part of his mortal nature, until, shorn of all earthly evil, he shall find redemption in the Empyrean and be united there with the world soul that is everywhere and everything and eternal!”

Andreas slowly shook his head.

No, brother, do not heed that voice out of the past. Redemption is not to be found in the Empyrean.

Too late!—

No, Nicolas, not too late. It is not I who have said all these things today, but you.

He was smiling, and his face was healed, the terrible scars had faded, and he was again as he had once been, and rising now he laid his hand upon his brother’s burning brow. The terrible birds sailed in silence into the dark, the harsh light grew soft, and the stone walls of the tower rose up again. The Baltic shone, a bright sea bearing away a ship with a black sail. Andreas brought out the book from beneath his cloak, and placing it on the couch he guided his brother’s hand until the slack fingers touched the unquiet pages.

I am the angel of redemption, Nicolas. Will you come with me now?

And so saying he smiled once more, a last time, and lifted up his delicate exquisite face and turned, to the window and the light, as if listening to something immensely far and faint, a music out of earth and air, water and fire, that was everywhere, and everything, and eternal, and Nicolas, straining to catch that melody, heard the voices of evening rising to meet him from without: the herdsman’s call, the cries of children at play, the rumbling of the carts returning from market; and there were other voices too, of churchbells gravely tolling the hour, of dogs that barked afar, of the sea, of the earth itself, turning in its course, and of the wind, out of huge blue air, sighing in the leaves of the linden. All called and called to him, and called, calling him away.

D.C.

Quotations from writings other than Copernicus’s:

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“It seemed as though a new world. . possession of the whole community.” from Henri Pirenne’s A History of Europe , translated by Bernard Miall (New York, 1956)