John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

He opened his eyes. In moonlight Andreas’s pale thin unforgiving face floated above him, darkly grinning.

*

Now he became an insubstantial thing, a web of air rippling in red winds. He felt that he had been flayed of a vital protective skin. His surfaces ached, flesh, nails, hair, the very filaments of his eyes, yearning for what he could not name nor even properly imagine. At Mass he spied down from the choir loft on the women of the town kneeling in the congregation below him. They were hopelessly corporeal creatures. Even the youngest and daintiest of them in no way matched the shimmering singing spirits that flew at him out of the darkness of his frantic nights. Nor was there any comfort to be had from the snivelling smelly little boys that came trailing their blankets through the dormitory, offering themselves in return for the consolation of a shared bed. What he sought was something other than ordinary flesh, was something made of light and air and marvellous grave gaiety.

Snow fell, and soothed the raw wound he has opened with his own hands. For three days it stormed in eerie silence, and then, on the fourth, dawn found the world transformed. It was in the absence of things that the change lay; the snow itself was hardly a presence, was rather a nothing where before there had been something, a pavement, a headstone, a green field, and the eye, lost in that white emptiness, was led irresistibly to the horizon that seemed immeasurably farther off now than it had ever been before.

Nicolas carried his numbed and lightened spirit up the winding stairs of the tower where Canon Wodka had his observatory, a little circular cell with a single window that opened out like a trapdoor on the sky. All tended upward here, so that the tower itself seemed on the point of flight. He climbed the seven wooden steps to the viewing platform, and as his head emerged into the stinging air he felt for a moment that he might indeed continue upward effortlessly, up and up, and he grew dizzy. The sky was a dome of palest glass, and the sun sparkled on the snow, and everywhere was a purity and brilliance almost beyond bearing. Through the far clear silence above the snowy fields and the roofs of the town he heard the bark of a fox, a somehow perfect sound that pierced the stillness like a gleaming needle. A flood of foolish happiness filled his heart. All would be well, O, all would be well! The infinite possibilities of the future awaited him. That was what the snow meant, what the fox said. His young soul swooned, and slowly, O, slowly, he seemed to fall upward, into the blue.

* * *

In his fourth year at the University of Cracow he was ordered by Uncle Lucas to return at once to Torun: the Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter was dying, and Uncle Lucas, now Bishop of the diocese, was bent on securing the post for his youngest nephew. Nicolas made the long journey northwards alone through a tawny sad September. He was twenty-two. He carried little away with him from the Polish capital. Memories still haunted him of certain spring days in the city when the wind sang in the spires and washes of sunlight swept through the streets, and the heart, strangely troubled by clouds and birds and the voices of children, became lost and confused in surroundings that yesterday had seemed irreproachably familiar.

Andreas and he had lodged with Katharina and her husband, Gertner the merchant. Nicolas disliked that smug stolid household. Womanhood and early marriage had not changed his sister much. She was still, behind the mask of the young matron, a feline calculating child, cruel and greedy, tormented by an implacable discontent. Nicolas suspected her of adultery. She and Andreas fought as fiercely as ever they had done as children, but there was palpable between them now a new accord, forged by the sharing of secrets concealed from husband and brother alike. They united too in baiting Nicolas. His anxieties amused them, his shabbiness, his studiousness, his risible sobriety — amused them, yes, but disturbed them too, obscurely. He suffered their jibes in silence, smiling meekly, and saw, not without a certain satisfaction of which he tried but failed to feel ashamed, that indifference was the weapon that wounded them most sorely.

*

True, he had learned a great deal in Poland. After four years his head was packed with great granite blocks of knowledge; but knowledge was not perception. His mind, already venturing apprehensively along certain perilous and hitherto untrodden paths, required a lightness and delicacy of atmosphere, a sense of air and space, that was not to be had at Cracow. It was significant, he realised later, that the college on first sight had reminded him of nothing so much as a fortress, for it was, despite its pretensions, the main link in the defences thrown up by scholasticism against the tide of new ideas sweeping in from Italy, from England, and from Rotterdam. In his first year there he witnessed pitched bloody battles in the streets between Hungarian scholastics and German humanists. Although these student brawls seemed to him senseless and even comical, he could not help but see, in the meeting under the lowering mass of Wawel Rock of flaxen-haired northerners and the Magyars with their sullen brows and muddy complexions, something made tangible of that war of minds being waged across the continent.

The physical world was expanding. In their quest for a sea route to the Indies the Portuguese had revealed the frightening immensity of Africa. Rumours from Spain spoke of a vast new world beyond the ocean to the west. Men were voyaging out to all points of the compass, thrusting back the frontiers everywhere. All Europe was in the grip of an inspired sickness whose symptoms were avarice and monumental curiosity, the thirst for conquest and religious conversion, and something more, less easily denned, a kind of irresistible gaiety. Nicolas too was marked with the rosy tumours of that plague. His ocean was within him. When he ventured out in the frail bark of his thoughts he was at one with those crazed mariners on their green sea of darkness, and the visions that haunted him on his return from terra incognita were no less luminous and fantastic than theirs.

Yet the world was more, and less, than the fires and ice of lofty speculation. It was also his life and the lives of others, brief, pain-laden, irredeemably shabby. Between the two spheres of thought and action he could discern no workable connection. In this he was out of step with the age, which told him heaven and earth in his own self were conjoined. The notion was not seriously to be entertained, however stoutly he might defend it out of loyalty to the humanist cause. There were for him two selves, separate and irreconcilable, the one a mind among the stars, the other a worthless fork of flesh planted firmly in earthy excrement. In the writings of antiquity he glimpsed the blue and gold of Greece, the blood-boltered majesty of Rome, and was allowed briefly to believe that there had been times when the world had known an almost divine unity of spirit and matter, of purpose and consequence: was it this that men were searching after now, across strange seas, in the infinite silent spaces of pure thought?

Well, if such harmony had ever indeed existed, he feared deep down, deep beyond admitting, that it was not to be regained.

*

He took humanities, and also theology, as Uncle Lucas had directed. His studies absorbed him wholly. His ways became the set ways of the scholar. Old before his time, detached, desiccated and fussy, he retreated from the world. He spoke Latin now more readily than German.

And yet it was all a deeply earnest play-acting, a form of ritual by which the world and his self and the relation between the two were simplified and made manageable. Scholarship transformed into docile order the hideous clamour and chaos of the world outside himself, endistanced it and at the same time brought it palpably near, so that, as he grappled with the terrors of the world, he was terrified and yet also miraculously tranquil. Sometimes, though, that tranquil terror was not enough; sometimes the hideousness demanded more, howled for more, for risk, for blood, for sacrifice. Then, like an actor who has forgotten his lines, he stood paralysed, staring aghast into a black hole in the air.