Kepler

"I know, I know, "Joha

"Yes, " the older man said mildly, scratching his chin, "there is in you perhaps too much… passion. But I would not wish to see a young man suppress his natural enthusiasm. Perhaps, Master Kepler, you were not meant for teaching?"

Joha

"I am not a good teacher, ' 'Joha

"Ah yes, " said the rector, coughing; "your astronomy. " He peered at the inspectors' report on the desk before him. "You teach that well, it seems?"

"But I have no students!"

"Not your fault-Pastor Zimmerma

Joha

"They are ignorant barbarians! " he cried suddenly, and a log fell out of the fire. "All they care for is hunting and warring and looking for fat dowries for their heirs. They hate and despise philosophy and philosophers. They they they-they do not deserve…" He broke off, pale with rage and alarm. These mad outbursts must stop.

Rector Papius smiled the ghost of a smile. "The inspectors?"

"The…?"

"I understood you to be describing our good Pastor Zimmerma

Joha

"Ah. But I think, you know, there are many among our noble families, and among the merchants also, who would consider astronomy not a proper subject for their sons to study. They burn at the stake poor wretches who have had less dealings with the moon than you do in your classes. I am not defending this benighted attitude to your science, you understand, but only drawing it to your attention, as it is my-"

"But-"

"-As it is my duty to do. "

They sat and eyed each other, Joha

"But try, will you, Master Kepler: try?"

He tried, he tried, but how could he be calm? His brain teemed. A chaos of ideas and images churned within him. In class he fell silent more and more frequently, standing stock still, deaf to the sniggering of his students, like a crazed hiero-phant. He traipsed the streets in a daze, and more than once was nearly run down by horses. He wondered if he were ill. Yet it was more as if he were… in love! In love, that is, not with any individual object, but generally. The notion, when he hit on it, made him laugh.

At the begi

He had not the solution, yet; he was still posing the questions. The first of these was: Why are therejust six planets in the solar system? Why not five, or seven, or a thousand for that matter? No one, so far as he knew, had ever thought to ask it before. It became for him the fundamental mystery. Even the formulation of such a question struck him as a singular achievement.

He was a Copernican. At Tübingen his teacher Michael Mästlin had introduced him to that Polish master's world system. There was for Kepler something almost holy, something redemptive almost, in that vision of an ordered clockwork of sun-centred spheres. And yet he saw, from the begi

Copernicus was dead fifty years, but now for Joha

And then he made a discovery. He realised that it was not so much in what he had done that Copernicus had erred: his sin had been one of omission. The great man, Joha

Then had Copernicus believed that his system was a picture of reality, or had he been satisfied that it agreed, more or less, with appearances? Or did the question arise? There was no sustained music in that old man's world, only chance airs and fragments, broken harmonies, scribbled cadences. It would be Kepler's task to draw it together, to make it sing. For truth was the missing music. He lifted his eyes to the bleak light of winter in the window and hugged himself. Was it not wonderful, the logic of things? Troubled by an inelegance in the Ptolemaic system, Copernicus had erected his great monument to the sun, in which there was embedded the flaw, the pearl, for Joha