Endless Things (15 page)

Would His Eminence have come here to question Bruno, or would Bruno have been taken to him? His horn-rimmed spectacles, red silks sweeping this floor; a little stool for him set by a servant. Wearied maybe. Bruno never grew tired of talking.

Shall we go on, Fra’ Giordano, from where we broke off: of things, and what causes them to come to be?

Your Eminence, by speaking of things we cause them to come to be: or to be tempted to come to be, or recognize in themselves the power to come to be. Why shouldn't it be so? We see ourselves in the mirror of the world, placed before us by the infinite creativity of divine intelligence; and that universe is as alive as we are ourselves; so it may see itself in the mirror of our intelligence, and think to refashion itself.

But it hasn't. It never has done that, refashioned as you say.

No?

No. It was fashioned by God in the beginning, and has remained as it was built. The foundations of the earth.

Oh? For how long then was the world flat, like a plate or a cowpat, and the sun went down at its western edge, and traveled through the Austral waters to rise again at its eastern?

It never was so. It was only our lack of understanding that described it in this way. It was always as it is now, a globe. In the center of the universe, around which the stars and planets go.

No edge? No Austral waters?

No. Of course not.

Ah. Well then. Maybe when we have described the earth long enough as traveling with the other planets around the sun, in an infinite universe of suns, then that too will always have been so.

But you couldn't know, really. Galileo hadn't yet been condemned, then; Bellarmino was himself a proponent of the New Learning. It was easy to imagine him trying hard to win Bruno over, probe for the places where his old faith might hook him again; explaining just what Bruno had to assent to, what minimum, in exchange for safety. All over Europe there were people doing it, in the lands of one confession or another. He, Pierce, had done it most of his life. He had thought, in the winter of this very year, in the middle of some very bad nights, that he might do it again: thought he might return, under threat of deracination and dissolution or out of a desperate hope of peace, to the safety of Mother Church. If only Mother Church had stayed put to return to.

But not Bruno.

How can I be as brave as you were? Pierce asked. If I can't go back and can't go forward, what can I do here?

It had begun to grow dim in the chamber. Pierce could no longer hear small sounds, feet striking stone, the grinding of a hinge. It might be that the hours of daylight when the prisons and the tomb itself could be visited were over, and he should have continued with his group of Belgians or whoever they had been; the doors he had passed through to reach this chamber might even now be shutting, one by one, all down or up the way that led to here, and he not be able to come out again till dawn.

Why is there anything and not rather nothing? Tell me. Why does a universe come to be?

—It comes to be because it can. No other reason.

And why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead?

—It is the way it is because it chooses to be. It is always choosing, and thus changes how it is, within the limits of its nature.

But why should the things that are have these limits that they have, and not different ones?

—Because this is the age we inhabit, and not a different one.

And you—do you choose to be here, or are you constrained to be here?

—Who are you that you should ask me this?

A countryman of yours
.

—Allow me to doubt that.

Why? What country do you say is yours?

—Who are you?

Have you forgotten me?

—"Forget” is not a power allotted to me.

Then you remember. In this city long years ago we met at first, in the library of the Vatican. Ever since then you have been my ally, my messenger—the messenger of a messenger! More too.

He did remember. Remembered how he was brought to Rome and permitted to sit in that library and read the works of Hermes Ægyptiacus. And he remembered the one who came to him there, and warned him as the angel warned the Holy Family, but to flee from, not to, Ægypt. Remembered the terrible gay eyes, the pitiless smile, the kind hand upon him to throw him out into the world, into the safety of no safety. Now he seemed a sadder, older fellow, in a plain gown of black stuff, than he had been when he had first come before Bruno, in the library of the Vatican next door. He crossed his slim legs, and took his knee in both his hands.

We will continue from where we broke off,
he said.
Of what nature are the things of this world, this universe, that they are capable of continuous change, without falling into chaos?

—
The universe is infinite in all directions, without center or limit. In itself it has no qualities, it cannot even be said to have extension, because it is infinite, which is beyond size. It is a vacuum, or
æther
, or nothing, and that nothing is filled with an infinite number of
minima
or atoms, though these are not the tiny hard grains or balls of Lucretius, but invisible infinitesimal centers whose circumferences touch one another everywhere. The infinite universe is compressed within each infinite atom of the infinite number of atoms of which it is composed.

An infinity inside another infinity?

—An infinite number of infinities. Nothing, in fact, is finite except as it is perceived by the limiting categories of the mind. Indeed we keep coming upon things that disrupt those categories, like certain stones that have seemingly impossible properties of attraction, or animals that combine the qualities of sea and earth, or persons neither dead nor alive. The infinity contained within atoms is soul, that is, divine intelligence; all soul is the same, and only varies because of the disposition and nature of the atoms that compose it.

A sad fate to be made of agglomerations of atoms, and not by processes of Justice, Worth, Providence; to be a heap, rather than a self-based subject.

—All beings, including us human beings, are formed not by a process of casual agglomeration but by an internal principle of unity belonging to the atoms, their energy, their creative soul. Thus instead of a chaos they make the ranks and systems of things in all their specific and endless multiplicity, as the conjoined letters of the alphabet make the words of the language. The words of the world begin with the irreducible atoms, which have their rules of association and attraction, their passions and repulsions, demanding and forbidding certain combinations, permitting or discouraging others. Still the sentences they make are endless in number, and go on being made forever.

And how many categories and kinds of atoms are there? An infinite number too?

I don't know how many categories. I ponder how many would be necessary to account for a limitless number of combinations. I think of the words of a tongue, or of a tongue that has no limit, as perhaps the human tongue was before the fall of Babel. If there were no limit on how long the words could be, or how often the same word might appear in the whole, then a limited number of letters could create an infinite number of words. I think that a mere twenty-four letters, as in our alphabet, would be enough. That would suffice to spell the universe, and if we could come to understand them, name them, recognize them, we would know how.

Only a divine mind, a nous, could spell the infinite world with the letters you describe. How is your mere human mind to encompass them?

—The vicissitudes of nature are endless but not unlimited. There are reasons why some atoms are drawn to some others, to join with them, creating particular compounds, which in turn create bodies that persist as themselves through time. Those Reasons are like lamps lit within the things of which the world is composed, lamps that cast shadows of the things in the perceiving mind. By means of certain living images, the mind can grasp the Reasons and their working. For instance the reasons may be called gods, and the vicissitudes of nature may be truly reflected in stories of the gods. Thus the infinite number of things reflected in the mind is ordered into ranks and kinds, special and general, under all its varied aspects, which can be called Jupiter, Hera, Venus, Pallas, Minerva, Silenus, Pan.

So the gods are but stories.

—As the stories that we men read and write are but letters. Not the less true for that.

Very well,
he said, after a moment's wavering between presence and absence, offended possibly.
Continue. How are these images for the Reasons cast?

—We discover them. We have them within us, we have them inside, actually further inside than we are in ourselves. They are as much a part of nature as the atoms themselves, the numbers of Pythagoras, the figures of Euclid, the letters of the alphabet, the intentions of the spirit, the persons of the gods.

Why then do not all men agree on how the world and the things are to be conceived? Numbers and geometries are fixed, and describe many things under a few terms, but images may have as many forms as there are things, and what use is that?

—The images change because the world changes. It is a work that it undertakes itself, that goes on continuously. Merely my standing still changes the names around me. Every age must find its own figures for the things that are, to correspond to a changed reality. As in the practice of
alchymia
, where one thing can be seen under many figures, so that Mercurius is called a dragon, a serpent, a mermaid, a whore, tears, rain, dew, bee, Cupid, or lion, without error or ambiguity, because Mercurius is continually changed in the work.

His interlocutor smiled and perhaps slightly bent his head, as though he had noted the compliment paid his name and nature.

So they, I mean those compound bodies, made of those cohering atoms, do not remain stable.

—They do not. All compounds—ourselves and our bodies too—disintegrate over time. The bonds are merely bonds, however strong the attraction, and impermanent. Yet neither the corporeal substances, nor the atoms, nor their souls, can ever disappear. The atoms and the reasons that they bear inside themselves wander through the vicissitudes of matter, in search of other groups of
minima
that they recognize as compatible, and into which they insert themselves as into a new skin.

Are the
minima
so wise as that?

—The atom or
minimum
contains more energy than any corporeal mass of which it is a part, no matter how powerful—a sun, a star. The energy contained in and expressed by the minimum is
soul
, and that infinity is what makes us and all beings immortal, merely passing from being to being. If the process of that dissolution and agglomeration could be controlled, our beings, our selves, might pass intact to other beings. The Ægyptian priests inveigled the souls of stars into speaking statues of gods and beasts. We might—as those wise workers do who cast codes and ciphers—respell the words the atoms make, and therefore make of them other words, that is, other things.

So words are things?

—Better to say: things are words. This is the secret of the Cabala of the rabbis, which says that all things are made of the words of God, and to rearrange their letters must be to create new things.

This then is the principle of transubstantiation. Jesus's most brilliant trick—the
minima
of his being, containing his infinite soul, passed unchanged into the circle of bread. Is that correct
?

—You have said it.

The gods too—their endless transformations into things, Jupiter into swans, showers of gold, bulls; others into other things, Venus into a cat, everyone knows.

—Everyone knows.

But of course such power of transubstantiation or
metensomatosis
is impossible for those not gods or the sons of God. It may be that a clever man may have the power to make himself a simulacrum of another thing, and so fool the unwary.

—It is possible. It is also possible for one living thing to become another, and thereby cease to be what it has been.

Possible!

—Unless we teach ourselves by our thoughts to act, there is no point in thinking. Every philosopher has attempted to describe the world, but the point is to contain it.

So the wise man may do what the immortals have done.

—
Given enough years, a wise man might accomplish it.

Years, dearest friend, son and brother, are what you have.

With that, the messenger bent his head, smiling confidentially toward the immured philosopher. Around them the stone walls of his cell and the thicker ones of the
castello
; around the
castello
the Papal City all in its ranks and the battlements of the Holy Roman Empire around that.

I have a plan
, he said.

When he came at length to believe that he was too sick to finish his last book—that he would himself be finished before it was—then the novelist Fellowes Kraft experienced contradictory impulses.

On the one hand, he thought to put it aside and think no more of it, while with the little time left him he put his (few, pitiful) affairs in order. On the other hand he wanted to do nothing but work at it, to be found at the end (facedown on his pages, like Proust) to have escaped or at least exited into it. He spent the mornings making long notes to himself about further chapters and scenes, further volumes even, expanding an already immense project into unrealizable grandeur (since he was to be freed, he supposed, from having to execute it) and then when the horrid lassitude returned at day's end, would push away the mess of alien handled paper feeling ashen and sad. Then he would find himself thinking, for no reason or for many reasons, of his mother.

In the course of, or more exactly instead of, settling his life's business he had been collecting from his files the letters his mother had written him over the years, most of which he had saved but never looked at again after first opening them (saved in their envelopes, whose faint addresses charted his own old restlessness, chasing him from house to apartment to
pensione
as the stamps in the corner rose in cost). There were fewer than he recalled.