Doctor Copernicus Read Online Free PDF Page A

a bat. Only his eyes, disconsolate and bright, revealed the sad maimed soul within. To the school he was a figure of rare fun, and Canon Sturm’s boys
loved to follow him at a lurch down the corridors, mocking his preposterous gait. Even his name, so perfectly inapt, conspired to make a clown of him, a role to which he seemed to have resigned
himself, for it was in irony that he had taken the name Abstemius, and when thus addressed would sometimes cross his eyes and let his great head loll about in a travesty of drunkenness. Nicolas
suspected that the Canon, despite his admonition, derived from the intricacies of pure playful thought the only consolation afforded by a life that he had never quite learned how to live.
    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