The Sleepwalkers (127 page)

Not
a
word
is
said
about
the
person
of
his
betrothed
or
his
feelings
for
her.
But
in
another
letter
written
two
years
later,
he
blames
her
horoscope
for
her
"rather
sad
and
unlucky
fate...
In
all
dealings
she
is
confused
and
inhibited.
Also
she
gives
birth
with
difficulty.
Everything
else
is
in
the
same
vein."
⁶

After
her
death,
he
described
her
in
even
more
depressing
terms.
She
had
known
how
to
make
a
favourable
impression
on
strangers,
but
at
home
she
had
been
different.
She
resented
her
husband's
lowly
position
as
a
stargazer
and
understood
nothing
of
his
work.
She
read
nothing,
not
even
stories,
only
her
prayer
book
which
she
devoured
day
and
night.
She
had
"a
stupid,
sulking,
lonely,
melancholy
complexion".
She
was
always
ailing
and
weighed
down
with
melancholia.
When
his
salary
was
withheld,
she
refused
to
let
him
touch
her
dowry,
even
to
pawn
a
cup
or
to
put
her
hand
into
her
private
purse.

"And
because,
due
to
her
constant
illness,
she
was
deprived
of
her
memory,
I
made
her
angry
with
my
reminders
and
admonitions
for
she
would
have
no
master
and
yet
often
was
unable
to
cope
herself.
Often
I
was
even
more
helpless
than
she,
but
in
my
ignorance
persisted
in
the
quarrel.
In
short
she
was
of
an
angry
nature,
and
uttered
all
her
wishes
in
an
angry
voice;
this
incited
me
to
provoke
her,
I
regret
it,
for
my
studies
sometimes
made
me
thoughtless;
but
I
learnt
my
lesson,
I
learnt
to
have
patience
with
her.
When
I
saw
that
she
took
my
words
to
heart,
I
would
rather
have
bitten
my
own
finger
than
to
give
her
further
offence..."
⁷

Her
avarice
made
her
neglect
her
appearance;
but
she
lavished
everything
on
the
children
because
she
was
a
woman
"entirely
imprisoned
by
maternal
love";
as
for
her
husband
"not
much
love
came
my
way".
She
nagged
not
only
him
but
also
the
servant
wenches
and
"could
never
keep
a
wench".
When
he
was
working
she
would
interrupt
him
to
discuss
her
household
problems.
"I
may
have
been
impatient
when
she
failed
to
understand
and
went
on
asking
me
questions,
but
I
never
called
her
a
fool,
though
it
may
have
been
her
understanding
that
I
considered
her
a
fool,
for
she
was
very
touchy."
⁸
There
is
not
much
left
to
be
added
to
this
portrait
of
the
perennial
Xanthippe.

Nine
months
after
the
wedding
their
first
child
was
born,
a
little
boy,
with
his
genitals
so
deformed
that
"their
composition
looked
like
a
boiled
turtle
in
its
shell"
⁹
–
which,
Kepler
explains,
was
due
to
turtles
being
his
wife's
favourite
dish.
After
two
months
the
child
died
of
cerebral
meningitis,
and
the
next,
a
little
girl,
died
after
a
month
of
the
same
disease.
Frau
Barbara
bore
three
more
children,
of
which
one
boy
and
one
girl
survived.

Altogether,
their
marriage
lasted
fourteen
years;
Barbara
died
at
the
age
of
thirty-seven,
with
a
distraught
mind.
The
marriage
horoscope
had
shown
a
coelo
calamitoso
,
and
in
predicting
disaster
Kepler's
horoscopes
were
nearly
always
right.

3.
Limbering Up

When
in
the
spring
of
1597,
the
Mysterium
at
last
appeared
in
print,
the
proud
young
author
sent
copies
to
all
leading
scholars
he
could
think
of,
including
Galileo
and
Tycho
de
Brahe.
There
existed
as
yet
no
scientific
journals
nor,
happy
days,
book
reviewers;
on
the
other
hand,
there
was
an
intensive
exchange
of
letters
among
scholars
and
a
luxuriant
international
academic
grapevine.
By
these
means
the
unknown
young
man's
book
created
a
certain
stir;
though
not
the
earthquake
which
its
author
expected,
yet
remarkable
enough
if
we
consider
that
the
average
number
of
scientific
(and
pseudo-scientific)
books
published
in
Germany
in
a
single
year
was
well
over
a
thousand.
¹⁰

But
the
response
was
not
surprising.
Astronomy,
from
Ptolemy
to
Kepler,
had
been
a
purely
descriptive
geography
of
the
sky.
Its
task
was
to
provide
maps
of
the
fixed
stars,
timetables
of
the
motions
of
sun,
moon
and
planets,
and
of
such
special
events
as
eclipses,
oppositions,
conjunctions,
solstices,
equinoxes,
and
the
rest.
The
physical
causes
of
the
motions,
the
forces
of
nature
behind
them,
were
not
the
astronomer's
concern.
Whenever
necessary,
a
few
epicycles
were
added
to
the
existing
machinery
of
wheels
–
which
did
not
matter
much
since
they
were
fictional
anyway,
and
nobody
believed
in
their
physical
reality.
The
hierarchy
of
cherubim
and
seraphim
who
were
supposed
to
keep
the
wheels
turning
was,
since
the
end
of
the
Middle
Ages,
regarded
as
another
polite,
poetic
fiction.
Thus
the
physics
of
the
sky
had
become
a
complete
blank.
There
were
events
but
no
causes,
motions
but
no
moving
forces.
The
astronomer's
task
was
to
observe,
describe
and
predict,
not
to
search
for
causes
–
"theirs
not
to
reason
why".
Aristotelian
physics,
which
made
any
rational
and
causal
approach
to
the
heavenly
phenomena
unthinkable,
was
on
the
wane,
but
it
had
left
only
a
vacuum
behind
it.
Ears
were
still
ringing
with
the
vanished
song
of
the
star-spinning
angels,
but
all
was
silence.
In
that
fertile
silence
the
unformed,
stammering
voice
of
the
young
theologian-turned-astronomer
obtained
an
immediate
hearing.