"Isn’t it better, he wonders in another stroke of psychological genius, to illustrate the monstrosity of people’s ignorance by way of the ignorance of imaginary others? He hoped that by seeing the absurdity of the lunar people’s belief that the Moon is the center of the universe, the inhabitants of Earth would have the insight and integrity to question their own conviction of centrality. Three hundred fifty years later, when fifteen prominent poets are asked to contribute a “statement on poetics” for an influential anthology,
Denise Levertov—the only woman of the fifteen—would state that
poetry’s highest task is “to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.” This must have been what
Kepler aimed to do with The Dream—his serenade to the poetics of science, aimed at awakening. In December 1629, Kepler funded the printing of his Dream manuscript out of his already shallow pocket and set the type by hand himself. The first six pages took him four months, and then his money ran out. He left his family at their temporary home in Sagan and, already in precarious health, traveled to Leipzig, where he borrowed fifty florins—a substantial amount, about as much as a skilled craftsperson made in a year. He then put on his warmest brown stockings, belted a pistol and a powder flask into his tattered black woolen cloak, and made his way to Nuremberg, where he bought a famished mare as bony as himself. The two fragile creatures rode a hundred kilometers through the autumn rain to the Bavarian courts in Regensburg, where Kepler would seek permission to sell some Austrian bonds to repay his debt and finish printing The Dream. Days after he arrived and settled into an acquaintance’s house, now named after him, Kepler came down with an acute illness. Used to frequent attacks of fever and bodily ailments, he paid little mind. Bloodletting was performed to attempt alleviating the symptoms, but he began slipping in and out of consciousness. Pastors were called in. At noon on November 15, 1630, Johannes Kepler died, six weeks shy of his fifty-ninth birthday. Three days later, as his body was lowered into a grave in the Lutheran churchyard of St. Peter’s Gate, a pastor proclaimed: “Blessed are they who hear and preserve the word of God.” The Thirty Years’ War, waged unblessed and unblessing on the alleged word of God, would soon swallow the cemetery and erase any trace of Kepler’s bones. The night after the funeral, a full moon passed through Earth’s shadow in a lunar eclipse governed by eternal forces deaf to human words—fundamental truths of nature, which Kepler had spoken in the native tongue of the universe: mathematics. Three hundred thirty-nine years later, his Dream would come true as the first human foot stepped onto the Moon, leaping humankind via a trajectory calculated by his laws."
Figuring, Maria Popova
