KEPLER, BY THE WAY, as the astronomer knew for a fact, according to Leibniz, had eaten a heavy dinner of bread dumplings that night and fallen asleep early, before the new object had even appeared in the sky. By the time he woke up and looked out the window, the Prague Aristotelians were already completely tied in knots; perhaps there were a few stray Aristotelians whom Kepler could claim to have tied in knots with his De Stella Nova, but essentially that book entered a Prague in which the Aristotelians were mostly already totally tied in knots. It was, incidentally, Kepler’s well-known hankering for bread dumplings, and the fatigue those dumplings inevitably induced, that caused him to miss untold astronomical phenomena throughout his life; it is accurate to say that throughout his entire life Kepler never actually saw anything for the first time, he only observed what other people observed first, so filled was he with soporific bread dumplings—the optical nerve, said the astronomer, is directly connected, as Vesalius showed, not only to the brain but also to the stomach and extremities—which is why in place of his eyes, always half-closed in a dumpling-induced stupor, Kepler had to substitute his notorious mathematical prowess. But mathematical reasoning as a means of accessing reality can only go so far in replacing vision. For this reason, “I myself have never eaten a bread dumpling after four o’clock in the afternoon, even though there’s nothing in the world I’d like to eat more in the evening hours, and by the time seven or eight rolls around my mind is often screaming for bread dumplings, just as Kepler’s mind was always screaming for bread dumplings. But unlike Kepler I have always denied myself.” He likewise, unlike Kepler, had always denied himself all goulash and all roasted meats served after the hour of four o’clock in the afternoon, and as a result of this lifelong self-denial was always “preternaturally crisp in the head” by the time the stars began to shine. The astronomer’s firm conviction was that anyone who eats foods like goulash or bread dumplings after about four in the afternoon, or five at the latest, cannot (unless we’re dealing with a ludicrously light dumpling, a dumpling you hardly feel in your belly, the kind of divinely light bread dumpling we could theorize about forever but that in practice we never actually encounter anywhere on Earth, much less in Prague) call himself an “astronomer,” perhaps he can call himself a “mathematician” or a “philosopher,” but he cannot in good faith call himself an “astronomer,” and that includes the gastronome Tycho Brahe. “You simply cannot eat such a meal at such an hour and afterward expect to see,” the astronomer told Leibniz. “I mean truly see.”

When he said the words “truly see” he pointed at his empty eye sockets.