INSTEAD OF KILLING HIMSELF—“which would have been exceptionally foolish to do then, before I knew what the stars actually were, and where they actually came from!”—he catalogued the stars in the Way to the Shrine of Saint Jacob, nearly three thousand of them, and requested from Emperor Ferdinand a new tube ninety feet long, after that a tube one hundred feet long, and shortly after that a tube not less than a hundred and fifteen feet in length, with the power to magnify things ninety times, and which required, per the astronomer, a whole battalion of Wallenstein’s men, fresh from their victory over Mansfield at Dessau, on the Elbe, to haul up the hillside. Through each new tube something that had appeared in the prior one to be a nebulosity or a cloud of dust was revealed to be another multitude of stars, necessitating the tube to follow. “Until the sky looked the same through two tubes of different lengths the star catalogue was incomplete.” The tubes, it is true, now became enormously long. But so long as Wallenstein struck fear into the hearts of the Protestant princes, the Emperor with his veneer of constitutionality was if not delighted to supply them at least prompt in doing so, in accordance with the edict issued by his predecessor by two. Years passed in this way, the tubes getting longer and longer, and resolving more and more nebulosities into clusters of stars. What is interesting, noted the astronomer, per Leibniz, is that his inner technology kept pace with his outer technology; as his outer technology, the tubes, grew longer and longer outward, his inner technology, the introspective mechanism, grew longer and longer inward, and became more and more powerful, and as he resolved the nebulosities into vast multitudes of stars, he also simultaneously resolved himself and his mother and his father and his son into vast multitudes of motivations; “The tale I am now telling you—minus of course the last and most crucial part, wherein I lost my eyes—began in those days to arrange itself in my head, as I peered at my life through my longer and longer introspective mechanism and broke myself and my family members into smaller and smaller (rearrangeable) bits and pieces,” said the astronomer. This was not entirely a good thing, he felt, and in fact as he resolved the nebulous portions of his life into discrete and indistinguishable bits and pieces, just as he resolved the nebulous portions of the skies into discrete and indistinguishable stars, he felt it was entirely a bad thing. With his longer and longer and more and more powerful inner technology he resolved his mother into smaller and smaller and hence less and less nebulous and interesting bits, chopped her basically into hundreds of tiny bits and pieces, and then did likewise to his father, then to his son, and then to himself, until they were all chopped into extremely small, entirely unmysterious, and completely uninteresting bits, bits of disposition, personality pieces, bits and pieces of belief and inclination and habit. And to the sky he did the same thing, or something similar.