There’s actually nothing interesting above and actually nothing interesting within, the astronomer thought at that time. Prince Heinrich was right. “Everything everywhere is more or less the same.”

For the first time in his life, the astronomer wanted to stop looking, to stop looking out at the sky, and to stop looking into himself.

But he could not stop. He felt he had a “compulsion to look,” to look closer and closer, “a looking-closer-and-closer compulsion.” What (he wondered) would it take to stop looking, “to look this closely, and no closer? Through such and such a magnification, and no higher?”

Now, these thoughts must have occurred to him around the year 1628, just after the imperial army failed at the siege of Stralsund to oust the King of Sweden from his foothold in Pomerania, for that was the moment at which an anonymous Munich pamphleteer, “as though reading my mind,” charged the astronomer with a “Judaic looking-compulsion,” which, by channeling toward his long nonsensical Judaic tubes funds required for the defense of Germany and Catholicism from the heretics and philistines of the north, sacrificed the fatherland to the singleminded “compulsion to look ever closer” common to all Jews but especially pronounced in this particular Jew, “who reserves for himself the right to look as closely as humanly possible at all things, though it means the devastation of our mother country, and the ruin of Christendom.” As he read the pamphlet, and even as he recognized the danger it posed to his project, and to his person, the astronomer recalled thinking that no one on Earth understood him as well as did this pamphleteer, perhaps not even he himself, and certainly not his own son. Still, he would not let it deter him, “a compulsion leads a life quite independent of one’s consciousness of it,” and the afternoon of the morning he read it he wrote to Ferdinand demanding a new tube one hundred and sixty feet in length, with the power to magnify things a hundred and twenty times. The timing of this demand was inauspicious. It arrived at the Hofburg at the very instant that a breathless courier came with the ominous news that the Swedish Estates had voted with one voice to finance three years’ worth of war with Germany. If Gustavus Adolphus had not already set sail from Stockholm with his forces he was surely soon to do so. Meanwhile the Imperial Treasury was in a lamentable state. Ferdinand had taken to selling his own land, first Lusatia in perpetuity to the Elector of Saxony, then Upper Austria as a pledge to Maximilian of Bavaria. In partial payment of a debt of some half a million gulden Wallenstein was granted the dukedom of Mecklenburg. And now this superannuated Imperial Astronomer, “having taught Prince Heinrich about triangles,” as he prefaced each of his demands, was demanding a tube one hundred and sixty feet long, so fast on the heels of one that was one hundred and fifty feet? Ferdinand, moreover, was not deaf to the whispering among his Bavarian subjects, including Duke Maximilian himself, that he was held hostage to a Judaic looking-compulsion, that he was mortgaging the German lands in order to let a single Jew look more and more closely, indeed “pointlessly close,” in the words of the Munich polemicist, at all things, in heaven, on Earth, “and in himself, as well: into his own repugnant and blaspheming soul,” as the astronomer recalled one of the pamphlets alleging, “not wholly without justification,” he told Leibniz. The Emperor therefore found himself in a bind. On the one hand he had to uphold at all costs the appearance of constitutionality, or else it was certain that Saxony would relinquish its neutrality and align itself with the Swedes; and no argument founded upon the reason of state, upon the identity of the reasonable with the necessary, would persuade the Elector of Saxony to do otherwise; if, on the other hand, he continued to tap the Imperial Treasury to pay for these longer and longer and now extraordinarily long tubes, he would lose the support of the good people of Munich, then of all Bavaria, after that he would lose Maximilian, and hence the army his Catholic League had put under the command of Count Tilly, and soon after that he would lose the war. “In either case my tubes seemed to spell the end of the Holy Roman Empire,” the astronomer told Leibniz.