Emperor Ferdinand’s solution was ingenious.

He would continue, he declared, to uphold the letter of the law of the Edict of the Tubes, but no longer would he bankroll these costly tubes exclusively out of his own pocket, not, in other words, out of the imperial pocket, not exclusively, so the astronomer told Leibniz; henceforth the cost of the tubes would be subsidized by a new and annually escalating tax, a so-called tube tax, levied on the goatherds and salt miners who populated the mountainous province at the highest and most visible point of which the observatory stood. At first the new policy seemed inane; the people who lived here were poor and there were not many of them; even if the Crown confiscated every last thaler in the whole province, the revenues would not come to a tenth of a single tube. Soon, however, it dawned on the astronomer that the policy had political aims, not economic ones. “With that tube tax, the Emperor turned those salt miners and goatherds against me.” Across these hills there were thousands of manual laborers but only a single “laborer of the mind,” in the astronomer’s words; Emperor Ferdinand hoped, presumably, that the body would turn against the mind, so to speak, that it would reject the mind, attack the mind, and kill the mind. That is nearly what happened. It was, of course, no accident that the observatory itself was selected as the tube tax collection point, and as the goatherds and salt miners dropped off their in-kind payments of goats on the one hand and sacks of salt on the other they murmured imprecations at their aberrant neighbor with his arcane concerns. Some vowed violence against him. More than one tried to hack his tubes in two. When a goatherd’s wife, whose six sons, she said, were off God-knows-where fighting God-knows-who, and whose starving daughter could not make enough milk to nourish her newborn, inquired of the astronomer, as she surrendered her last runtish goat, what wisdom he had gained from his observations of the stars, and he replied with a laugh that he had learned nothing, he had gained nothing at all in the way of wisdom, and he knew less now than he did when he began, she with a howl such as he had never heard took from within her cloak a vial containing some sort of acidic substance which she flung at the astronomer’s face, and which might well have blinded him then and there had he not had the nimbleness to duck. One evening matters came to a head. Through the tube the astronomer observed a strange reddish glow emanating from the Earth that revealed itself when they had crested the hill to be four or five hundred of his neighbors bearing torches in one hand and weapons in the other, pickaxes for the salt miners and pitchforks for the goatherds. The astronomer told Leibniz: “These men had come to kill me.” He took what he feared would be his final glance at the heavens and then went out to meet them. And he thought, per Leibniz: My father, who worked his whole life with his hands, would know how to address these men; I, who put all my faith in my eyes, not to mention my mind, do not, I do not know how to address them, I don’t know how to speak to these manual laborers the way manual laborers like being spoken to. “For the first time in my life, I wanted to be more like my father.” No longer did he pride himself on the esoteric metaphysical torment that he sensed and suffered and that his father did not; now the astronomer just wanted to be able to speak to manual laborers, like his father could. “In that moment, there seemed to me nothing more worthy than to know how to get one’s meaning across to a man whose life is devoted to goats. But I knew I could not get my meaning across to him nor could I justify myself to those men with weathered hands whose coats glittered with crystals of salt.” And so, with little hope that his words would save him, certain that his own inescapable erudition would only confirm for these earthy people his monstrousness, the astronomer took off his thick spectacles and opened his mouth to speak—yet what came out, he marveled to Leibniz, “but my father’s words, my father’s cadences! He was within me still, I do not know how deep within, it was as if in my boyhood I had without realizing it swallowed the man whole.” He spoke to those manual laborers the way manual laborers like being spoken to, he made them laugh with the manual-laborer jokes his father had once told the men in his workshop, made them misty-eyed with his father’s manual-laborer mawkishness, gesticulating all the while with his father’s manual-laborer gesticulations. Though without his spectacles he could hardly see the crowd he could sense that his performance was winning them over. And he ended by justifying what he was doing there with his tubes in terms they understood innately.