Then the astronomer said: “Of course, whether the telescope is attributed to me or someone else doesn’t really matter, I’m even a little bit ashamed to harp on it, because when I die, which by my calculations will happen not long after the eclipse that will take place some two and three-quarters hours from now, I will be taking the telescope with me, and I will be taking Galileo and Kepler with me, and I’ll be taking Tycho with me, too, they’re all dead of course but nevertheless I’ll be taking them all with me, and anyone who credits the telescope to anyone else I’ll be taking with me, as well as the people they credit, as well as everyone else, and actually I’ll be taking the whole world with me, and even you, Herr Leibniz, I will be taking you with me, too, you probably didn’t know that! You because you’re young probably think that you’ll take the world with you when you die, deep down every young person thinks that he will take the world with him when he dies, that’s the canonical young person’s belief, because deep down young people don’t really believe in the reality of other people, they haven’t had the sheer reality of other people drummed into them yet by the schools, but what I have discovered through the most rigorous astronomical research is that I will actually take the world with me when I die. As a child I stupidly believed that I would take the world with me when I died, which belief was fortunately drummed out of me during the few years of schooling I had before my father whisked me into his workshop. The reality of other people was drummed into me and my belief that I would take the world with me when I died was accordingly drummed out of me. I learned next to nothing in school, but the sheer reality of other people was drummed into me. Elementary school is mostly useless, of course, but as a social mechanism for drumming into people the sheer reality of other people it is probably unsurpassed. I’m actually grateful for school, because by the time my father yanked me out of it by the ears I genuinely believed in the sheer reality of other people! Which, needless to say, is an extremely useful belief for going about life. There’s no more practical belief for going about life, and through life, than a belief in the reality of other people. Almost no one succeeds in the world without that belief, and all art and science flows out of that extremely expedient and uniquely advantageous belief, without which the stock market, too, would actually immediately shut down. And as a consequence of that belief being drummed into me, my childish, self-indulgent belief that I would take the world with me when I died was, thankfully, drummed out of me. Of course I eventually found my way back to that belief and realized it was perfectly true, but now it was true for the most rigorous and quantitative astronomical reasons,” the astronomer said, patting the telescope. “Every great thinker, by the way, has always without exception found his way back to his earliest childhood beliefs; right at the end he realizes that his whole intellectual life has been nothing more than a putting-on-firm-foundations of what he thought right at the start. Bad thinkers, I include incidentally Kepler and Tycho and Galileo in this category, and also Copernicus, start over here and end up over there, and the farther apart here and there are the better they think they’ve thought, and the louder the world claps, as if they’re children in a jumping competition, because the world thinks thinking is a kind of jumping, and in fact the kind of thinking Kepler did was a kind of jumping, but true thinking is actually an elaborate standing-still, or at most a going-over-there followed by a coming-back-here. While the world applauds the thinkers who choose to participate in the children’s jumping competition, the true thinkers are standing utterly still in a very complicated way. And since nonthinkers also tend to stand quite still, and nonthinkers vastly outnumber true thinkers, the world assumes that anyone standing still is a nonthinker and therefore does not applaud these standing-still types; but if you look very closely at a nonthinker and a true thinker you’ll notice that they’re actually standing still in completely different ways. So I came to realize that I really would take the world with me when I died, the fixed stars and the erratic ones and the Earth and the Sun and everything else, just as I had once thought, I would, not you, and not anyone else, either, but for entirely different reasons than I had once thought,” the astronomer said, patting the telescope. The content of the belief was the same but the armature around it and supporting it from underneath had gone from “pure childishness” to “extreme scientificity.”