SHORTLY AFTER THE appearance in the heavens of the new object, the astronomer’s father, who didn’t show the slightest interest in it, because, as he once put it to his son, “that’s up there and we’re down here,” a point of view that wounded the son but which he could not after all disprove, “I could not tie him in knots as I had the Aristotelians because he simply didn’t care about the twinkling thing, not what it was, not where it was, not even that it was,” decided, in an attempt to reverse his fortunes, which according to the astronomer had plunged from great heights into an abyss, to present Emperor Rudolf, who as it was known had an insatiable appetite for the monstrous and the esoteric and was a fanatical enthusiast of any mechanism that mimicked nature, with a perfect simulacrum of the human head. This mechanical human head would be capable not only of blinking its eyes and chomping its teeth but also of imitating the human voice through an astoundingly intricate system of tubes modeled in part on the apparatus by which the brazen bull of Phalaris had transformed the shrieks of the criminals roasted to death within it into eerily realistic bullish bellowing. For it to be a genuine automaton, the head, of course, could have no one inside it, it had to be void of everything but toothed wheels turning one another, so the initial sound would have to be produced by mechanical means rather than the yelps of the damned, the astronomer told Leibniz; but the apparatus that converted that first sound into something ostensibly human would be based, his father explained, on the principle of Phalaris’s bull. “We shall invent the modern bull of Phalaris!” his father told him. To the son the idea of a mechanical human head was abominable even though it was actually he who, in the course of the furtive studies he pursued each night, had first come across it, in a book called On the Sense of Things and on Magic, written by the heretical Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella just before his arrest by the Inquisition in 1594; in this book, the astronomer told Leibniz (who reported the claim to the Philosophical Transactions “although,” as he noted, “it cannot possibly be true, since that book was not published until 1620,” and suggested that the astronomer may have meant Campanella’s earlier Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses), Campanella writes of coming across a passage in a book by William of Paris in which William claims that Albertus Magnus had built in Cologne around 1250 out of pure matter a mechanical head that could speak in a human voice. Campanella himself did not believe that such a head was possible, in fact he adduced this head precisely as an example of what it was that natural magic could not bring about, “I do not hold to be true that which William of Paris writes,” wrote Campanella, as the astronomer told Leibniz, Leibniz wrote, but the astronomer’s father—who had been racking his brain for a marvel he could make that would astonish the Emperor and thus restore the astronomer’s father to his former stature, even to his former title, for if the astronomer was not lying to Leibniz his father had at one time been the Imperial Sculptor to Rudolf’s father and predecessor, Emperor Maximilian—believed that not only was such a head possible, it would actually be quite simple. “I can make that head!” he cried, according to the astronomer, when the astronomer mentioned the idea to his father as though it had occurred to him ex nihilo. The idea was abominable to the astronomer but he knew that his father, whom besides fearing, admiring, resenting, and loving, he now pitied, would take to it. “Every sentiment a boy can feel toward his father I felt toward my father and every sentiment an artist can feel toward his art my father felt toward that mechanical human head,” the astronomer told Leibniz. He distinctly recalled the first moment of sheer elation, the cries of “I can make that head! I can make that head! I can actually make that head!” He really thought he could make that head! the astronomer recalled. He was confident he could make that head and that that head would flabbergast the Emperor. With a sweep of his arm his father cast into the trash decades of labor, including the almost infinitely mirrored microcosm of the cosmos that had been his first gambit to get into the Emperor’s good graces, but in which his father had quite recently, and rather traumatically, lost faith. For years, indeed for much of the astronomer’s adolescence, his father had been gluing thousands or tens of thousands of tiny mirrors to the inside walls of a box, but one day, not long before that new object appeared in the heavens, “he peered into the peephole of the box and immediately started weeping.” Never before had the astronomer seen his father weep. It was horrible to see, “horrific!” “The cause of his weeping of course was the realization that he had devoted a sizable chunk of his life to a many-mirrored box.” Whenever we devote such a sizable chunk of our lives to such a box, gluing mirrors in it and so forth, and then realize rather far along that it has not magically metamorphosed into a microcosm of the cosmos, we weep—that’s natural. “We weep upon realizing that it has remained a mere box, I understand that now.” At the time, though, it was extremely upsetting, the astronomer said. “I often wish I hadn’t seen it.” To see your father peer into a little box he has made and begin weeping remains upsetting no matter how much you claim to comprehend it in retrospect. Imagine, he put so much faith into that little box, he truly believed in the box, and then one day he peers into the box and begins weeping! He had really believed in that box, but from the moment he peered into the box, he could no longer sustain his belief in the box. “His faith in that box could not withstand what he now saw in it, which was basically just a lot of mirrors.” Though he saw himself as the most practical and skeptical of sculptors, and sculpting as the most practical and skeptical of art forms, he was in truth driven by a faith even more fervent than that which drove penitents to wander the streets of Prague thrashing themselves bloody with iron-studded whips, for he believed without question that the incremental addition of a particular mirror, one of thousands, who knew which one, would suddenly transform that object from a mere many-mirrored box into a microcosm of the cosmos. For years he glued in mirror after mirror, awaiting with a conviction that in retrospect seemed to the astronomer uncanny the marginal mirror that would effect that metamorphosis and give him a box worthy of bestowing on the Emperor. Leibniz comments: “His father seems to have believed that the qualitative problem of transmuting a many-mirrored box into a microcosm of the cosmos could be reduced to the quantitative problem of pasting in, e.g., the three hundred and forty-fourth mirror, or the three hundred and forty-fifth mirror.” The astronomer said: “No one should have to see his father put so much faith in such a small box and then all of a sudden lose that faith in that box.” That day the astronomer wept, too, and so did his mother; the fact of the matter is that they, too, had had faith in that box; they, too, had believed (probably based on the uncanny conviction of their father and husband) that it would at some point transfigure itself from a mere many-mirrored box into a microcosm of the cosmos, rescuing its maker from the commercial, artistic, and psychological abyss into which he’d been plunged when Emperor Rudolf dismissed him as Imperial Sculptor and transferred the imperial capital from Vienna to Prague. “Father begged us, weeping, Look inside, tell me what you see when you look inside! What do you see? What do you see? And Mother peered in and said, I see a microcosm, and I peered in and said, I see a many-mirrored box. And Father knew of course that Mother was lying and that I was telling the truth.”