The astronomer paused to peer into the telescope. Then he said:

“All day long we took turns peering into the peephole and weeping.” It was the end of his childhood. “When you peer into your father’s mirrored box and tell him point-blank that it’s not a microcosm of anything, least of all the cosmos, you are needless to say no longer a child.” A teardrop had formed in the corner of one of the astronomer’s sockets, a fact to which the latter drew Leibniz’s attention and which Leibniz confirmed in his letter. Just as he could still see, he could still weep, the astronomer explained, since his faculty of sentimentality like his faculty of sight had not been damaged in the slightest when he lost his eyes. And Leibniz noted parenthetically that a failed assassin of John the Fearless of Burgundy was likewise seen to weep soon after his eyes had been cut out, and that an anatomist at Montpellier who examined the corpse reported that the tear ducts remained intact. The astronomer said: “I’ve always been interested in sentimentality, never scorned it, never feared it, always adopted a scrupulously scientific attitude toward it, so I’m actually glad you got the chance to verify this teardrop. You see it, yes? You confirm it? This is, needless to say, a most sentimental subject matter for me.” His father, like all fathers, had once been all-powerful, and his father had been even more all-powerful than most. He had once been the most powerful sculptor in the whole world. In Vienna not only the Hofburg Palace but the entire city had basically burst at the seams with his father’s busts, friezes, fountains, and columns. As a boy born in a city decorated to his father’s exact specifications, the astronomer often had the peculiar feeling, upon turning a corner and stumbling across another of his father’s columns or fountains or friezes or busts, that he had actually been born inside his father’s head. “The cityscape conformed to his concepts.” Sometimes as a boy the astronomer strutted down the streets of Vienna “with tremendous conceit, for this was none other than my father’s head we were all walking through!” and sometimes he skulked through the alleys with his back pressed to the high walls, woozy, bewildered, hyperventilating, looking in every direction for a way out of his father’s big black-bearded head—“forgetting of course that the very exit for which I was searching would also be built by him, as were the very walls against which my back was pressed.” His conceit turned into claustrophobia, his claustrophobia into conceit, these sensations were utterly inextricable or possibly even the same sensation, the astronomer told Leibniz.

He added: “You have to understand all of this to understand the telescope.”

And: “I want you to see what I’m seeing when I peer through the telescope.”