There is pathos, of course, in seeing one’s son seize with enormous delight upon something one knows oneself to be worthless.

And how his father seized upon that head!

All the faith he had put in the box now went into the head, right into that head. “He put all of his faith in that mechanical human head.” The few new commissions that still came in he declined. “Everything now depended on that head,” the astronomer told Leibniz. His father called it the Head of Phalaris. If his father knew that the sculptor who had presented Phalaris with the brazen bull wound up being burned to death by Phalaris inside that selfsame bull he did not let on. The astronomer began to have dreadful premonitions. Of course his father “could not actually be stuffed inside of his own head,” the head having a circumference like the mean adult male of just over one and a half feet, “a body cannot be stuffed inside a head, that’s clear,” and since moreover it was to serve as an instrument of simulation and entertainment rather than persecution and execution it seemed unlikely that the Emperor, even if he were not amused by it, would consign its inventor to death. “The question of the Emperor’s amusement was, however, not a minor one, as you shall see,” the astronomer said, “and the foreboding I had about the head almost as soon as my father began building it, and in particular the peculiar foreboding I had about the eventual presentation of that head to the Emperor, was not, in fact, without foundation, for as you shall see, Herr Leibniz, something very terrible did come to pass, something very terrible indeed! Even though that terrible thing was intertwined in a way I could never have foreseen with something very great.”

The astronomer put one empty socket to his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote something down. There were two and a half hours till noon. Leibniz reported seeing a sliver of the Moon through the slightly warped slat, but where the Sun was at that moment he did not know. “And I might have been mistaken about the Moon.”