ALL DAY LONG the astronomer and his father hammered together that mechanical human head. Then his father went to sleep and he stayed up all night conducting his clandestine investigations into optics, reading Euclid and Ptolemy and Grosseteste and peering at the firmament through a glass, or in the reflection of a curved mirror. During the day he and his father scavenged lead scraps, which they melted down and sculpted into the shell of the head, elegant and lifelike, and topped with a shock of thick brown hair donated to them gratis by an attendant of the anatomical theater at Charles University where a week before a young thief had been dissected. Then his father went to bed and the astronomer—by the light of a single candle lit only after he heard his father’s sixth snore, for one snore could of course be faked, as could two snores or three, even four simulated snores is not unthinkable if his father had suspicions, and the idea of feigning five snores to catch your son in some verboten act is, if absurd, not impossible, whereas after six snores his father was probably asleep—read, for example, the portions of Friar Bacon’s Opus Majus concerning the physiology of vision or his Letter on the Secret Workings of Art and Nature with its depictions of those ingenious devices of antiquity that according to legend made distant things seem near or near things distant, such as the fabled glasses with which Julius Caesar is said to have seen the cliffs of Great Britain from the beaches of Gaul, or the gigantic mirror atop the Pharos of Alexandria with which one could not only spot enemy ships at a distance of six hundred miles but by concentrating the rays of the Sun on them just so even set them ablaze. Naturally with all this reading the astronomer’s eyes began deteriorating, “the eye always deteriorates when it focuses on something so near at hand, in so weak a light,” so he had to purchase spectacles, first thin ones, and then thicker and thicker ones, until eventually he wore the thickest spectacles in Prague, but “for some reason my father never inferred from the thickness of my spectacles my contempt for his values.” Each morning when his father’s snores subsided it was time to return from the realm of contemplation to that of fabrication. For weeks the astronomer did not sleep. If he wasn’t peering into his father’s mechanical human head, he was peering out of his own head. One head was to be looked into: the mechanical head. The other was to be looked out from: his own organismic head. The former head had to speak, blink, and chomp, the latter head to think and see. But in his mounting exhaustion it did not take long of course to descend into complete head confusion, “utter head chaos.” Everything got mixed up! Which head was for looking at, and which head was for looking? One night he spent all night observing his head, instead of using his head to observe. “Obviously I had to use my own head to observe my own head, so in a sense I was still using my head to observe, but what I was observing with my head was my head, rather than the new twinkling object in the heavens.” He actually observed his head observing his head being observed by his head: a complete waste of time. That whole night was a waste, “particularly since the sky was perfectly cloudless.” He ought to have spent that time observing the firmament in the reflection of a rounded mirror. Not to mention that the head doing the observing was never quite the same head as the head being observed, even if it had the illusion that it was observing itself, so his data besides being worthless were meaningless. A head “no matter how sensitive” cannot catch itself in the act of observing itself, that much he did determine. “The observer head and the observed head are two wholly different heads, even if they sprout from one and the same neck.” Thus amid the confusion of heads, there was a multiplication of heads. The next day he spent all day tinkering with the cogwheels in his father’s mechanical head in hopes of inducing it to think, if not to reflect. Only toward the end of the day after hours of failing to make the head think, much less reflect, did he suddenly remember, prompted by his father’s asking him, So how’s the blinking coming along?, that this was actually not the thinking head, it was the blinking and chomping head! “Wrong head once again!” He was supposed to be contriving the flapping of the eyelids, not the churning of thought, the tingling of sentiment, or the synthesis of concepts. The eyes were to open and close, that’s all. So this whole day, too, was a waste. And then that night, as his father slept, the astronomer while looking at the heavens through a lens realized that he could see nothing, nothing at all, not a single star all night either fixed or wandering, the sky was cloudless once again and filled presumably with phenomena—indeed he would learn the next morning that Venus in the course of the night had transited Jupiter—but there might as well have been a curtain drawn across it for he found himself attending exclusively and involuntarily to his own blinks, scrutinizing his own blinks with an absorption that actually entirely occluded the world outside him and above. He said: “That night though I knew very well which head I had on my shoulders I still could not stop devoting my attention exclusively to my blinks, noticing each of my blinks, feeling and registering each of my blinks, counting my blinks well into the thousands, analyzing my blinks into their constituent parts, to the point where I could actually no longer blink, I basically forgot how to blink, or rather I suddenly understood blinking too well now to do it, I saw through what it means to blink, to experience an infinitesimal flash of darkness between two prolonged exposures to the external world, My God, I thought, that’s what a blink is?, my thinking you see had made my blinking impossible, I could still chomp, as I determined, oh, I could speak and chomp perfectly well, but I could no longer blink no matter how dry my eyes, I had utterly dismantled my blinking machine, it lay, as it were, in pieces, which I now had to put back together using only the most fundamental physical principles, I had to teach myself from scratch how to blink again, how to do this very simple thing, this very simple blinking thing, that hitherto I had done instinctively and in fact continuously from birth.”