Of course, his inability to furnish that eureka moment, to retrace precisely the route by which he had arrived at the notion that two convex lenses placed one behind the other would magnify, albeit invert, the world—the foundation, Leibniz noted, of what is now called the Keplerian telescope—rendered him suspect in the eyes of the world, and especially in the eyes of the chroniclers of the world, who, in devoting their lives to carving from the infinitely extended, infinitely dense glob of absolute nonsense known as reality numerous little globules of nonsense, then compressing these globules of nonsense into beads of pure nonsense, and finally stringing together these nonsensical fact-beads into handsome glittering concatenations of seeming sense, i.e., their history books, practice sanity, promulgate sanity, and privilege, in selecting what and especially whom to preserve and parade about for posterity, a species of sanity. Now, sanity has, no doubt, accomplished a great deal throughout European history, the astronomer told Leibniz. Sanity is important, too! But in all of the hoopla over sanity, we ought not to neglect the contributions of madness. “Of course, it is true, if I might anticipate your objection, Herr Leibniz,” the astronomer said, “that these sane chroniclers sometimes pay lip service to the merits of madness, or more than sometimes, perpetually, actually these staunchly sane chroniclers are almost always completely obsessed with madness, the saner the more obsessed, probably precisely because they sense the strictures imposed on their thoughts by their sanity, and they fill their histories with hymns to madness and its fruits: with painters who painted their greatest paintings with their left hand, in the dark, while chained by the right to a wall in a Fool’s Tower, with philosophers who lived in filth but spoke the truth, with mystics who walked into the desert and lived for forty years atop a pillar before returning to the city bearing the word of God. Their histories, you will object, Herr Leibniz, are in fact nothing but histories of madness, fairy tales and fables of madness, odes to madness as the supreme mechanism of art and science, histories of the world as the handiwork of the mad! And I reply: Whatever it is these sane chroniclers are chronicling, it is not madness. The painter is locked up in a Fool’s Tower … but he paints a painting the sane see as beautiful. The philosopher lives in his filth … but he says things the sane see as true. The mystic climbs up his pillar … but he climbs back down it with what the sane see as the word of God. This isn’t madness,” he told Leibniz, “it is only the portion of madness recognizable to the sane, expressible in the tongue of the sane, and is ipso facto the sane portion of madness: This is sanitized madness! The portion of insanity that can be put in the language of the sane is obviously the sane portion. It is the untranslatable residue that constitutes true madness. Notice how in the history books you never come across a man or indeed a woman who climbs up a pillar for no reason, and never comes down. Where is the history of this pointless pillar person? Whose bones are picked clean by the birds? Where is the historian who will write the history of this person who climbs up a pillar for no reason, reports nothing from God, and is ultimately devoured by birds? Where is the history of the philosopher who lives in his own filth, subsists on garbage, grunts incessantly, like a beast, brutalizes himself, and has never once been heard to utter anything even remotely intelligible, not a single word, much less a syllogism? Where is the historian who will write the history of this philosopher? I will tell you where he is: He’s nowhere! He does not exist! He does not and cannot by definition exist,” the astronomer said, according to Leibniz. “For the instant a historian writes a stupendously long history of a person who climbs a pillar for no reason and is devoured up there by desert birds, or of a bestial philosopher who cannot speak and eats garbage, the historian ceases to be a historian and becomes, himself, a madman. In the eyes of the world and in his own eyes also he has climbed his own pillar, ceased speaking intelligibly.