In the Castle, brought there by the invited astronomers, were contraptions that left us as blind as before, or basically as blind, the astronomer thought, while in my head—the head of a noninvited astronomer!—was a contraption that would permit us to see, I mean truly to see.

Now it was merely a matter of getting this head into that Castle.

This head, containing that contraption, or the concept of that contraption, into that Castle.

Under the guise of helping his father get his father’s mechanical head into that Castle.

“Tomorrow, I told my father,” the astronomer told Leibniz, “we get this head into that Castle! Purposefully ambiguous of course about whose head, which head. I mean, of course: Let’s get my head into that Castle! but my father hears: Let’s get your, or our, head, the head we built together, into that Castle! And he, his beard now basically completely white, his mouth more or less toothless, on his head his prized plumed cap, breaks into one of those infinitely creased old-person grins that evoke the beatitude of an infant.

“You see this tear, yes?” the astronomer asked Leibniz. “You verify it? The interesting thing is that I weep most not when I ponder my feelings for my father but when I ponder my father’s feelings for his cap, or his feelings for his box. Not my feelings for him, not his feelings for me, not his feelings for my mother, or my mother’s feelings for him—though all of these feelings like all family feelings were perfectly potent—but rather his feelings for his cap and his feelings for his box, as well as my mother’s feelings for his cap, for she was always trying to keep that cap clean for him even in the years he wasn’t wearing it, that black cap my father loved so much collected dust like crazy and it’s not too much to say that my mother, who was actually an extremely literate and intelligent woman, the daughter of a renowned jurist and humanist from Regensburg, wound up locked in a lifelong battle with the dust-collecting-qualities of my father’s black velvet cap. It is not the relationship between subjects and subjects that makes one weep most but the relationship between subjects and objects, that’s insufficiently understood! When I picture my mother trying to keep my father’s cap dust-free I can produce a teardrop almost at will.”

He peered into his telescope.

“Sentimentality remains radically understudied. The scientific study of the sentiments is still utterly in its nascence. Only in the last year or two, in Delft, has a teardrop finally been put under the microscope. Sentiments can be investigated only to a certain extent by introspection, i.e., in the absence of a microscope. Delft is the undisputed capital of teardrop microscopy.”

He peered into his telescope.