At last they entered the Great Hall, a vast vaulted chamber that had hosted countless coronations, royal weddings, winter waltzes, and other scenes of official elation, including the occasional chivalrous competition, “three weeks ago horses had galloped up and down that hall to the ecstasy of the Emperor,” but which now was a scene of utter despair, scored by the tick-tock of precision clocks and swarming with men of science who in their fancy black cloaks and frilly white collars twirled their well-oiled models of the cosmos or pointed their useless instruments at the gray Prague sky, and in the midst of whom, upon his throne at the head of a banquet table laden with cold cauldrons of stale goulash and littered with the bones of diverse beasts and birds, sat the Emperor himself, cradling his huge, profoundly horrified-seeming Habsburgian head in the palm of one hand. “My first glimpse of the man, and of his huge imperial head, and of the horrified expression upon the face of it, which I immediately found not only congenial but reminiscent of an expression I’d sometimes seen when, while trying to glimpse a reflection of the heavenly vault in a spherical mirror, I glimpsed instead, however fleetingly, my own face.” To this horrified imperial head the astronomer of course sought to bring “intellectual relief,” while beside him his father, “precisely I think because the appearance of that new twinkling object had not thrust his own head into metaphysical torment,” dreamt merely of bringing artistic delight. The astronomer added: “Only someone essentially untroubled by the nature of things will go around offering delight rather than relief, as I often told my son, himself a purveyor of art delights rather than means of mental relief. Only someone whose head is rarely or never thrust into philosophistic torment would rather please the eye than relieve the intense philosophical pressure that builds up behind the eye, I often said to him,” said the astronomer. One glimpse of the Emperor’s head was enough to assure the astronomer that it was not only huge, it was also thrust deep into torment. Why, the astronomer recalled asking himself for the first time in his life, had such an expression of fathomless metaphysical horror never flitted across his father’s face? He said: “It is only upon leaving one’s father’s house and workshop, and gazing upon another man’s face, that one realizes, retrospectively, that there are expressions one never observed upon one’s father’s face, the range of expressions of which had seemed, growing up, exhaustive, i.e., definitive of all possibilities.” Distinctions, and hence knowledge, and hence self-knowledge, begin with this gazing-at-another-man’s-face. “There’s no knowledge until there’s another man’s face.” In your father’s house, gazing at your father’s face, the world is bright, but without definition; then you leave home, and gaze elsewhere, including at other men’s faces, and your eyes begin to deteriorate, but your mind begins to discern, and the world dims, but grows more distinct; finally, your eyes are plucked out, but your mind becomes infinitely discerning, and the world goes black, but becomes fantastically well-defined, “possessed of a crispness that in fact remains shocking to me.” That’s the standard story of knowledge acquisition, he said, “and the standard story is true.” This process of coming to know himself, “which only with the eclipse will come to fruition,” began with that gazing-at-the-face-of-the-man-in-the-alleyway but quickened markedly with this gazing-at-the-Emperor’s-face, and observing upon it an expression (of fathomless metaphysical horror) that he’d sometimes fleetingly seen in his spherical mirror but, since he’d never seen it upon his father’s face, had never registered seeing until now, “I must have seen it without seeing it,” he must have overlooked it as trivial, perverted, or an artifact of his instrument. Seeing the Emperor’s face schooled him in the art of seeing his own. “I had to admit to myself the terrible truth that I already, within seconds of seeing him across the hall, felt a closer kinship to the Emperor than I ever had to my own father, simply because we, and not my father, nor later my son, were seemingly thrust into the same torment.” Years later, incidentally, the astronomer had done everything in his power to introduce his son to that torment, obviously he’d felt a certain ambivalence about seizing a young person’s head and thrusting it without warning deep into the philosophical torment, “Did I really have the right, I had to ask myself, to thrust this content young man’s head deep into torment? For the sake of company? What are we doing, exactly, when we give a child reams of reading material for the express purpose of thrusting them into the age-old torment?,” but even though he’d decided that, yes, he had that right, and even though he’d actually gone ahead and thrust his son’s head deep into the torment, his son was not, in the end, tormented. He kept “bobbing up like a buoy from the philosophical depths.” A head might be more or less dense than the philosophical fluid into which it is plunged. His son’s head was less dense. “The deeper I thrust him into the depths, the higher, like a buoy, he bobbed.” A uniquely untormented individual, for better or worse, interested above all in the delights and distractions of art. His father and son would have liked each other, “had they ever met.” He added: “A logical impossibility, of course, as my son’s birth was a distal effect of the same cause, this encounter with the Emperor, that more proximally brought about my father’s demise.” Neither could’ve understood how the popping into being of a point of prettily twinkling luminosity overhead could bring to the imperial face such an expression of horror, nor, for that matter, how the horses who had galloped up and down here three weeks ago could bring him such happiness, whereas the astronomer with one glance at the Emperor thought he understood him, i.e., understood both why the horses had made him so happy and why the popping into being of that new twinkling thing now horrified him so.