That night, the third night of his stellar observations, a few minutes before the Sun absorbed in its rays every other entity in the heavens, the astronomer, his ears plugged with wax to block the sound of the maddening Benedictine bells, his eye fixed to his nineteen-inch, fourfold-magnifying silver telescope, surpassed the 1,164 stars enumerated in Bayer’s Uranometria.

And he thought euphorically: I have now seen more stars than Johann Bayer, who saw more than Tycho, who saw more than Piccolomini, who saw more than Ptolemy and the Greeks.

He thought: At this moment I have seen more than anyone.

Then, however, he thought: At this moment I have seen more than anyone.

In the next moment someone else would see more than him.

What Piccolomini was to the Greeks, and Tycho to Piccolomini, and Bayer to Tycho, and he to Bayer, someone else would be to him. To come after someone, to come before someone: ridiculous! the astronomer said. “The pointlessness,” he said, “of seeing more than Bayer. The emptiness of seeing more than Bayer.” How important seeing more than Bayer had once been, and how little it now amounted to!

Short of seeing all the stars, an absurdity, there was no point in seeing any of them.

He would die, the stars would stay put, and someone else would see more of them.

He would be buried in that series of scientific surnames, beside Bayer, two down from Tycho, three away from Piccolomini.

Will everything, he wondered, amount to as little as this?

He tore out the wax from his ears, it had done nothing to stop the ringing of the bells, and he ran to the Benedictine monastery, and he kicked the stone wall with his feet, and he beat the wall bloody with his fists, and with his tongue he vilified those who lived within it, whose perpetual bell-ringing was inimical to the thinking of thoughts. The ringing of a bell enters the thinking head, proceeds straightaway to the thought-thinking part of the head, locates there the incipient thought, and destroys it: “Your bells have destroyed my thoughts!” Ringing bells and thinking heads cannot coexist (he cried) and since their monastery was filled with huge numbers of ringing bells, he could only conclude that it did not contain a single thinking head. By now a handful of white-haired monks had materialized on top of the stone wall where side by side they peered down at him with curiosity and compassion, that spiritual compassion which is commingled with bemusement over our investment in the things of this world. This needless to say only enraged the astronomer further, and he told the Benedictine monks what he would do to them, and what they ought to do to each other, and what they, the Benedictine monks, could do to their mothers, each monk to his own mother and each to each other’s mothers, and finally what all of the Benedictine monks could do to a single Benedictine monk’s mother. One by one the wizened old men shook their heads in sorrow and vanished from atop the wall. Only the last of them spoke: “Think, my child,” he murmured as he, too, departed from the parapet, “of eternity.”