Monday, August 10, 2009

Six Fragments from Johannes Kepler's Last Letter to Galileo

The last of George Keithley's "Six Fragments from Johannes Kepler's Last Letter to Galileo" begins as follows:

Like all men who think, I struggle
against my nature.

The enjambment gives this an extra twist, allowing for two readings of Kepler's struggle, one general, the second a more specific "struggle / against my nature."

But I disagree with the more specific reading: for me, thinking can be a struggle, but not one "against my nature"!

Keithley does not leave it at that, of course. Here's the whole sixth "fragment":

Like all men who think, I struggle
against my nature. Wherein
I acknowledge what I hear
or dream is but the ghost
of those heavenly harmonics
that move the mind to dance:
Why not, then, call it music
and admit our souls are lost?

I struggle to think about those lines, about how to comment on them—but I don't struggle to feel them.

(Still, "just because you feel it doesn't mean it's there," as the Radiohead song goes ...)

1 comment:

Peter L. Griffiths said...

Kepler and Galileo were contemporaries and their works were prohibited by the Church because they were both in agreement with Copernicus's discovery that the Earth moved round the Sun. Galileo contributed the law of falling bodies, velocity squared equals distance fallen. The main motive for Kepler's discoveries was to adjust the recorded observations to take account of Copernicus's discovery that the Earth being the observation point was not stationary but moved round the Sun. Galileo disagreed with Kepler over this, nevertheless Galileo's law of falling bodies can be usefully included in Kepler's system.