sounds like a good idea.”
After she had served and we had started to eat, she looked up atme and said, “You know, I’m not completely good.” She paused. “At singing.”
“What?” I stopped chewing. “Yes, you are. You’re all right.”
“Don’t lie. I know I’m not. You know I’m not. Come on: let’s at least be honest. I think I have certain qualities of musicality, but my pitch is … you know. Uneven. You probably think it’s awfully vain of me to put on these recitals. With nobody but friends and family coming.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, I don’t care what you say. It’s … hmm, I don’t know. People encourage me. And it’s a discipline. Music’s finally a discipline that rewards you. Privately, though. Well, that’s what my mother says.”
Carefully, I said, “She may be right.”
“Who cares if she is?” She laughed, her mouth full of food. “I enjoy doing it. Like I enjoy doing this. Listen, I don’t want to seem forward or anything, but are you married?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.” She picked up a string bean and eyed it suspiciously. “Why aren’t you? You’re not ugly. In fact you’re all-right looking. You obviously haven’t been crazy. Are you gay or something?”
“No.”
“No,” she agreed, “you don’t look gay. You don’t even look very happy. You don’t look very anything. Why is that?”
“I should be offended by this line of questioning.”
“But you’re not. You know why? Because I’m interested in you. I hardly know you, but I like you, what I can see. Don’t you have any trust?”
“Yes,” I said finally.
“So answer my question. Why don’t you look very anything?”
“Do you want to hear what my piano teacher once said?” I asked. “He said I wasn’t enough of a fanatic. He said that to be one of the great ones you have to be a tiny bit crazy. Touched. And he said I wasn’t. And when he said it, I knew all along he was right. I was waiting for someone to say what I already knew, and he was the one. I was too much a good citizen, he said. I wasn’t possessed.”
She rose, walked around the table to where I was sitting, and stood in front of me, looking down at my face. I knew that whatever she was going to do had been picked up, in attitude, from one of her songs. Shetouched the back of my arm with two fingers on her right hand. “Well,” she said, “maybe you aren’t possessed, but what would you think of me as another possession?”
In 1618, at the age of seventy, Katherine Kepler, the mother of Johannes Kepler, was put on trial for witchcraft. The records indicate that her personality was so deranged, so deeply offensive to all, that if she were alive today she would still be called a witch. One of Kepler’s biographers, Angus Armitage, notes that she was “evil-tempered” and possessed an interest in unnamed “outlandish things.” Her trial lasted, on and off, for three years; by 1621, when she was acquitted, her personality had disintegrated completely. She died the following year.
At the age of six, Kepler’s son Frederick died of smallpox. A few months later, Kepler’s wife, Barbara, died of typhus. Two other children, Henry and Susanna, had died in infancy.
Like many others of his age, Kepler spent much of his adult life cultivating favor from the nobility. He was habitually penniless and was often reduced, as his correspondence shows, to begging for handouts. He was the victim of religious persecution, though luckier in this regard than some.
After he married for a second time, three more children died in infancy, a statistic that in theory carries less emotional weight than one might think, given the accepted levels of infant mortality for that era.
In 1619, despite the facts cited above, Kepler published De Harmonice Mundi , a text in which he set out to establish the correspondence between the laws of harmony and the disposition of planets in motion. In brief, Kepler argued that
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