Galileo Galilei: A Private Life

1638, Arcetri, near Florence

The shutters remain half closed because too much light now merely announces what it cannot repair. It presses against the eye, then slides away again, and the room goes back to wax, paper, dust, old timber, the scrape of a sandal in the corridor, the pause before a servant enters as though even entry must be staged now for the convenience of my decline. They would like this place to look orderly, devout, conclusive. They would like the old man nearly blind, confined, corrected, and therefore useful. I know the arrangement. I have arranged rooms myself. A defeated philosopher is easiest to handle when he begins speaking in the language expected of him, gratitude, obedience, chastening, all the tidy postures by which institutions launder their own fear. I have no intention of helping them. The papers must still be set right. The sequence must still be taken back while there is time enough to answer before time hardens into someone else’s version.