Johannes Kepler: A Private Life

1630, Regensburg

I keep the papers where I can reach them because if they slide beyond my hand they become someone else’s arrangement, and I have had enough of that in this life, enough of princes, officials, theologians, creditors, widowers, magistrates, all taking what stood nearest me and then telling me the loss was orderly, necessary, even providential. The room is cold in a way that feels intentional, as if arrears and winter had conspired before I arrived, and by evening the fever rises until every thought glows too brightly and then thins, yet by morning it loosens again and I mistake the loosening for permission, for strength, for time still obedient, and this is the most dangerous deceit of all because it lets me begin another page, another petition, another sorting of notes on imperial debt and planetary law as though the body were merely sulking and not preparing its withdrawal. Outside there is war in men’s mouths even when no cannon speak, religion breaking every talk in two, money making cowards solemn, and I feel more sharply each day that if I die before the account is gathered, they will preserve the ellipses and mislay the hunger, the children, the confessions, the insults, and then call the theft biography.