The most interesting book I’ve read in my Covid quarantine is Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel, (who also wrote Longitude, which I loved). This book is based on surviving letters by Galileo’s daughter Suor Celeste, who lived all her life cloistered in the Order of St. Clare, called the Poor Clares, with a vow of poverty. At times the nuns were so poor they were nearly starving. Suor Celeste continuously needed to ask her father for money and goods, which he provided as he could.
The convent’s small garden was pretty much all she ever saw of the world. Yet she wrote to her father almost daily, read his books and treatises, and had a wider conception of the world than most in her time. Galileo put her and her sister there when they were very young because they were illegitimate and so not marriageable to someone at her social level. True also of their brother—all three children from a long and loving relationship with a woman not of Galileo’s high social standing. He managed, though, to have the son, a lawyer, declared legitimate through various legal/religious machinations. So the family name was carried on. Makes you furious, doesn’t it? But Celeste, with her excellent mind, at least had her father as her mentor and chief correspondent.
Suor Celeste and I have something in common at the moment: we’re both unable to go anywhere. I implore my oft-beleaguered immune system, do your thing! Last I heard, only two of us here are still testing positive. I don’t know my soulmate but I wish him or her well, I send greetings from my cave.
The Copernican model.
Galileo, having deeply offended the Church by discovering the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, was buried in a virtually unmarked grave. Years later he was moved to an appropriately elegant tomb. Under his rotted wooden casket, they found another casket. It was Celeste’s. At some point her casket had been moved to where she belonged, near her father. I wonder if moving bodies around is useless symbolism, or if there’s some lingering of the soul still in the bodies themselves that appreciates it.
I wish I could say I’m using this Covid time to write marvelous poems, or any poems at all, but the fields lie fallow. It’s painful, as some of you writers may know. But you just have to bow to it, trust that there’s regeneration going on somewhere underneath. I’m still working a little on the diary project. I wanted 100 pages. I have almost 90. I can’t imagine who will want to publish a history of moving into a retirement community. I had a thought that it would be interesting for people of a certain age. Or else, I wrote it for myself, as a survival tool. I think I meant it, though, as a book. I don’t have any idea of where to send such a manuscript. Do you? I’d love suggestions. I’m nearly done with it, I think. I gave it four months, January being the last.
We’re into the drearies here in northwest lower Michigan, as it’s called. Snow, melt, snow, then just dreary. Molly died, then we got Covid, one at a time. I have a trip to Turks and Caicos planned with my daughter and son-in-law plus some of their friends at the end of this month. That should be nice. Sometimes I wonder why we live here in the cold, but actually, I like it here, with glorious water all around. As long as I can escape occasionally.
Of course you could think of my writing this Wobbly as an escape. Reading is an escape. Both of them open a door to the other room, where there may be a party, or a dance, or a tragedy. Something interesting, anyway.