The book is just so much better than I ever expected--now it's my favorite nonfiction book, in a tie with St Therese of Lisieux's Story of a Soul. I want my own copy. I just stumbled upon this one when Carmela, one of my friends who used to stay in Manila a few years ago but who got reassigned to Cebu, was in our center for a day, during Pentecost. She wanted me to pass the book on to Tina, who had lent her the book a long time ago, but I saw the cover and the summary and couldn't put it down. I'm usually not very interested in Italian history, and even less interested in the dealings of "great men" like Galileo. But the moment that I read that the daughter in question was a nun in a convent--was in fact a "Poor Clare" after the spirit of St. Francis and the rule of St. Clare--I guess I started to think that there was so much more to a man like him than I thought.
In my head Galileo was this man who thumbed his nose at the Church (though I admit that the Inquisition at the time had made a very great mistake); the book made me realize that this wasn't what happened at all.
Galileo was a faithful Catholic his whole life--before, during, and after his trial. Descriptions of pilgrimages he made to Loreto for the sake of his health, showing his great devotion to Our Lady, made me smile; seeing how he had to ask to be allowed to wander out for Mass during Easter in Florence, while he was still under house arrest, made me shake my head in shame. The mundane details revealed by his daughter's letters to him--the collars he sent to be starched and the citrus fruits he sent to be candied, and the presents and trinkets he sent along to his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste--made me fall in love with the story even more; it almost feels like someone made this all up, as though the story is too rich and beautiful to be true.
In the end I know more about Galileo's brilliance than I ever wanted to know--the man seemed to run on curiosity, and seemed to want to study every possible subject under the sun (except comets), and he made valuable contributions to so many new sciences--but what sticks with me the most is the impression I have of him as a sweet, loving Father, at least to Suor Maria Celeste; the other daughter is obscured by the lack of any surviving letters or references about her. He might have been an intellectual giant, but like all men he was immersed in the details of daily living--the plants in the garden, his own bodily illnesses, the search for a partridge to send to his daughter for the sake of a sick nun, the expenses of his oldest son.
I think of old, blind Galileo in those last few years at Arcetri, working and talking to his new companion Vincenzio Viviani and perhaps to Evangelista Torricelli, all the while missing his eldest daughter with a constancy like the pumping of blood, like heartbeats. I don't think I would have been far off the mark. But it's sweeter to think of him as he was, when he was still allowed to wander outside the house and to walk the short distance between his house at Arcetri and the convent of San Mateo, where his daughter sat waiting for a visit while mending an apron or tending to the sick.
Requiescant in pace!
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