At night. Galileo and Sagredo, bundled-up in heavy coats, before the telescope.
SAGREDO - Looking through the telescope, softly:
The sickle is completely irregular, toothed and rough. On the dark part, in the neighborhood of the illuminated rim, there are illuminated points. Some tread on the heels of others. Light comes from those points that bathe surfaces wider and wider, fusing with the better illuminated section.
GALILEO - How do you explain the illuminated points?
SAGREDO - They cannot be...
GALILEO - Sure. They are mountains.
SAGREDO - In a star?
GALILEO - Gigantic mountains. The hiding Sun gilds their peaks, while the undulating night hangs by the abysses.
The light that you see is the one reflecting from the peaks arising from the valleys.
SAGREDO - But this contradicts totally the astronomy of two thousand years.
GALILEO - Certainly. What you are seeing, nobody has seen it but me. You are the second one.
SAGREDO - But the Moon cannot be an Earth with mountains and valleys, and neither the Earth can be a star.
GALILEO - The Moon can be an Earth with mountains and valleys and the Earth can be a star.
An ordinary heavenly body, one among thousands. Look still another time. Do you see the darkened part of
the Moon totally obscure?
SAGREDO - No. Where I am now paying attention, I notice a feeble ashen light resting there.
GALILEO - What kind of light could it be?
SAGREDO - ?
GALILEO - It comes from the Earth.
SAGREDO - It makes no sense. How could the Earth illuminate, with its mountains and oceans, ... a cold body?
GALILEO - As the Moon illuminates. Since both stars are illuminated by the Sun, they do in their turn illuminate.
What the Moon is for us, we are for it. And they see us some times as a sickle, sometimes as half a
circle, sometimes as a complete star, and sometimes they do not see us at all.
SAGREDO - There is no difference between the Moon and the Earth?
GALILEO - Apparently not.
SAGREDO - Not yet ten years ago, a man was burned in Rome: Giordano Bruno. It was because of having asserted
precisely that.
GALILEO - Yes, I know. And we are seeing it with our own eyes. Leave your eye on the tube, Sagredo. Do you realize
that there is no difference at all between Heaven and Earth? Today, January 10, 1610, humankind is
writing on its diary the following: "Heaven has been undone."
SAGREDO - How dreadful!
Notes
Note *: My translation of two pages in scene third, Bertold Brechts's Leben des Galilei (Brecht, 1963).
Claudio
Gutierrez