The Call-Girls by Arthur Koestler Read Free Book Online

the music of the spheres made by the planets’ motions in their orbits. Their swift revolutions caused a musical humthroughout the universe; and since each planet moved round the earth at a different speed, each hummed or sang at a different pitch. The musical interval between Earth and Moon was that of a tone; Moon to Mercury a semi-tone, Mercury to Venus a semi-tone, Venus to Sun a minor third, Sun to Mars a tone, and so on. The resulting musical scale – the Pythagorean scale – defined the ‘harmony of the spheres’. Ordinary mortals cannot hear it, because they are made of all too solid flesh; but to Pythagoras, who was half-divine, the universe was a musical box playing its nocturnes through all eternity.
    Nikolai had a feeling of
déjà vu
: a passage in
The Merchant of Venice,
recently read at school, came floating into his mind:
    â€˜Soft stillness and the night … Look, how the floor of heaven/is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;/there’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdst/but in his motion like an angel sings…’
    Later on he was to discover that the Pythagorean fantasy of musical harmonies governing the motions of the stars had never lost its hold on mankind. Its echoes could be found in the poets of Elizabethan England; in Milton’s ‘Heavenly tune which none can hear/Of human mould with gross unpurged ear’; and eventually it produced one of the most astonishing feats in the history of human thought: Johannes Kepler, mathematician and mystic, built the foundations of modern astronomy on similar speculations about the affinities between planetary motions and musical scales.
    Nikolai experienced the same kind of floating, entranced feeling which he knew from rare moments at the piano when one’s identity became extinguished, dissolved like a drop in the ocean. He had discovered that music, the most intimate of one’s experiences, was married to the stars by the abstract laws of mathematics. According to Greek historians, the marriage took place when Pythagoras took a walk on his native island of Samos, and stopped in front of a blacksmith’s workshop. Watching the sweat-glistening bodies at work, he suddenly realized that each iron rod, when struckby a hammer, gave out a different sound; that the pitch of each sound depended on the length of the rod; and that if two iron rods were struck simultaneously, the intimate sensual quality of the resulting chord depended on the ratio of their lengths. Octave, fifth, major and minor third, each had a different colour and feel; but that feel depended entirely on simple mathematical relations. It was a crucial discovery: the first step towards the mathematization of human experience.
    But was it not degrading to reduce human emotions to a play of numbers? He had always thought so; now he discovered that to the Pythagoreans and the Platonists it was not a degradation but an ennoblement. Mathematics and geometry were ethereal pursuits, concerned with pure form, proportion, pattern, not with gross matter; with disembodied ideas which lent themselves to profound insights and delightful games. The riddle of the universe was contained in the dance of numbers, reflected in the motions of the celestial bodies and in the melodies which Orpheus played on his lyre. The Pythagoreans had been worshippers of the Orphic mystery cult, but they had given it a new twist: they regarded geometrical forms and mathematical relations as the ultimate mystery, and their study as the highest form of worship, the true Orphic purge. Divinity spoke in numbers.
    On that late evening in his room overlooking the Lake of Geneva, Nikolai experienced the two stages of the Orphic rite:
ekstasis
and
katharsis.
He sat down at the piano and tried to improvise a nocturne to be called
Harmonice Mundi.
After a while he realized that it was a bad imitation of Chopin. He laughed, munched a bar of his favourite Swiss chocolate and went to