Free Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) by Bertolt Brecht

you’d better drink up your milk, because people are sure to start arriving soon.
    GALILEO : Have you understood what I told you yesterday?
    ANDREA : What? All about Copper Knickers and turning?
    GALILEO : Yes.
    ANDREA : No. What d’you want me to understand that for? It’s very difficult, and I’m not even eleven till October.
    GALILEO : I particularly want you to understand it. Getting people to understand it is the reason why I go on working and buying expensive books instead of paying the milkman.
    ANDREA : But I can see with my own eyes that the sun goes down in a different place from where it rises. So how can it stay still? Of course it can’t.
    GALILEO : You can see, indeed! What can you see? Nothing at all. You just gawp. Gawping isn’t seeing.
He puts the iron washstand in the middle of the room
. Right: this is the sun. Sit down.
Andrea sits on one of the chairs, Galileo stands behind him
. Where’s the sun, right or left of you?
    ANDREA : Left.
    GALILEO : And how does it get to be on your right?
    ANDREA : By you carrying it to my right, of course.
    GALILEO : Isn’t there any other way?
He picks him up along
with the chair and makes an about-turn
. Now where’s the sun?
    ANDREA : On my right.
    GALILEO : Did it move?
    ANDREA : Not really.
    GALILEO : So what did move?
    ANDREA : Me.
    GALILEO
bellows:
Wrong! You idiot! The chair!
    ANDREA : But me with it!
    GALILEO : Of course. The chair’s the earth. You’re sitting on it.
    MRS SARTI
has entered in order to make the bed. She has been watching:
Just what are you up to with my boy, Mr Galilei?
    GALILEO : Teaching him to see, Mrs Sarti.
    MRS SARTI : What, by lugging him round the room?
    ANDREA : Lay off, mother. You don’t understand.
    MRS SARTI : Oh, don’t I? And you do: is that it? There’s a young gentleman wants some lessons. Very well dressed, got a letter of introduction too.
Hands it over
. You’ll have Andrea believing two and two makes five any minute now, Mr Galilei. As if he didn’t already muddle up everything you tell him. Only last night he was arguing that the earth goes round the sun. He’s got it into his head that some gentleman called Copper Knickers worked that one out.
    ANDREA : Didn’t Copper Knickers work it out, Mr Galilei? You tell her.
    MRS SARTI : You surely can’t tell him such stories? Making him trot it all out at school so the priests come and see me because he keeps on coming out with blasphemies. You should be ashamed of yourself, Mr Galilei.
    GALILEO
eating his breakfast:
In consequence of our researches, Mrs Sarti, and as a result of intensive arguments, Andrea and I have made discoveries which we can no longer hold back from the world. A new time has begun, a time it’s a pleasure to live in.
    MRS SARTI : Well. Let’s hope your new time will allow us topay the milkman, Mr Galilei.
Indicating the letter of introduction
. Just do me a favour and don’t send this man away. I’m thinking of the milk bill.
    GALILEO
laughing:
Let me at least finish my milk! To
Andrea:
So you did understand something yesterday?
    ANDREA : I only told her to wake her up a bit. But it isn’t true. All you did with me and that chair was turn it sideways, not like this.
He makes a looping motion with his arm
. Or I’d have fallen off, and that’s a fact. Why didn’t you turn the chair over? Because it would have proved I’d fall off if you turned it that way. So there.
    GALILEO : Look, I proved to you …
    ANDREA : But last night I realised that if the earth turned that way I’d be hanging head downwards every night, and that’s a fact.
    GALILEO
takes an apple from the table:
Right, now this is the earth.
    ANDREA : Don’t keep on taking that sort of example, Mr Galilei. They always work.
    GALILEO
putting back the apple:
Very well.
    ANDREA : Examples always work if you’re clever. Only I can’t lug my mother round in a chair like you did me. So you see it’s a rotten example really. And suppose your apple is the earth like you