It is not true that I stole Newton’s manuscript from London. It is not true that I have fed the geometrical form of the calculus found in the Principia into the mind of my master. These are slanderous remarks by members of the Royal Society. They have called Leibniz a plagiarist. They have called me a sympathizer. My lord’s funeral is known in history, unfortunately, as having been attended by only one man — myself, Johannes of Nuremberg, the very faithful personal secretary of Gottfried Leibniz. And they have taken that against me.

But I will disclose a secret. I tried to kill Newton in Oxford when I was sacristan to a priest. I tried to poison the noble alchemist and theoretician of gravity by lacing a Eucharistic host with arsenic. But I did did not succeed.

I realized that eliminating the man will not eliminate the lies. So I sought the office of his rival. Cautiously, unconspicuously, I suggested to Leibniz the sketch of the truth. Through subtle gestures, through seemingly insignificant comments on the weather or the ripening fruit outside the window, I was able to plant a sacred idea. Gradually, through the years, my lord gave birth to the doctrine of pre-established harmony.

The truth, gentlemen, is this: there is no causation. Gravity does not cause the apple to fall toward the earth. Falling does not cause the breaking of a glass. Shoving a person will not cause him to move.

I hated the audacity of Newton. I hated his superstition (what else is a theory but a totally consistent superstition?). There is no causation, gentlemen. When I allow a glass to fall, the impact does not cause the glass to shatter — the glass knows it must shatter at that instance. The apple knows it must fall at the appointed hour. The body of a person knows that it must move when pushed by another body. Every blade of grass is programmed to move in accordance to the rhythm of the wind.

God had pre-established all motion in the universe, and perhaps, He had also harmonized my failure with the triumph of the theory of gravity. I now hold a pistol to my head, gentlemen. In reality, it is not I who will cause it to fire.

The pistol, above all, desires to kill. My skull is harmonized to blow simultaneously with the firing of the shot. It is incomprehensible to think any necessary connection between the bullet and the hole.

I am destined to go, gentlemen. It just so happens that God had placed this pistol here in my hand, and it is a mere coincidence that this hand is lifting up the pistol.

Some said the game masters were patriarchs and prelates, but this was refuted by a Jesuit theologian who said that every conjecture made about the game was a deceptive manifestation of its omnipotence, including the conjecture just stated.

There was a Chinese gambler’s tale about a mystical board game from India. The original players were kings fighting over a small territory. The chessboard bore a grid of alternating black and white. They played the game for many years with no one emerging as a winner. Gradually, the players raised the stakes, invented more rules, and magnified the scope of the game. They risked their money, gold, horses, lands and wives. They started to argue about the rules and accuse each other of cheating. To settle these conflicts, they resorted to increasing the stakes further until they could no longer offer anything else but abstract possessions, like knowledge and devotion.

The game caught the country’s attention. People started betting on the players’ outcomes. It was a gamble from which other gambling contracts emerged and multiplied. Laws were written to recognize these new obligations. Offenders suffered severe penalties. Riddles, songs and sayings referring to the game and its tradition spread across the neighboring villages, but the ones using them did not decipher their origin.

When the original players died, their eldest children took over. Countless generations passed until the artificial equipment embodying the game — the chessboard — dissolved into an invisible nexus of social relations. The grid of black and white disappeared but the game went on in a more encompassing space. Everyone recognized the sacrifice of a pawn every time someone committed suicide. A civil war over the supply of rice and wine represented a particular tactic in the overall economy of the game.

No one knew who was part of it. They could not tell if they were players or pawns. It was believed a person was still playing even while washing the dishes or just sleeping. They did not know that the most mundane details of their lives had a role to play in this immortal game.

It concerns a legend in ancient times.

There were two tribes at opposite ends of the empire. To the north was a group which possessed a most powerful gift: a sword that could pierce all the shields, armors and fortification on earth. To the south was another group which held an indestructible defense: a shield that could never be pierced by the most powerful sword, spear or arrow in the universe.

I imagine that the sword and the shield were gifts from two separate, quarreling gods.

One day, in a war, the sword and the shield met on the battlefield.

In the snow, by the ruins of a stone temple, amidst the ashes of the whole town ravaged by the flaming arrows from both tribes, the man with the sword swung his weapon against the man with the shield.

Some scholars say that the moment these two objects meet, the universe will realize a grave mistake, a terrible flaw, in the logic of its own design. Some say the world will end just to rectify that error: clearly, no one, not even the gods who forged these objects, could comprehend the consequence of this paradox on the very foundations of heaven and earth.

If neither object fail in their given function as a result of preserving the other, then it would still amount to a contradiction.

Han Feizi wrote of this similar problem. No solution has been found before him.

One scholar speculates that the elements of the universe all conspire to make the battle impossible: the intelligence that moves the world ensures that the encounter between these two objects will never happen.

But the last scholar I buried believed otherwise. He told me that the moment the sword and the shield clashed, the world was split in two — one where the sword won and another where it was defeated by the shield.

I now look at the vast territory of the empire. I know that its power depends on having vanquished its fiercest enemy: the northern barbarians.

I dream of another reality, one where the barbarians have won, and the empire and a man like me have been vanquished. It is a reality where the books I have burned are still intact and the living scholars I have buried are still trying to find a solution to this paradox.

The ancient metaphysicians have long assumed that the desert is spherical, but this is an error. In Timaeus – which prophets of the desert call the Scripture — Plato praises the Demiurge for molding the world in this shape. No other artifact of geometry symbolizes perfection. He claims that the sphere, embodiment of mathematical symmetry, befits the dignity of a divine intelligence.

But the Demiurge, anticipating Plato in his creation, thought of confounding the philosophers by embedding into the fabric of space an impossible principle which no architect can conceive: that the world, having no edge, is to be enclosed upon itself.

The heretics (living in the shade of shattered statues in the sand) tell a different story: that the Demiurge is a demon, that his purpose for creating the world is malign, and that millions of years ago he had trapped the god in this prison.

The agonizing duration of my isolation has led me to renounce that greater prison which is my identity. I imagine myself partaking in some eternal form. I imagine effacing my personality to reveal that mold for which my human shape or the shape of this prison is only a mask of the unchanging One.

I am, naturally, a believer of Spinoza. No other sage or Jew in all of history has meditated the substance or monad of this world and gave it the elegant name of God.

At present, my only possession is a dagger. It is an antique Roman pugio which I have employed to astonish the audience of the circus with tricks of conjuration. “Now it’s a dagger. Now it’s a coin. But is it a flower or a mirror?”

I would have long killed myself with its blade had not an idea struck me. For one, I know that God is real. If He is real, then He is All. Being All, God is simultaneously this dagger and this well and this body and all the insects I have eaten.

Obsessed in some way by Spinoza’s pantheism and the circus arts, I began to wonder if a religious conjurer like me could perform a real feat of magic: that of producing any object of the universe from a single article — this dagger.

If, indeed, the universe or God was one, it could never be divided; if it stayed without parts, this dagger (which was, in appearance, a small fragment of the world) contained within it nothing less than the whole.

Time dragged on and God would not permit me to bypass His material laws. Defeated, I lied down and felt no more alive than a stone thrown into the abyss.

But one second before my demise (or was it after or during?), I have realized that the dagger in my hand had been graced. It was no longer my dagger but the Dagger which is all daggers, including the one which Clytemnestra used to stab Agamemnon. It was no longer a dagger but the form of the dagger, subsisting in perfection in the world of ideas, used by all assassins, all warriors, all conspirators.

I know, however, that there is only one form. I know, too, that this form is God. With this knowledge, I was afflicted with a great uncertainty — because I did not know if I saw a dagger or all the items of the encyclopedia and all the items that could not be conceived by the encyclopedia.

For one second before my death, I did not need to emerge from this well to see the totality of this world.

25 minutes. Time tolls away and I feel the impending approach of death. I do nothing to escape because he can fire his rifle any time and the bullet will always strike before I can leap.

20 minutes. I know that there is nothing I can do to prevent my ‘fate’ (a word which I have only understood now for the first time in my life). I know that my only choice is to make him pull the trigger at the appointed time, which is during the communion.

10 minutes. My entire life flashes before me. I remember all the subtle details, as though I have been granted omniscience. I remember the arrangement of pieces on the chessboard in the first game of chess that I won. I remember the entire book of Spinoza. I remember all the branches of the cracks on the dome of the nave.

5 minutes. I implore God to curve the bullet’s trajectory.

1 minute. I blink and start to dream. The duration is a quarter of a second. The duration of the dream, however, is 30 years. I have in fact dreamed an entire lifetime — the biography of the sniper — and it is as if I have lived as himself, from the hour of his birth to this very moment, when he is pointing the rifle at me.

I know that the Lord answered my call. I know that he had given me a chance — one tiny loophole of chance — to change things. That loophole is a blink that encompasses the entire lifetime of another person. I know that the dream is real, that I have in fact assumed the form of the sniper during that very short interval of a quarter of a second. I know that in order to prevent my own death, I must decide not to pull the trigger, for I am now holding the rifle which will kill me.

But it is precisely at that instant that I have forgotten the importance of not pulling the trigger. I have been entirely persuaded by the life that produced the sniper’s reasoning and intention. I have accepted the inevitability of his decision, which is also mine.

The reality of his life is so indistinguishable from the dream that when I open my eyes, I am persuaded that my biography, my whole life, is only the dream of the sniper. (In the same spirit of confusion, the philosopher Zhuangzi didn’t know if he had dreamt of a butterfly, or that the butterfly dreamt he was Zhuangzi).

That is why, when I open my eyes, he fires the rifle and I die.

I know that my position in the nave of the cathedral gives me a perfect vantage point. Between me and the bishop, there is no obstacle. When I fire the bullet, I know that I have served my purpose in the brotherhood.

I know that when I shoot my target, the bullet must travel 100 meters, the exact length of the aisle of the church before it reaches the bishop. I know that I will carry out the plan smoothly and that my skills will not falter. I know, however, that I will fail.

Just as I am about to pull the trigger, I am seized by the greatest doubt of my life. It is not a doubt about my skill, but a doubt about the reality of motion.

First, before the bullet can reach the bishop’s heart, it must travel the entire aisle. Before completing the whole length of 100 meters, the bullet must travel halfway, or 50 meters. However, before completing 50 meters, it must travel half of that half, which is 25 meters. Then it must complete 12.50 meters, but before that, 6.25, but before that, 3.12, 1.56, and so on. The series is infinite and the bullet will never reach my target. In fact, travel cannot even begin. This impossible thought gives me a kind of nausea about the nature of the universe.

The second thought is concerned about time. Let us assume that the bullet, if it can travel at all, will take a split second before arriving at the destination. I know that a split second is a composite of time, a totality of moments. In order for the bullet to complete the time required, the bullet must be at rest at each moment of the interval. Therefore it is not in motion. If the bullet kills the bishop, I will never reconcile the reality of his death with the fact that motion does not exist. This paradox aggravates my doubt.

I know that Zeno of Elea, wittiest of all the ancient Greeks, did not accept the truth of his own conclusions and that he used his paradoxes only to confound the Pythagoreans (out of his love for Parmenides). There is, however, no other idea in the history of knowledge that corrupts all others.

That is why I will not assassinate the bishop, even if I can. That is why — overwhelmed by nausea over the errors of my senses and the hallucinatory nature of reality — I use my own rifle to kill myself.

Pythagoras said that all reality is ‘number’, and he meant this in the geometric sense. Like Parmenides, he is a monist; like all monists, he is an enigma. A monist is anyone who essentially believes that ‘All is One’. The Greek monists uphold a particular object as the ultimate constituent of reality: Thales is to water, Anaximander is to apeiron or the ‘boundless’; Heraclitus is to fire; Parmenides is to Being or the One. Number, for the Pythagoreans, is simply ‘the One that is All’.

F. Copleston explains that the Pythagoreans did not conceive number as a substance in the way that Thales conceived water as the ultimate substance of the universe. They did not, for instance, claim that a bird is made up of the ratio of its body to its wings while denying the independent existence of what that ratio is measuring. Rather, the Pythagoreans asserted the physical reality of the abstract tenets of geometry. They believed that all space, time and extension are made up of planes, lines and points. When they hear good melody, they know that its secret lies on the mathematics of the strings.

Pythagoras is not a cold theoretician. First and foremost, he is a priest. Pythagoreanism is a religion. Pythagoreans, like Iamblichus, were ascetics (they were forbidden to eat beans). Pythagoras remembers having past lives. Legend says that he tried to stop a man from beating a dog because he recognized the barking as the voice of a departed friend. The disciples all believed in ‘metempsychosis’, or the doctrine that the soul can outlive its body. This is a very important doctrine because, at that time, poets like Homer conceived the soul as something subordinate to the body — as a mere shadow of our earthly existence.

Aristotle said that when the Pythagoreans discovered the ‘dodecahedron’, they immediately declared its existence a secret. The price of spilling the secret is steep. There is one disciple who murdered a traitor because the latter reportedly disclosed a sacred number, figure or teaching to the public.

The Pythagoreans astonish me for the simple reason that they did not distinguish geometry from metaphysics, and mathematics from religion. The Pythagoreans saw identity in difference — a theme that everyday gives me beautiful nightmares.