I, Rene Descartes, am writing this to regale you with an adventure I have just taken part in in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and forty five. An adventure, indeed. It was more than that, so much more. This is such a wondrous time in our history, but these things I’m sure you know. The story’s the thing here, my friend! Pick up a daily parchment if you need updating. &, do I have an adventure for you? Yes, I can say I do. So, let’s get right to it. This man can wait no longer.

My 48th year & I was strong of body & trim of mustache with a beard whose bushiness matched the density of my mind. I had published numerous scientific, philosophic & theologistic pieces that kept me in the public eye & which, if I do say so myself, kept people thinking & wondering, pushing their minds further & further along that path of darkness & confusion into the light. Well, this all comes at a time when I had a couple of new ideas & new theories, experiment was a top priority of mine whether it be physical or mental, which were taking me over. But, I see that I am surpassing myself in narrative thrust, you don’t know where I was or how I was living. I haven’t even given you a proper description...Oh, when one wants to tell a story, one can be literally dragged away. Let us set these things aside so I can relate my tremendous adventure. Will you please join me at the next paragraph?

Well, I was of average height for my times, relatively thin & sprightly, even at my age, & that’s not including my mind, with dark hair, dark eyes & an exquisite symmetrical combination of mustache & beard. My teeth were as well as any member of the nobility’s ever since I had taken up brushing them weekly with a small brush. My disposition, I will try to be as honest as I can, tended towards an isolation. I had, by this point in my life, been swarmed by numerous multitudes of Our Lord’s creations. Fought in several wars, lived in the lovely & crowded Paris loveliness. I have spent so much time with noise & the hustle-bustle of humanity that I now find I keep myself to myself in the main. My manservant of 20 years, trusty Henri, was my closest companion & that was only because we lived in the same house.

How are we to describe Henri? If you’ll forgive the aside...He was several years younger than I, wiry, but I think without the same mind as mine. A man suited perfectly to the trade, as I think God must put us all in our proper places & positions, which he was given: to be my manservant. Lighter hair than mine, his eyes were hazel & his face was free from hair, which I teased him about but he claimed was his own business. A hard working man who was there at a moment’s notice to give me a towel, powder my social wig or hand me another bottle of wine during the endless hours of writing in my bedroom.

Which is where I did all of my writing, at least as much as I could. With a fire glowing, wine & cheese by my side & myself tucked under covers with a tremendous amount of quill & paper. This bedroom, which I had occupied since the house was acquired, had been the snuggest of all my writing desks as it were, making for such interesting theories which I could right another book about. I recommend to all those who write in the bedroom to get oneself a canopy bed. Something with a lovely covering over it. A hazy silkiness adds to the feeling that you’re in a wonderfully enclosed space. Add the curtains on all sides & you are there. The outside world, or at least the world inside of your bedroom, can be seen but you are a caterpillar cocoon’d to do your work.

An adventure can only be put off for so long & now I find myself further away than before. The bedroom is part of my house, which I have lived in for several years now, right outside of that lovely, unfettered, generous, holy, remarkable city-town of Holland. One can peak his mind in such a place. Its endless & lovely streets filled with such a large variety of people, the rich, the poor & those hard working folk somewhere in between. So many & varying places of business abut against charming houses, hovels & otherwise. You have never seen as many vendors of as many vendable items as out on that Main Street where even the sewer flows past us & smells like wine. Buns, rolls, breads aplenty, cheeses of a 1,000 varieties, leather, buttons, pastries, meats, shoes, fruits & vegetables, nuts that will crack themselves, sweet & glorious candies, one man sells earthenware crocks, one woman has alchemical doo-dadery which would do better in Portugal or Spain but she does allright, kittens & puppies, I do not tell lies when I tell you that I could go on for many more pages on our illustrious street vendors, with their splinter-wheel carts lined right on the edge of the King’s Memorial Sewer, making & plying constant worthy trades. But the vendors could exhaust one, when there are so many other wonderful sights in Holland: the mansions & castles of our smartest & wisest, the hospital with the adjacent ground of the Holland School of Higher Learning, both so large & full of learned men that I like to liken, to my good friend Dr. Johann Bjornmanian, all the visionary intelligence walking about during the day to the illuminatory & vibrant lighting of the night lamps which line the city’s streets.

I guess, looking back, my finest friend, I have many colleagues but he is a friend, would be Johann, an intelligent man, rather short & without facial paraphernalia or cranium hair except for two strips which arched over his ears like little gray rainbows. A good, wise man & an expert in the brain & general anatomy. He was 10 years my senior but, if anything, a little more sprightly than I. -The constant energy of my teaching & surgical room, he would say. Medicine had gone through so much in his time, as we would talk over the coffee bean drink he loved & a dinner. -Every 4 or 5 years I find myself updating my entire curriculum. -Wonderful things are afoot this century, Johann. I’m surprised it’s only every 4 or 5 years. -Yes. Ha! I feel like Adam at times. Cataloguing Creation. Johann is a fine man & I know he is extremely glad to take part in the upcoming adventure, which happened only a little while ago.

Leaving Holland, I bet you had forgotten we were there, one enters the hills & glades beyond. For a while, if you could walk backwards from Main Street into the rural area, the lights would still shine & the noise would be audible. In a city like ours, there is always some noise if only the lamps flicker or the sewer’s flow. But, the noise dies away &, at least heading towards my place, the lights disappear over the crest of a green hill with a small brown road stretching across it. The city is gone although forever within my walking distance, a lovely road flanked by trees & woods populated with all kinds of tremendous animals &, probably, one or two people. After a 1/4 mile, little roads weave in & between the trees, stretching to houses, many 1,000 times larger than the one I inhabit & epically beautiful. There is even a small parish Church down one of these.

The house, which Henri & I inhabit, is about two miles outside of town. Wind past trees & you enter a large field with a single walking path to the front door. Many houses have paths for carriages & stables but Henri & I prefer to walk. It suits our constitution. There is space all the way around the manor, green grass dotted with the occasional tree. But, we are, as all out here are, surrounded by these woods. The house had been built 30 years ago in this natural clearing. The back yard stretches back for about 500 feet & then becomes woods that fall away on a rather steep incline into a beautiful horizon from which I can see the sunset from my windows, or the yard, every night. At the time our adventure begins, I had never really been back in those receding woods so, I guessed, anything could be back there.

At this rate, we will never reach my house, which is larger than the average Holland home but not as large as the Prince’s summer home or the hospital. Allow me to give my first rendering of the place.

Done in the early 17th Century Holland style in a lovely white. Made from strong wood & two stories high, two high stories high. Spacious rooms & an indoor plumbing facility, which we rarely used. My bedroom on the second floor, south corner, & Henri’s nearby. A spacious dining room & elegant entranceway. Three guest suites & 25 windows. No basement & no attic. 18 steps leading to the second floor & two leading into my Master Suite & three dropping you into the backyard. Three main balconies on the front of the house & three on the back, six in all. My bedroom had two, one on each side, front & back. Sort of a rectangle with bulges at both ends. The large dining room below me & a second Master Suite on the other end with a spacious & underused banquet room. I acquired this house through the goodwill of my fine friend, Dr. Harvey*, whom I worked with on many occasions & who treated me to dinner here on numerous nights. When he & his wife left for London, where because of his teaching there & his age he decided to leave the house for someone because he didn’t think he’d ever come back, I found myself, with Henri, the sole proprietors of the estate -for the purpose of continued research- & I continue that research. Free rent & I get all the rest of my sundries from sales & commissions of my works & several points of royal patronage, you shall encounter one of these fine nobles soon. So, I am probably a little more well off than your average person but not as well off as, say, the King of Spain.

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*Editors Note: Dr. William Harvey discovered the general circulation of the blood. In 1628, he published De Motu Corids et Sanguinis in Animalibus (On the Motion of the Heart and of Blood in Animals). From 1618 until his death in 1657, he taught in England. While there is no actual evidence of Harvey and his wife having a ‘summer home’ in Holland, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have. Harvey would have been around 60 when Descartes relates this, which was very old for men in the 17th century. It could be absolutely true that he wouldn’t be able to make the journey anymore.