Dr. King's Refrigerator

by Charles Johnson

  After four weeks there seemed no cure for my affliction. I became resigned to the fact that my brain would always feel baked, that during my classes I would be groggy and the edges of my mind blurred, with the whole world seeming to tilt on its axis. I was in that state as I left my afternoon seminar on the thirtieth day of this misery, and it was on the second floor of Padelford Hall that I ran into my chairman, who was almost sprinting toward the conference room behind me.

  “Her-win!” he said. (My name is Herwin Throckmorton.) “You’re just in time! There’s an emergency we have to discuss!”

  He took me by my arm, steering me into the crowded conference room, where all my colleagues were gathered. It was a windowless room, I should point out, and there were only two seats left at the head of the long conference table. My chairman took one while I collapsed in the other. All my colleagues stared at me in shock, because it was well-known that I never went to faculty meetings, not if I could avoid them. But all of that, remarkably, was about to change.

  My chairman unpacked his briefcase, pulling out official-looking papers. He called the meeting to order, explaining the latest crisis that had befallen our little department, and I wish to heaven I could tell you exactly what that new crisis was, but I cannot because we have at least three crises every quarter, and as soon as his assistant began reviewing the minutes of the last meeting, and my chairman launched into a summary of the department’s budget and future plans, adding (as he always does) a tirade against the administrators who favored the hard sciences over the struggling humanities and the arts, which explained why we classical scholars were perpetually overworked and under-appreciated and why all our salaries were so abysmally low—as he launched into this familiar jeremiad, I found myself helplessly drifting in and out of that hot, oxygen-depleted room, catching one of his phrases here and there, then I passed through another wave of warm torpidity that washed over me wonderfully, dropping me down—ever down—a deep well (cupa in Sanskrit) of blissful unconsciousness, and just before I started to snore loudly (for five straight hours, my colleagues and the school janitor later told me), sleeping like a whale on the surface of the sea, I was indeed thankful to the powers that be for the soporific qualities of faculty meetings, and I knew—as I’ve known nothing else in my life—that from that moment forward, I would happily attend every boring business meeting for the rest of the year, and perhaps the rest of my life, simply in order to catch up on my sleep.

  The Queen and the Philosopher

  In 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden became interested in Descartes’ work and prevailed upon him to come to Stockholm. This Scandinavian sovereign was a true renaissance character. Strong-willed and vigorous, she insisted that Descartes should teach her philosophy at five in the morning. This unphilosophic hour of rising at dead of night in a Swedish winter was more than Descartes could endure. He took ill and died in February 1650.

  —Bertrand Russell, The Wisdom of the West

  YEARS AND YEARS agone I cautioned Meister Descartes about this dangerous young woman, the notorious Queen Christina, and, to his credit, he did heed my monitions the first time she sent one of her warships to fetch him to Sweden.I I mean, didn’t he have enough troubles already? She wanted him to serve as her personal tutor in philosophy and mathematics. At the time we were living not too uncomfortably in Holland on an estate twenty miles north of Amsterdam. The master enjoyed performing his daily meditations in a study shaped like an octagon, and this overlooked a beautiful garden, the sight of which brought him a feeling of serenity—his meditations were, of course, always in the afternoons or evenings, because all his life he was in the habit of sleeping ten hours a day and never rising before noon. I, Gustav Schulter, his valet and secretary who knew my place in this world and was not likely to rise above it, was at Descartes’ side when he politely declined Queen Christina’s invitation to join her court. He gave the admiral of her warship a letter that praised the queen’s beauty, her likeness to God, and he requested, regretfully, that she forgive his inability at the moment to bask “in the sunbeams of her glorious presence.”

  If matters had ended there—if, for example, she had given up and set her sights instead on Francis Bacon or Galileo as trophies to be installed in the Swedish court for her amusement—all would have gone well, I believe, for the father of modern philosophy. However, twenty-two-year-old Christina was not to be denied. She sent a second ship from Sweden to bring her Descartes. Was this a highborn hijacking? An aristocratic body snatching? Call his capture what you will. My master, whose cup-hilt rapier once held at bay a gang of buccaneers—devils, one and all—intent upon robbing him of his fine garments, was defeated. One does not decline when royalty comes calling twice. So in October 1649, and after our friends said, “Goodbye and Godspeed,” we began our exodus and exile from Holland, sailing for Stockholm—and straight into the most nightmarish cautionary tale (or conte philosophique) any metaphysician has ever known.

  During our passage through the Baltic Sea, as our vessel swung lazily from side to side on the gray-slick waters, I very much wondered at his acquiescence to the whim of a willful monarch said to prefer her art collection to the welfare of her people. He was fifty-three that fall, twice her age, and though he still cut a sartorial, if strange, figure, you would not have guessed from his guise the depths of his genius. In stature he was small, with a gigantic head and more than enough Gallic nose for two or three Parisians. If you squinted, blurring his image a bit, he looked rather like a magpie or a crow that decided one day to become a man, but only got halfway. His voice was frail. As his valet I knew him to be a good Catholic, a solitary, a selfish, an unmarried, and at times a highly eccentric man. For example, he told me that on November 11, 1619, he took to living inside a stove during an especially harsh winter in Bavaria. But it was there—inside his stove (or, as some claim, his stove-heated room)—that he experienced a Platonic vision of the world portrayed entirely in terms of the eternal beauty of mathematics. This mystical moment directed him inward, to his suspending all his beliefs and systematically doubting the existence of everything—the world, God, his perceptions—until he could find something so apodictic and certain that even the Almighty, if he was an Evil Deceiver, could not fool him about it. That certainty, said my master, was the thinking self. His cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—became the most oft-quoted sentence in (and the foundation of) Western philosophy in our time, and from this single brick of rationalism he rebuilt a mechanistic world, dividing it into mind substances (res cogitans) and physical substances (res extentias), with a benevolent God standing above it all, ensuring that the innate ideas he had implanted within us were true. His bifurcation of phenomena into Mind and Matter—into two separate “truths,” as it were—was a politically shrewd compromise that left men of science free to explore things material, and men of the cloth free to hold forth on things immaterial, such as the soul, that Ghost in the Machine. (For example, in the master’s philosophy, animals were merely machines controlled by external stimuli.) So yes, Descartes carved out a space in the ruins of medieval scholasticism for science to progress. Just the same, his Meditations, and his methods, still ignited controversy across the European continent. The Jesuits sensed that his systematic doubt would be their undoing. The president of Holland’s most esteemed university condemned him as an atheist, and the Calvinists in the Netherlands accused him of heresy. I know little of these things, being only a humble valet, but I gathered that once you become famous, you can count on getting famous problems.

  Notwithstanding his misgivings about Queen Christina, and moving to Sweden, I suspect he saw her offer in terms of his present troubles with the Church. She hoped the founder of analytic geometry, the creator of Cartesian coordinates, and the man who revolutionized optics by discovering the law of refraction would help her create in her country an academy of sciences that would rival anything in Paris. Christina planned to make him a naturalized Swedish citizen, bring him into the Swedish ar
istocracy, and give him an estate on German lands she had conquered. Unless I am beguiled by the master’s Evil Deceiver, Descartes saw her proposal as almost too good to be true—she would, he imagined, save him from his enemies in the Church, and among other philosophers, who were amplifying their opposition to his ideas.

  As things turned out, her proposal—like so many in this life—was too good to be true. Descartes once said he wrote his Meditations in an autobiographical style to make it accessible to women. Maybe he succeeded too well, for Queen Christina not only understood his philosophical musings, but she saw his blunders as well. In every respect she was magnific. Before Christina was born astrologers predicted she would be a boy, and at first everyone thought King Gustavus Adolphus did have a son because she came into the world with a caul covering her pelvis. Foras-much as the king had no male heirs, her father ordered that Christina was to be raised and trained as a prince. She was easily the homeliest woman in all Christiandom and stood only five feet tall in her slippers. But this “Queen of Sweden, of the Goths, and the Wends” was vigorously athletic, tough as an armadillo, disciplined, crisp, and efficient, and spent twelve hours a day, six days a week at sports and her studies. Christina wrote and spoke five languages. Her favorite activities were riding and hunting bears. She never slept more than five hours a night. Like a well-trained soldier, she took little food, was contemptuous of extremes of heat and cold, and expected the same Spartan behavior from everyone around her. Not too surprisingly, she refused to marry, and it was rumored that she liked girls, specifically a young countess named Ebba Sparre, new to her court. “It is necessary to try to surpass one’s self always,” Christina was fond of saying. “This occupation ought to last as long as life.” She also was famous for saying, “I myself find it much less difficult to strangle a man than to fear him.”

  I must confess that I, Gustav, not being a bold man, did fear this galloping Ubermensch of a queen. There was no question that Descartes was fond of her. In public conversations he praised her for being “the Philosopher Queen,” and in private talks with me called her his “Viking Amazon”; she called him whatever she pleased.

  On the day we arrived he was feasted with smorgasbord, schnapps, and glögg, and lavishly honored by her court, as was appropriate for a luminary such as himself. But then Christina dropped her first royal slipper. After granting him permission to see her only twice, she informed Descartes that she was busy with affairs of state and could not begin her lessons with him for at least six weeks. During that time, she said, he should productively occupy himself with writing a ballet in verse to commemorate her role in the Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the Thirty Years’ War. Besides all this, she ordered him to compose a comedy in five acts, and draw up the statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  So, as I say, Descartes was not happy about this delay, but it couldn’t be helped. To these time-wasting chores he dutifully applied himself as, saints preserve us, a cold, dark winter set in—the worst winter in sixty years—and turned Stockholm into a hyperborean cavern buried beneath a hundred kinds of snow, with ice forming in your hair if you were outside for but a few moments. The temperature fell well below zero. My master seemed to keep a cold. “By heaven, Gustav, my old friend,” he said through clogged-up sinuses, “it seems to me that men’s thoughts freeze here during the winter, just as does the water. Our brains are, you know, eighty percent liquid.”

  Anon, he came to see how cruel, how unforgiving was this northern climate. And also how wickedly devious Queen Christina could be when after six weeks she dropped her second royal slipper. She knew—as everyone knew—that erenow Descartes slept until noon. Christina, on the other hand, was out of bed each day at four A.M. She wanted her lessons in philosophy and mathematics three times a week at the wee hour of five A.M. in the unheated library of her royal palace, with all the windows thrown open. Perhaps she felt her regimen of defying refrigeration, of being indifferent to discomfort, would help Descartes to “surpass himself always.”

  In truth, it had the opposite effect, and for the first time I began to suspect she was in league with the Devil. For two difficult weeks I helped the master out of bed at three A.M. It was, I must say, like trying to bring Lazarus back to life. I filled his shivering, sleep-deprived body with hot tea; I helped him out of his nightshirt and into his black coat, knee breeches, and thick woolen scarf. I guided Descartes through his elaborate French toiletries, then I drove him in a sleigh over the frost-surfaced, sleety ground thither to her castle, the air raw and stinging my lungs, and with him all the while sneezing and coughing and shivering as if he might shake himself apart.

  There, just outside her frigid, windswept library lined on all sides with books, Descartes trembled. As the queen bade him enter, he shook off a sudden wave of drowsiness and his cold-stiffened fingers brought forth from his valise the pages of the statutes he’d written for her academy. In a voice still phlegmed by sleep, he said, “Your Highness, I hope these pages will please you.”

  “For your sake, I hope they do.” Christina was lively, even playful at this godforsaken, gelid hour. Spread out on a long table before the queen were my master’s books. A thin wind through the windows changed the room’s pressure and all at once my left ear felt stopped up, my right had a ringing sound, and my toes felt like knots of wood. So please don’t think poorly of me if my memory of this tutorial appears sketchy. Reaching back, I do remember her saying, “But there is something in your published writing that troubles me. You say that Mind and Matter are separate substances. But if my soul wills my left hand to rise”—as she said this Christina gave the air a swipe with the back of her hand—“it remains a mystery how the immaterial will can affect my material body.”

  Descartes’ teeth chattered loudly. His steamy breath rolled out: “Your Majesty, it is my belief that the interaction of the soul and body occurs in the pineal gland, where—”

  “Just a moment! Don’t speak! Stop!”

  The master pulled up short, his mouth snapping shut, and he let his gaze fall to where his feet felt cemented to the floor.

  “Do you have evidence for this?” she asked.

  “Well, not exactly . . .”

  “Oh, pooh, then the idea is preposterous, isn’t it?” Christina put her head back. “Why there? Why not in the kidneys? Or the stomach?”

  No one had pointed out this problem to him until now, or at least not so forcefully. My master, in a mental fog, tried to answer; his mouth opened, but no sound was forthcoming, as if his thoughts had glaciated. I suffer you then to see this almost Siberian chamber in the middle of a Scandinavian winter as the inner circle of a Hell perfectly designed for slugabed René Descartes.

  The Ice Queen smiled and sat back in her chair.

  “Do you see my problem, dear? For want of a better phrase, I would call it a ‘mind-body problem,’ an unnecessary and silly dualism that you’ve created. And this theory of yours about animals being machines is a delicious piece of sophistry! My goodness, I never saw my clock making babies!”

  Particles of snow drifted inside and settled on Descartes’ books. Weaving from the paralytic chill, he blew hot breath into his hands until they heated a little, briefly defrosting himself long enough to say, “Your Highness, everything I’ve written logically follows if you begin, as I did, with systematic doubt.”

  The queen rolled her head to the left, and raised her right eyebrow. “But your Meditations are not at all systematic, and they are fatally flawed.”

  His voice slipped a scale. “They are?”

  “Forgive me if I speak frankly, for I’m not the world-famous philosopher you are, but I boast a knowledge of many things, as every monarch should.” She looked at him steadily, as she might a bear she had just cornered. “If you stop doubting everything when you reach your own thoughts of doubt, you can’t just say, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ because all you can be truly certain of at that moment is that thought is going on. You’ve assumed and added
a self, an I, that is not given—only presupposed—in that experience.”

  My master looked sacked and empty. His frostbitten limbs were stiff and mechanical, like the fantastic animals that populated his philosophy. “I think . . . I need more time . . . to consider this, Your Majesty.”

  “Do consider, it,” she said. “Be advised that I would like a good answer when we meet again two days from now.”

  That next tutorial was not destined to be. The master never completely thawed. He came down with pneumonia, and seven days after his lesson with the queen, he first slipped into delirium, then on February 11, 1650, a coma from which he never emerged. His body was buried near the queen’s estate in a small Catholic cemetery for unbaptized children. And how did I, Gustav, feel now that my master was gone? Whoever is wise must conclude that every original thinker would do well to fear too much attention from the High and Mighty. I wanted to go home and cry into my wife’s bosom for a while. But I didn’t have a wife. Eventually, I did return to Germany, with Christina’s unanswered questions still shimmering in my mind. And even now, late at night when I try unsuccessfully to sleep, and look back on those bone-chilling months, I find myself unable to decide if the queen was a brief footnote in Meister Descartes’ history, or if he, poor soul, was simply a footnote in hers.