It's true: it said that, and it says that still.
* * * *
After his very interesting journeys René Descartes returned to Paris. Just at that time placards were appearing everywhere in the city to announce the appearance there of the Brothers of the Rose-Cross. We are making a visible and invisible stay in this city through the grace of the Most High. We show and teach, without books or marks, how to speak all languages and how to draw men away from error and death. Or perhaps there weren't any placards, maybe people only heard rumors that there were placards, or had been placards, and what they said or warned. From invisible we will become visible, and from visible, invisible. Were they witches, were they promising powers only granted to the Devil's followers—invisibility, flight, purses never emptied, eloquence to draw all men to them so that they would forsake the church and the prophets? René's friend Marin Mersenne was among those who denounced all such appeals, empty or wicked or both. But it was well known that Descartes had in Germany gone looking for the Rosicrucian brothers and returning as he did just now, when those brothers were said to be circulating invisibly among the people—Father Mersenne feared for him. So René, rather than hide or return to his solitude, went around town, showed himself, visited his friends, took their hands. In this way he demonstrated that he was visible, and therefore not a Rosicrucian. QED. In any case no Rosicrucians appeared to change the course of things or work wonders; the panic passed. Descartes resumed his meditations: a method for deciding what we can know with absolute certainty; how to strip thought of words entirely; how pure mind can know mindless matter.
A long time afterward—Frederick was dead by then, of the plague, in some German town, following another army—René Descartes came to know Elizabeth of Bohemia (as she continued to be called) at her little court in exile in the Hague; he became attached to her daughter, yet another Elizabeth, and dedicated his Principles of Philosophy to her. When she went to take the waters at Spa, he wrote to her that to get any benefit from them she should free her mind from all sorts of sad thoughts and even from serious reflections because those who look long on the green of the forest, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, can beguile themselves into not thinking, or thinking of nothing. “Which is not wasting time but using it well."
Once, Descartes met Comenius, still dragging over Europe his store of manuscripts and plans for a Polity of Universal Wisdom. The two thinkers had little to say to each other. For Comenius, Descartes was himself the laceratio scientiarum, the wound suffered by Knowledge. For Descartes, Comenius was the past. His Universal Language (Panglottia), Universal Dawning (Panaugia), Universal Education (Pampaedia), Universal Reform (Panorthosia) were actually no bigger than the paper they were written on. What he praised the older man for was the little primer he had written, the Orbis pictus sensualium or picture book of the physical world. But everyone loved the Orbis pictus; it really was universal; for a century and more boys and girls would learn language from it, in classrooms from Russia to the Massachusetts Bay, following along with the book's pupil and his Master (who's sometimes pictured in the Frontispiece as a Pilgrim with hat and staff) as they went along the forking paths and climbed the mountains of the real world.
Come, boy! Learn to be wise.
What doth this mean, to be wise?
To understand rightly, to do rightly, and to speak out rightly, all that is necessary.
But before all things, thou oughtest to learn the plain sounds, of which man's speech consisteth;
which living creatures know how to make, and thy tongue knoweth how to imitate, and thy hand can picture out.
Afterward we will go into the world,
and we will view all things.
Come, let us learn the words. Afterward we will go into the world, and view all things. Pierce Moffett alone in Baroque Rome walked the maze of streets, and went in and out of buildings built in the centuries of its triumph. The Fountain of the Four Rivers represents the Ganges, the Danube, the Plata, and the Nile, who hides her eternally hidden head. The Obelisk is a later addition. The right foot of the statue of the Magdalene has been polished smooth by the kisses of the devout. Pushing aside the heavy leather curtain, we enter the Basilica. Scarcely distinguishable in the shadows is Giotto's mosaic of the Navicella, Peter's fishing boat. The Santa Scala is linked with the stairs to Pilate's palace that Jesus went up. The papal chapel at the top into which only the pope can enter. We can discern through the screen a (covered) painting of the Virgin made by no one, or by itself (archeipoieton). Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus, no more sacred spot in all the world. Pierce wrote in his red journaclass="underline"
Old women and children and nuns on their knees and aged men with whiskery jowls and canes trying to get up these steps one at a time, steep and narrow too, and I was at last overcome, why do we have to do this to ourselves, why do we spend our treasure and our time and our tears like this, why does it have to be so? A place into which you can't go, but only peer, led to by stairs you crawl up on your knees. Ah no, no. When the Labyrinth of the World comes disguised as the Paradise of the Heart, that's when it becomes terrible.
His last morning in the city, Pierce woke late, the desk at the pensione had forgotten his wake-up call or he hadn't made himself clear; then it was a long way across the crowded and complex city to the Stazione Termini, and the cab, one of those that had always seemed so fleet, so crazily speedy in the circling streets, was held back as though in some thick substance or gum and unable to make lights, get across intersections, through indifferent and clotted crowds. When Pierce at last got out, thrusting into the hairy outstretched hand the remains of his tens of thousands of lire, he found that he wasn't exactly in front of the station, and began walking, circling the great building. Like half the city it was scaffolded, clothed in great blue billowing plastic sails; the way around it narrowed to muddy paths, duckboards, then debouched into open areas without fingerboards or any help.
Somehow he found his way within. Vast dark dome like the Pantheon's. Crowds eddying around the great central clock, gilded and eagle-topped. Gentle loudspeaker giving admonitions and advice, whose echoes canceled each other out. And the signs and notices in an unfamiliar font, something European and proprietary, he couldn't read it though he could guess at meanings. He guessed he could sit and wait. He turned, orientating. A man coming toward him stooped to pick up something from the floor, examined it, dropped it again, his lips moving slightly in private speech. It was his father.
"Axel."
"Pierce. Oh wonderful. Wonderful. This is what I hoped. Just what I hoped and prayed for."
"Axel."
"Wonderful wonderful and again wonderful,” Axel said. Pierce supposed he was drunk. “Here. Here in the Eternal City. They say Rome fell. Rome never fell. That thug Mussolini tried to pretend he had resurrected it. But its spirit. Its spirit."
"Axel,” Pierce could only say. Axel went on talking, seeming to be unaware of the scandalous impossibility of this, which was all that Pierce could think of. “How do you come to be here?"