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It is the first freeze of winter, and the dew has crystalized where it clings to the bowing, trampled heads of yellow blades of grass. This is when the tulips are asleep underground, wrapped tight beneath layers of thick skin and warm, insulated from the dead world above – not quite dead, for the festivities of winter leave swarming footsteps that the tulip is entirely unaware of.
The unsuspecting tulip bulb would make a fine vehicle for the narrative of Bento, or Baruch, or Benedictus Spinoza’s corruption. There is the infamous story of the sailor who unknowingly ate a rare tulip bulb, thinking it was merely an onion, and found himself facing jail for the immense financial damages he had caused. Spinoza, too, could have been nothing more than the plain eldest son of a financially precarious merchant, but indeed his mind blossomed into full, scandalous flowering beauty in the spring of his maturity, in the year of his excommunication.
He sits by Franciscus van den Enden in the enigmatic man’s home. This is where the seed of apostasy was nurtured and encouraged to germinate in such fertile conditions. They stretch their legs before the fireplace and van den Enden leans forward to tend the flames with a brass poker at irregular intervals. Spinoza with his black curls that melt into the shadows between the tongues of light dancing around them besides van den Enden’s worn, pale features and wispy blond hair. The individual bristles of his unkempt beard catch figments of this same light; a smile tugs at the young man’s mouth when he silently likens his master to a silky lap dog that has escaped its owner and gone too long without grooming. Van den Enden was, he thought it certain, better suited for a life of comfort but too audacious to maintain it. A Jesuit then a doctor then an art-seller, now the philosopher-king of his own small world.
Outside, it is raining, soon to transition into sparse snow then back to rain, leaving the Amsterdam streets dreary and wet for days, winter advancing further all the while. Spinoza is in the first month of his twenty-second year, but winces at the sharp ache occasionally cascading through his lower legs. Unlike van den Enden, his wool stockings gave him no warmth, having been thoroughly soaked during his journey trudging towards his teacher’s residence. Upon entering he had, sheepishly, gestured at his shoes tracking cold, muddy water past the threshold of the van den Enden family’s home – always, he was apologetic for any signs of his existence – Franciscus nodded, his eyes crinkling at their corners though no expression played on his face.
“Dry them by the fire, won’t you!” He barked these words, as he did most things he said, lacking the intonation one would otherwise look to for guidance regarding his intended meaning, but this was a single item among the many idiosyncrasies that coaxed from his students their own outrageous traits, none being more relieved than Baruch Spinoza. Thus, the tulip bulb’s tough hide softened in the soil’s embrace, allowing for roots to unfurl and a stem to raise its bent neck safe from discovery.
“Thank you, Mynheer,” he murmured, “Oh, thank you,” already wriggling his cold-numbed heels from their place in his boots before reaching the sitting room where van den Enden’s classes were often conducted. A small room in a small home, made smaller by the bookshelves crowded on each wall, and the disproportionately large table complemented by a similarly cluttering number of chairs. The order of man’s constructed abode was thoroughly destroyed, made naturalistic, by the accumulation of books and scattered papers all about the room, like miniature geographic features, mountains and spires punctuated by lower plateaus of pamphlets. Rather similar to the geologic theories fomented in their infancy by Nicolaus Steno, texts of more recent publication were in stratigraphic superposition to those which van den Enden possessed earlier, and the wretched housefly crushed between two volumes was analogous to the ancient fossilized beast.
Where it was not filled by books, his house was filled with paintings. It was womb-like in its tightness and many dark corners, and the heavy, oppressive warmth in the air when a fire was lit and all the things became layers and layers of insulation. The unknown faces peering out from their gilt frames became part of the room, too, chiaroscuro smelling of linseed oil grafted onto walls, more window than picture.
Spinoza would have liked to hide in the labyrinthian mess and hold himself for so long that he forgot whether his eyes were open, as had been his habit in boyhood when the home which stood fifth on Houtgracht canal was still filled with a constant stream of people and shipments for the family’s enterprise. Like ants walking in single-file to carry off breadcrumbs, they came – relatives and debt-collectors and business partners and community acquaintances and, on a few humiliating instances, instructors from the Talmud Torah school looking to discuss with Michael d’Espinosa (who never did localize his name) the performance of his son Baruch. In those years he could sit beneath a table and remain undisturbed, watching their shoes shuffle past for entire afternoons until his elder brother Isaac or his younger brother Gabriel found him in his hiding spot, covered in a thin powdering of dust. He never was as business-minded as either of them, which was perhaps why his father intended him to become a rabbi instead, though this wish also went unfulfilled.
Thus, he sat by van den Enden with his shoes drying and his stockings going from wet to only uncomfortably damp. Van den Enden turned to him, idly pushing one charred coal with the fireplace poker. “You cannot go home, in this weather and state.”
“I suppose not.” He pulls his legs back, chin coming to rest on his knees. “But I will manage, since, Mynheer, you have not yet found a way to control the heavens.”
“Ah, but I can control my wishes, and I extend my invitation that you may stay until conditions are more forgiving.”
“Does man truly control his wishes, if he considers God his master?” Shy as he was to be a guest, he had been ruminating on the question for some time, and followed to the extremes of his reason.
Van den Enden barked out a laugh – “Then God has acted through me!”
“Then, I am in no place to refuse.” Gabriel, Gabriel was still at home and likely sitting, awake and alone waiting for him to return, or pushing himself to sink into an uneasy, fitful sleep. Gabriel was only a year his junior, though, and so must have long grown accustomed to Spinoza’s absences, comprised of both absence of the body and of the spirit, for he rarely told Gabriel where he was going or what he was thinking. Their loose bond as brothers had been so for a very long time, when he watched Gabriel fall as he learned to walk and said nothing of how he wept. Simply put, there had always been so many people, Papa and Mama, and later Papa’s wife, and Grandmother, aunts and uncles and cousins, and Isaac, that Spinoza never felt it necessary to be particularly protective of his siblings. He had found it rather much, in fact, with everyone always watching one another, and he only dimly understood the reasons his grandmother gave – the terrors in Spain, of living in fear and giving up one’s faith, and escaping, driven out from one place to the next and resolving to cling together for protection – he could not imagine the events of the recent past before his life.
“Well, very well, all well and fine,” he laughs again, harsh, brandishing the poker in one hand. “Ah, fine! I do hope that fine is also the state of your firm.” How strange a man van den Enden was, how he delighted at speaking in circles.
“You unsettle me, for you know that the debt is unending and I appeal to the magistrate to disown it-!”
All of them, all the people passing in and out like ants swarming, had gone and, following several financial misfortunes, the business that M. d’Espinosa had built in life quickly fell into near-destitution under Baruch’s stewardship. The scent of spices went stale, stagnant, no more did they struggle to fit in the little stucco house, so it was that he and Gabriel pored over ledgers and skipped supper. His mind was not in wholehearted pursuit of life, but rather of the adequate understanding of it, which he considered dearer to him than breath itself. Their livelihood was acceptable collateral damage for this goal.
“Oh, Baruch, won’t you follow in your dear old master’s way?”
“And be run out of the city?” For van den Enden had, in the midst of his prior money-making schemes, taken a long, winding journey of exiles and escapes until he finally settled in Amsterdam. He presently scoffed at Spinoza’s gibe, though in his pompous expression there was a notable tinge of irritation, that his platonic kingdom should be invaded by a mention of the past.
“That, you are not too far from yourself!”
Yes, Spinoza was near-penniless and word slithered about like a vile serpent, the Devil in the Garden of Eden, that he grew too indecent, reveling in apostasy; that he trampled on the Lord’s decrees to man, on the very existence of God. Van den Enden was well aware of this. The difference between him and Spinoza was that, when faced with such dangers, he could be crafty, perhaps conniving, while his student stood and bore his lashings.
That night, Spinoza slept in their guestroom. He did not change out of his day clothes, because he had never intended to stay, and made to leave at the crack of dawn when he awoke to a harsh winter sun in the silvery sky. They were still asleep, so even a hasty goodbye was unnecessary. The guestroom’s curtains were bunched together at each side of the window, letting in pale light to illuminate what would have been an austere room were it not for the master of the house’s character.
The family rarely found themselves hosting overnight visitors, for their name had been blackened in almost every city where they once lived, and even in vast, liberal Amsterdam they kept to themselves, except for Franciscus van den Enden’s ceaseless participation in the intellectual community. His pamphlets, debates, and the Latin school, all brought wayward philosophers and thinkers to the home, but never the kind of acquaintance to stay for supper, ask after the health of Clara Maria Vermeeren – Mrs. van den Enden – or that of the children. Hence the guestroom found greater use as storage for the many objects of interest, possessions gathered over decades like sedimentary deposition in the formation of rock. More cramped than any other room of the house, a bed huddled in the corner, at the terminal of a path cleared amidst everything.
Clara Maria, the younger one, van den Enden’s daughter, creaked down the narrow staircase from her room. She was barefoot, to be quieter, and shivering in her nightgown.
“Baruch?” Barely a squeak, but she met his eyes in the tender dawn. One foot felt out the surface of the next step as she descended, clutching the banister all the way. “You are leaving so early.” He started at her voice.
“Should you not be in bed?”
“Papa won’t worry, I think. Will you really be gone so soon?” Her immense, sad, dark eyes and mousy brown hair were dull, nearly-translucent.
Spinoza would not speak to her as he might to a child, for she was his teacher and he felt her, at her age of thirteen years, to be more learned than possible for him in his entire life. Van den Enden had taught his daughter all he knew of Latin and the classics, the philosophy of great thinkers, yet thoroughly insulated her from the gentle innocence of youth. She took on students in his school, having sat lecturing Spinoza and Theodor Kerckring on declensions and translation, so he considered himself in no position above her.
“Today, yes. Not forever. I’m sure Mynheer van den Enden would want you to go back to sleep, if he were here now. Are you not cold?”
“No, not cold, I feel like I am still dreaming. Like Descartes’ malicious daemon has taken me.” Clara Maria rubbed her eyes, narrow, pale palms facing outwards. “Oh, I am still in a dream, a long, eternal dream, and by necessary logic I can only know that I am alone.”
She stumbled on the next step; she had always suffered from a limp, one leg shorter than the other, visible in her uneven stride, and she did not have the delicate walking stick which graced her side during the day. This added to the sense of age about her, unlived years bearing down upon her as she leaned on her cane like an old woman. Perhaps the girl was right, that she truly was unaware, her perceptions false and mind fecundated with illusions by a devil – her father van den Enden who had done the great favor of making her a sage and hermit.
“This – certainly, this must be just a passing fancy, nothing more. The work of the philosopher, by my judgement, at least, is to know how to live, and live well. We can discuss later, when I visit again.” At times Spinoza feared that he lacked some essential component of the human spirit, which made him so uniquely incapable of understanding his fellow beings. Even now when he felt his heart twist with sympathy for Clara Maria van den Enden, he was unable to find the words to remedy her ailment.
“Well, then I am not a philosopher! Only a poor, sick soul! I do not know how to live; I do not know anything at all.”
“Oh, Clara, Clara Maria.” Were he standing nearer, might he have reached out to hold her? “You know a very great deal, from what you have taught me, and what is left for you to teach. I dare say that you understand more about living than me.”
“Yes, yes, of course you would say that!” Her voice was a quiet cry. “Goodbye, I suppose, goodbye. You will leave, and come back soon, but truly – really, I feel that you will never return.”
He slipped out the door, opening it as slightly as possible lest it make a sound.
In the years following the day of his herem, his excommunication from the Jewish community brought to completion by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, Spinoza’s existence was scrubbed from the world of the Houtgracht. His name in the records of students at the Talmud Torah School had been expunged from its place besides his brothers’.
Uriel da Costa had been made to lie on the synagogue’s threshold and let all who passed through it tread upon his back, simply to be granted forgiveness for his sins. Baruch Spinoza did not ask to be forgiven. Gabriel helped pack the few possessions they did not share.
“Is it true that you shall not repent?” His sullen face turned away from his elder brother. He sat at their father’s sturdy writing desk, apathetically editing the deeds for the family’s firm and home to remove Spinoza.
“You are aware of my decision. I told you first.” A lie. He spoke of it to van den Enden first, allowed the man to tip him past the edge of decency and reason into full heresy.
Gabriel’s brows furrowed, eyes narrowing for an instant. He hated Baruch for what he had done and how he was to be left behind. “Where will you go?”
“Leiden, maybe, or Rijnsburg. I suppose you would not be able to find me, if that was what you intended to do.”
“I am forbidden from it, anyhow.”
“Ah,” indeed, the rabbinical authorities ruled him a tainted, corrupt man, bringing a spiritual rot to anyone who dared show him good will. “It’s alright. It would be best if you forgot me.”
“Certainly.”
“Will you stay here?” Unlikely, he imagined. There was nothing to bind Gabriel alone.
“You know you cannot come back. I shall stay as long as this enterprise may continue. Then perhaps I’ll consider Curaçao. The New World seems promising.”
“Yes, promising.”
Spinoza had been promising once, when he was a boy and Isaac still alive, and Gabriel’s hair still golden thread as it was in infancy – it browned with age until it was scarcely lighter than Baruch’s. This promise was broken long ago, and now its final remnants faded.
“You’ll grind lenses, too, to make a living?”
“Teaching and lens-grinding, and whatever else I may know. What of it?”
Gabriel smiled wryly. “With a good enough telescope, you could see me half way around the world.”
On Spinoza’s final night in Amsterdam, he did not stay in the stucco house on Houtgracht Canal. Better to leave quickly, lighten the burden lest something keep him any longer. He was not uneager to disappear, yet knowing that his eyes would never again water at the scent of long-gone spices, so thoroughly embedded into every pore of the home, dragged across a raw wound. He carried little; there was no need to take with him the things left in his father’s will. The imported Persian rugs, the arabesque chairs, the silver pitchers once meant for the first-born, Isaac, who was also the first to die, all of it was useless where he was going, wherever such a place might be. Gabriel would need them, though, when it inevitably came time to sell their possessions to temporarily stave off the creeping debt, the thousand-fold death which had strangled the Spinoza family’s firm for years.
Afternoon, the sun setting earlier every day, sweeping across the canals and slowly turning them to golden ichor. In this light the silver pitchers, perfectly, gleamingly polished, would throw wild shards of sun across the ceiling in perfect bright slices.
Clara Maria, in her milky white dress and starched lace, looked as if a stray piece of reflected light had escaped, fallen onto the cobbled street. The whiteness was split by her dark wooden cane, new, after she had grown too tall for the previous one, and she swayed in her gait like a little paper kite strung up in the wind, pulling its string taut.
To Baruch Spinoza she was nearer to an apparition, so rarely did he see her out of doors. In his mind she would forever sit at her father’s dining table, one delicate index finger extended to point at a Latin primer, or Seneca or Virgil, or seated before van den Enden’s black-lacquer-shelled clavichord which had gone too long without tuning but which she taught to make beautiful sounds nonetheless. The tip of her cane tapped upon the paving stones, as did her shoes, confirming the tangibility of her presence. Her cheeks had been made red by the crisp, chilly air, the kind of damp chill that wormed its way into one’s bones. She walked with conviction, driving her cane down as though beating the ground to punish it.
“Mynheer Spinoza, you are a fool!” She says, “I will not call you Baruch, because you have made yourself a stranger.”
The two stood beside each other, overlooking a fisherman driving his boat up the canal towards the market.
“I suppose so, though I find it necessary to be a fool like this. I shall never return to Amsterdam, not even in death. You will be a stranger to me then, too.”
“Oh, but everyone is a fool. You and my father – all fools for a cause! Am I simply left to go mad myself? Is it such a crime to want peace?” She tightened her grasp on the head of her cane, and an unfamiliar anger rose in Spinoza’s chest – that he, for the first time, found her foolish instead, and still reprimanded himself for the spreading crack in Clara Maria’s pure, immaculate innocence.
“And why should you be mad? Is wisdom not the greatest peace? You, of all people, should understand this.”
“I cannot understand it, Mynheer! I am too of this world that I know so little of, in truth.” She inhaled tremulously. Stray hairs, fine, curling threads which escaped styling, caught the sun and became copper wire.
“Yet I find that you were the closest to a most adequate understanding of-”
“Of something entirely abstract! What do you learn from matter without sensation! You are chasing nothing! You excise yourself from all that is human! What, Mynheer, what are you?” With each cry, Clara Maria waved her cane about wildly.
“I am simply one who seeks the truth, and to free myself of affectation.” The canal waters were calm. The languid sound of their lapping against the masonry drowned out Spinoza’s thoughts.
“You are free, if that is what you call freedom, very much so!” Punctuated by a final rapping of her cane upon the pavement, the anger that had previously animated her quickly drained from the girl’s body. She stilled and meekly turned her gaze to the ink-dark water, unoccupied hand nimbly toying with her sleeve.
They watched the procession of boats, silent, for some time, though the passing scene entered the eyes of neither. Again, Clara Maria’s tangibility thinned, she faded when not in the only environment in which she know how to function. Horrible, leaden guilt settled inside his abdomen, for having spoken to her so and choosing to leave as she, finally, no longer seemed so dreadfully immaterial.
“I – I did not intend to-” How unfortunate it was that he believed the words he had said, that he was unable to muster the remorse to be moved in his philosophy, “-to scorn you. I’m sorry, what a wretch I am for having lost all decorum. I hope we can discuss this in more depth, someday.”
At once she turned back to him, lurching greatly in an almost startling manner. “Mynheer, I am in love.”
How Spinoza’s heart stuttered! He could scarcely imagine Clara Maria capable of such emotions. But yes, the fact explained her change in constitution, he considered. Even this was not a full grasp of the situation – she had simply grown up.
“Theodor Kerckring,” she said lowly, the excitement seeping into her voice once more, “I will marry him when he finishes his studies. He shall go to Leiden and study medicine, then he will come back and wed me.”
It would not come to fruition. Kerckring would study at Leiden, and, upon possessing the engine with which to raise himself in the world, would have thoroughly forgotten the first, stumbling steps of passion he took within the home of his first teacher. Kerckring was not only a student of van den Enden, but of Spinoza’s as well. He taught the younger man – a boy when he first entered tutelage, now on the cusp of manhood – mathematics and helped him when he was unable to grasp certain topics they studied together. Theodor showed discipline, yet also a degree of impenetrability, making it impossible for one to tell if he was as staid as his round, blunt features made him appear. Often, his hands stank regardless of how many times he washed them, faintly smelling of anonymous flesh. He waited for execution dates so he could rush to the anatomy theatre and watch as the corpses were dissected, pushing among the crowd of interested onlookers to stand before the table, be blinded by the very glint of the scalpel in its first cut. Theodor was a fine individual. His failing was that he was young, and the resultant permutability of his character which allowed for so many changes to occur in such a short time. Perhaps Clara Maria’s feelings would wane in those years, too.
This was how such vows rotted, as many parts of youth did. This, Spinoza did not warn Clara Maria of. He had never loved another, in any case.
“Kerckring? Ah, I give you my most sincere blessings. Let both of you know the weight of these promises!”
“Do you believe I can ever truly know him?” Following her outburst, trying to wrench herself free of the chains fastened about her, the knowledge of incomplete knowledge, she seemed to shyly crawl back to the world as she had been taught to understand it.
Spinoza did not know what he believed. “You are nonetheless my teacher; I assume you must know more of this subject than I.”
“But you, you can think for yourself. As my senior, what do you believe? Can I know who I marry? Can I know you? You’ve spoken of this before. I want to hear it again.”
“No.” He shook his head slightly as if in a daze. “You learn through the senses. The senses cannot be trusted. Transient affections cannot be trusted. Only logic persists.” The sun was fast setting, giving a final glorious display as it sank below the water-line. Their long shadows looked like spirits about to burn up in the waning light.
“So, we can never know anything in life, beyond pure reason in our finite minds,” she stated, “I hope you find the true essence of things, as you’ve wished to.”
They returned to van den Enden’s home together and did not say as much as they would have wished to in parting. Spinoza lay awake in the guestroom, trying to memorize every bound canvas and shelf around him so he might always be able to return, if not home, then at least to van den Enden’s home. For once he thought it strange that Clara Maria slept in the next room, that she must have been dreaming and he did not know what odd stories played before the curtain of her thin, pale-to-translucence eyelids. Did she dream of those in her life? Of Theodor, her father, of Spinoza? Or were her dreams fantastic and filled with sights that none but her could create?
He hoped that, long after he left, Clara Maria would see him faintly in her dreams, for it was unlikely they would recognize one another if they ever met again.