! Unmethodical Discourse At A Café Table

By the flickering candlelight of the long evenings, inimical to study so they said they played this game to while away the time between learning and authority in that Jesuit college in the early 1600s: blindfolded or simply shut-eye and don’t cheat you turn the pages of the Latin dictionary at random and stick a pin, in turn, upon a random word; the first to make a sentence in the fewest rounds, the fewest words, wins a prize of choice.. we do not know the prize (among those severe, repressed, ambitious boys, perhaps it’s just as well…) or what the others drew; but this we know: that night René pricked a first word – ‘sum’ – ah! - promising! a verb was useful, in this game— the second round… he pricked on ‘ergo’… that swift mind already playing the tables of his agile mind… the air was tense; they’d remember this night, this flickering light, forever in their future lives… a hush (how boys fight to win more fiercely than Christ’s soldiers, whom they would become…) ‘Cogito’! A shout of triumph from our René – and the rest is history – alas.. It’s said the Devil enters in at the third stroke; and so it was: in three words, a lifetime’s career as the greatest of divines in an age of awe for the divine were lost to mere – philosophy… the age of Clairvaux, Cluny, Chartres for all too brief a moment, saw the vision of a glorious revival; but... triumphantly, our René shouts ‘Á moi, c’est la conquéte! Le jeu d’esprit á moi! ’ (impeccable Racinian hexameter, naturellement..) – alas for human vanity! The gods were whispering ‘Sum, ergo cogito! ’ in his spiritual ear – but no – his chose mankind’s so vain conceit and launched a thousand thousand café tables on the pavement; seated there in black, with scarf and beret, sunglasses, in a cloud of choking gitane and gauloise smoke, centuries of self-satisfied philosophes, believing 'cogito, ergo sum': that they are their thought; born as true Frenchmen, to be world thinkers, Rodin-like; and that because they think, they are… somebody… oh René, what a fall was there...