ethereal wings

ether

Theaether

XNUM X Year X NUM X Month.

"Monsieur Spinoza."

The mentioned youth turned around.A thin figure flashed by and sat beside him.

"I'm really sorry to disturb you in such a quiet place as the library of the association," Pascal said in a low voice, "have you been back to Holland recently?"

"I went back for a while last autumn, and I have been staying in the association since the beginning of winter," Spinoza replied, "Why are you so abrupt..."

"It's actually because of my roommate, Mr. René Descartes. Last December, he told me that he would go on a trip for a while." Pascal told the whole story, "I didn't care about it at first, because every year he Pretty much the same trip. Yet now that February is here, he's still out. I'm concerned that he might not be safe if he spends his memorial day away and suffers the characteristic near-death reactions of memoirized entities .So I would like to ask if you have seen or heard from him lately in Holland."

"Did he set off in December?" Spinoza suddenly thought of something, and he looked at Pascal in astonishment. "No, no, why didn't I know this until now...! His trip is very Dangerous, and all this due to a transcribed file I brought from Holland... Quick, take me to the main French pavilion! I'll find the letter, and maybe we'll have Descartes in no time A clue as to where Mister is now."

Pascal and Spinoza didn't want to peek into the privacy of their friends, but things have come to this point, and only by looking at the notes and letters left by Descartes before he left can he know where he is.

Faced with a pile of bottles and cans, piles of notebooks and books scattered everywhere, Pascal already felt dizzy, and what made it worse was that in recent years, Descartes seemed to be obsessed with finding music in music. Mathematics, the harpsichord placed in the room made the space more cluttered.Pascal picked up a stack of papers on top of the harpsichord, and judging from the date the pen was written, it was December 1780.He looked at these unfinished harpsichord works and found that they all had a common name—France.

"Bryce! I found the letter..." Spinoza shouted, and Pascal rushed to the bedside to read it together.Descartes kept the almost archival transcript of the letter beside his pillow.

"Dear Mr. Descartes:

"This time when I returned to my hometown, I happened to pass through Leiden. A modern scholar in Leiden heard of my arrival and asked to see me, because there were very few opportunities to communicate with memoirs, and he happened to have A new discovery I hope I can bring back to the association and tell my friends. He said that this discovery comes from the 17th century municipal notarized documents and the local chronicles of the small village of Egamund Binnen. It may not contribute much to the history of the Netherlands, but he said Would love to inform the memoirs incarnated about this through me as it would clear up years of misgivings. This is about a lady named Helena Yass and according to him this is very important to you .

The venerable Dutch historian found in the municipal documents of Leiden the marriage certificate of a man, Jean-Jans Van Weer, and a woman, Helena Jass, in 1644, but he didn't stop there.In the records of the village of Eggmond, the couple lived in the small hotel run by the family; and shortly afterwards, Mr. Fanville died, and Helena inherited the small hotel; The new husband has three sons..."

"It seems boring to us, but René doesn't think so." Pascal didn't read on, he raised his head, "He won't give up this opportunity to find traces of his past life...even if time has passed A century has passed."

"Then he should be in the village of Eggmonde now?" said Spinoza guiltily.

"He should have been there last December...but now..." Pascal returned to the desk again, and he inadvertently glimpsed Descartes' notes on the contract of unilateral grant, which came to an abrupt end, and the last four The word is: blood contract. "He is searching according to the trajectory of his life... If I guess correctly, he has reached the time when his beloved daughter is dead and his lover is married. If this is the case, what awaits him is only ice, cold and death. .”

*****************************************************

From the aether breathed by the gods gradually descends, and the light slowly fades.We descended into the world amidst the darkness and the black clouds that ravaged the wind and snow.In the early morning of a cold February, a typical Nordic snowstorm raged on the deserted street, and only the window of a house next to the street was still bright.

This is a four-story building located at the southern end of Stockholm, Sweden. The red bricks are dotted with sandstone sculptures of angels, and the style of the mid-17th century is still obvious.The late-night visitor obviously aroused the dissatisfaction of the landlord. After some explanations, the landlord realized that the visitor was just another special visitor who came to visit the small building recently.Among the yawns, Pascal was allowed in.

After Pascal pushed open the door of the room, he saw the familiar figure, with his back turned to him, holding a stack of scribbled letters in front of the bed and looking over and over again.This room should not be the exact place where Descartes died, because the interior of the house has changed a lot over the century; but it is indeed the closest Descartes can reach, the place where he took his last breath.What is he doing now?Apparently during his travels in Holland he found many letters from his past, but the local historians would not let him take them away; after having copied them, he has now come here with them, trying to make a cut off.

Descartes noticed the movement behind him.As on that night in 1650, adrenaline fueled his final rage. "Mr. Pascal, you'd better go out now, you have participated enough in my personal affairs."

Pascal still watched silently.Finally, after the deafening "roll" (the residents in the building cursed because of the growl), Pascal left without expression.

Pascal stood in the bone-chilling wind.The snowstorm had stopped, and the cold moonlight shone on his sallow, oval face.If Descartes was not truly regarded as a writer, why did he and Spinoza spare no effort to find the notes in the study, and why did they travel day and night from more than 20 residences where Descartes once lived in the Netherlands to the world of ice and snow? Sweden, to this place where Descartes finally ended.All this action would have been doomed on his birthday in 1777, when he wept in his new room.

There was a sudden creak of snow behind him, and before Pascal could react, Descartes had half-kneeled in front of him, grabbing his cloak. "You're not wearing a cloak, Monsieur Descartes," said Pascal quietly. "It's not good for your health."

"No, no, Bryce!" Descartes obviously hadn't adjusted his emotions yet, he was almost roaring angrily, "Bryce, I'm sorry, I can't control my emotions now... I made a mistake, I've struggled all my life with the contradiction of the dualism of mind and body separation, and then I've thrown everything away trying to find a way out of it... Once I thought I'd found the answer, right here, in Stockholm, Sweden... I named it' The passions of the soul', this is where the separate body and mind meet and interact...but now it has been released from the exercise of pure philosophy, out of my control, and has become a demon that consumes my reason...I can't calm down , I kept flashing in my mind... that little figure—France—was projected into everything I saw, and I couldn't get rid of it..."

"Rene!" Pascal tightly supported Descartes who was about to fall, but Descartes put aside his support. "Bryce...I have to give up this passion just like I set foot on this land back then."

Pascal sneered. "Philosophers abandon this universal feeling and imprison it in the practice of pure philosophy... Can such a philosophical theory against the commonality of human beings last for a long time? What did he get? In the face of the snow and the cold, isn't he still missing his lover and daughter? Even though these relatives left him, the warmth that was left to him was stronger than the empty thinking of "the passion of the soul" brought to him. His more! René..." Pascal's voice dropped suddenly, "a philosopher of his time was also doing the same stupid thing: he refused the medicines that his physicians kindly offered him, and the advice of his friends on self-cultivation. , gave up a love in Paris, and devoted himself wholeheartedly to religious disputes. Fanaticism occupied his complete heart, and self-tortured contempt gnawed at his body from the inside, making him stand in the desert after death. until the appearance of a person, his intentional or unintentional friendship, let this sad philosopher finally discover: philosophers always patronize the word "wisdom" in "love wisdom" and forget "love" .That person is you, but it's a pity that you are knowingly committing the crime again."

The bright moonlight illuminates the chilling snow-buried streets.Descartes looked at Pascal standing in front of him, "Bryce, but I am not what you imagine..." After a pause, he continued, "My love for you is mixed with selfishness, which makes me Can't face you again: in the time with you, I feel ashamed more than once. I just treat you as my dead daughter, a substitute for France..."

He looked desperately at Pascal not far away.Pascal stared at him with black eyes, and his small body stood alone in the snow.After a long silence, Pascal raised his eyebrows, "René, actually... In 1777, when I was watching a performance in front of the Small Armory in Paris, I mentioned that my father did not mean to... long for the warmth of his family but could not achieve it in his lifetime. , so I wandered around with this obsession after death... Isn't this what we seek from each other?" The thin child took the hand of the half-kneeling man on the ground and continued, "Do you still remember your goal? . . . instead of Aristotle? But you have inherited one of his creations, the ether."

"The upper air breathed by the gods, the fifth element other than feng shui fire and earth...the definitions in these myths are not important, you borrow it to refer to the conduction medium of physical effects. In the face of vacuum, the theory of ether is How ridiculous, isn't it?

"But these years, I have discovered that even though the abolition of ether in the scientific field is just around the corner, in other fields, it is much superior to vacuum... In this world, we do not exist in isolation, even when we Completely and self-righteously closing the self, we all have to admit that there are still some mysterious feelings that connect us and keep our inner desire for others. Isn’t this kind of substance just like ether? As always, I support the vacuum that I am proud of, but I realize that an absolute vacuum and an absolute void cannot exist. Before everything is destroyed, new particles must be produced.

"Ether, I want to compare it to your 'passion of the soul'. No matter how perfect the rational edifice of human beings is, it cannot last forever without it, and will fall into a technological frenzy that loses morality... Humans are not machines, we Why is he obsessed with his body that can be swallowed by a sip of water and a breath? What I cherish is his precious soul and his precious thoughts: he loves God, loves himself, and loves others. These feelings are so natural and impossible. suppressed.

"Because of these affections and associations our soul is complete and will continue to remain independent, and in the universal association the passions of the soul - the passive feelings of the subject excited by the object - are sublimated into the affections of the soul .At this time, everything it loves and feels happy bursts out from within it..."

"And..." There was a slight pause. "I know that you have been thinking about that unilateral contract. It seems that like its predecessors, it has been limited to the field of philosophical speculation. However, now I am willing to help you complete this experiment."

In Stockholm in February, there were snowflakes again, and the tiny snowflakes were scattered from the sky like pieces of feathers.Descartes stood up. "You're right, I think too much and do too little..." This rationalist philosopher, this grieving father for the death of his daughter, after a century of struggling with forgetting and reminiscing, looks from his wife The hut where the women gather together, moves to the deep cave where Frans sleeps, then turns to the ice field where everything is silent, and falls into the fantasy of the noisy and warm inn in the small village of Edgarmond Binnen where Helena and her family live, and finally returns to To the same lonely soul that stood before him.

Bryce, I now understand that the mysteries of the mind and body that I have been pondering over the years, for the passers-by in the small hotel in the small village of Edgarmond Binnen, in the foam of beer and the hustle and bustle of poker, in the The laughter of reunion and the tears of parting have long since found our own answers... We wandering souls, wandering in the boundless sea of ​​​​deserts, our eyes are blinded by the supreme rules, and how many opportunities to meet have been missed...

Bloodline contract... "For the giver of the 'page', the remaining memoir in his body will strive to restore integrity, so the giver should be as close as possible to the place where his 'page' goes, that is, the recipient of the 'page' party; but for the recipient of the 'page', the contract has little effect." Bryce, you don't know that.But I will still give my all... Isn’t the comparison of this kind of contract to the unreserved and unrequited love of parents for their offspring?

When the landlord opened the gate of this old house at night, the new moon was hanging in the clear sky, the morning star was already looming, and a little snowflakes occasionally fell like the wings of ether.Sleepy-eyed, she didn't know that a brand new attempt was being made that night.The middle-aged man waiting outside the door looked a little guilty, the child in his arms had already fallen asleep during the long wait.After a few words about the nuisance in the first half of the night, the landlord let the poor old man in.

Of course that wasn't the end of all troubles for the landlord of this four-story building on the southern tip of Stockholm, Sweden.At noon the next day, when she was clearing up the mess for lunch, the old guest who lived in 1650 just got up and came to ask if there was breakfast.

☆, Whispers of Reed