More from the New Yorker article on Descartes. It seems Descartes, like many creative thinkers through the ages, had a special relationship with sleep and dreams. Three quotes:
"Descartes’s mother died when he was fourteen months old, and his father entrusted his upbringing to relatives. At the age of ten, René was sent to the recently established Jesuit College of La Flèche. His health was weak, and a kinsman, Father Charlet, who was the rector of the school, managed to secure him special treatment. He had his own room and was allowed to laze in bed in the mornings, which became a lifelong habit. The other boys had to rise at 5 A.M.; Descartes apparently did not rouse himself until Mass at ten."
"It is unclear whether or not [physician, engineer, and candlemaker Isaac] Beeckman was one of the catalysts for the revelation that Descartes claims to have had at the age of twenty-three, a year to the day after his first meeting with him. That was when he went to bed after a day’s excited contemplation in which he discovered the “foundations of a marvellous science,” and had a series of vivid dreams that changed his life. Possibly, it was a nervous breakdown rather than the intellectual breakthrough that Descartes later made it out to be. Either way, within a few years he seems to have been set on a life of learning, focussing on the natural sciences and mathematics."
"Descartes died, of pneumonia, in Stockholm in 1650, at the age of fifty-three, having unwisely procured an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden, and then even more unwisely accepted it. In the coldest Swedish winter in sixty years, he found himself obliged to stand bare-headed at five in the morning in Christina’s library to give her philosophy lessons. It was a cruel change for a man who was not exactly a morning person. Four years later, the Queen abdicated and converted to Catholicism, prompted, she wrote, by Descartes’s teachings."
Not exactly a morning person. Cute, that.
Comments