The Spinoza Problem (35 page)

W
ithin a few days, Bento’s fear had subsided. Gone were the racing pulse, the tight chest, and the intrusive visions of the assassin’s attack. And what a blessed relief to breathe easily and feel safe in his skin! With some dispassion, he could even visualize the assassin’s face and, following Franco’s suggestion, look at the slashed black overcoat hanging in plain sight on the wall of his room.

For weeks after the assassination attempt and Franco’s visit, he pondered the mechanisms of overcoming terror. How had he recovered his equanimity? Was it not his improved understanding of the causes motivating the assassin? Bento leaned toward that explanation—it felt robust; it felt reasonable. Yet he was suspicious of his strong attachment to the power of understanding. After all, it hadn’t helped him at first; it was only after Franco appeared that the idea gained purchase. The more he thought about it, the clearer it was that Franco offered something essential to his recovery. Bento knew he had been at his worst when Franco arrived and then, very quickly, began to improve. But what precisely had Franco offered? Perhaps his major contribution was to have dissected the ingredients of the terror and to have demonstrated that Bento was particularly unsettled by the fact that his assassin was a Jew. In other words, the terror was augmented by his buried pain of separation from his people. That might explain Franco’s healing power: not only had he helped the process of reason, but, possibly even more importantly, he offered his sheer presence—his Jewish presence.

And Franco had also jolted Bento out of his tormented jealousy by confronting him with the irrationality of yearning for something that he neither
truly desired nor could possibly have. Bento steadily regained his tranquility and before long reestablished his camaraderie with Clara Maria and Dirk. Still, dark clouds gathered in his mind once again the day Clara Maria appeared wearing a pearl necklace given to her by Dirk. The clouds became a major squall a few days afterward, when they announced their engagement. But this time reason prevailed; Bento maintained his equilibrium and refused to allow passions to rupture his relationships with his two good friends.

Even so, Bento clung to the tactile memory of Clara Maria holding his hand throughout that night after the attack. And he recalled, too, the way Franco had clasped his shoulder and also how he and his brother Gabriel had often held hands. But there would be no more touching for him, however much his body yearned for it. Sometimes fantasies of touching and embracing Clara Maria or her aunt Martha, whom he also found attractive, stole into his mind, but they were easily swept away. Nighttime yearnings were another matter: he could lock no doors barring entry into his dreams, nor could he stem the nocturnal flow of his seed often staining his bedclothes. All this, of course, he held in the deepest vaults of silence, but were he to share it with Franco, he could predict the response: “It has always been thus—sexual pressure is part of our creatureliness; it is the force that allows our kind to persevere.”

Though Bento saw the wisdom of Franco’s advice to leave Amsterdam, he nonetheless lingered there for several more months. His linguistic skills as well as his powers of logic resulted in many Collegiants seeking his help with translation of Hebrew and Latin documents. Soon the Collegiants had formed a philosophy club headed by his friend Simon de Vries that met regularly and often discussed ideas formulated by Bento.

But this growing appreciative circle of acquaintances, so salutary for his self-esteem, also intruded heavily into his time, making it difficult for him to attend fully to the thoughts burgeoning within him. He spoke to Simon de Vries of his desire for a quieter life, and soon Simon, with the help of other philosophy club members, identified a house in Rijnsburg where he could live. Rijnsburg, a small community on the river Vliet forty kilometers from Amsterdam, was not only the center of the Collegiant movement but conveniently close to the University of Leiden, where Bento, now proficient in Latin, would be able to attend philosophy classes and enjoy the company of other scholars.

Bento found Rijnsburg much to his liking. The house was made of sturdy stone, with several small-paned windows looking out to a well-tended apple orchard. On the entry wall was painted a brief verse echoing the discontent of many Collegiants about the state of the world:

Bento’s quarters consisted of two ground-floor rooms, one for his study, burgeoning library, and four-poster bed; the other a smaller work room holding his lens-grinding equipment. Dr. Hooman, a surgeon, lived with his wife in the other half of the house—a combined large kitchen and living room and an upstairs bedroom, reached by a steep stairway.

Bento paid a small additional fee for supper, which he usually took with Dr. Hooman and his most congenial wife. Sometimes, after his long days of solitary writing and lens grinding, he looked forward to their company, but when he was particularly engrossed in an idea, he reverted to old habits and for several days supped in his room, staring at the fecund apple trees in the rear orchard, while he thought and wrote.

A year passed most agreeably. One September morning Bento awoke feeling out of sorts, listless, and achy. Yet he decided to proceed with his plans to travel to Amsterdam to deliver some fine telescope lenses to a client. Moreover, his friend Simon de Vries, the secretary of the Collegiant Philosophy Club, had arranged for him to be present at a meeting for a discussion of the first part of Bento’s new work. Bento pulled Simon’s most recent letter from his bag and reread it.

As he folded up the letter, Bento experienced both joy and uneasiness—joy at Simon’s good words but suspiciousness of his own yearning for an admiring audience. Without doubt moving to Rijnsburg was a wise decision. Wiser yet, he imagined, might be an even farther move from Amsterdam.

He walked the short distance to Oegstgeest, where, for 21 stuivers, he boarded the morning
trekschuit
, a horse-drawn barge that took passengers down the small
trekvaart
, the canal recently dug that ran straight to Amsterdam. For a few stuivers more he could have sat in the cabin, but it was a fine sunny day, and he sat on the deck and reread the beginning of his paper, “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,” to be discussed the following day by Simon’s philosophy club. He had begun by describing his personal search for happiness.

Next he described his inability to achieve his goal while still clutching his cultural beliefs that the highest good consisted of riches, fame, and the sensual pleasures. These goods, he insisted, were not good for one’s health. He carefully read his comments about the limitations of these three worldly goods.

Bento nodded, particularly satisfied with his description of the problem of fame. Now to the remedy: he had expressed his difficulties letting go of a sure and accustomed good for something uncertain. Then he had immediately tempered that idea by saying that, since he sought for a fixed good, something unchangeable, it was clearly not uncertain in its nature but only in its attainment. Though he was pleased with the progression of his arguments, he grew uncomfortable as he continued to read. Perhaps he had said and revealed too much of himself in several passages:

He felt flushed as he read and began to murmur to himself. “This is not philosophy. This is far too personal. What have I done? This is simply passionate argument intended to evoke emotions. I resolve . . . no, more than
resolve, I
vow
. . . that in the future, Bento Spinoza and his search, his fears, his hopes, will be invisible. I write falsely if I cannot persuade readers entirely by the reason of my arguments.”

He nodded as he continued reading passages describing how men have sacrificed all, even their lives, in pursuit of riches, reputation, and indulgence in sensual pleasures. Now to introduce the remedy in short strong passages.

He could read no more. His head began to throb—he definitely did not feel himself today—and he closed his eyes and dozed for what seemed a quarter of an hour. The first thing he saw when he awakened was a tightly clustered group of twenty to thirty strolling next to the canal. Who were they? Where were they going? He could not take his eyes off of them as the
trekschuit
neared and then passed the group. At the next stop, still at least an hour’s walk to Simon de Vries’s home in Amsterdam, where he would spend the night, he surprised himself by grabbing his bag, jumping off the barge, and heading backward, toward the strolling group.

Soon he drew close enough to notice that the men, who were dressed in working-class Dutch garb, all wore yarmulkes. Yes, without doubt, they were Jews, but Ashkenazi Jews, who would not recognize him. He drew closer. The group had stopped at a clearing by the banks of the canal and gathered about their leader, undoubtedly their rabbi, who began chanting at the very edge of the water. Bento edged closer to the group to hear his words. One elderly woman, short and stocky, her shoulders covered with heavy black cloth, eyed Bento for several minutes and then slowly approached him. Bento looked at her wrinkled face, so kind, so maternal that
he thought of his own mother. But no, his mother had died at a younger age than he was now. This old woman would be
her
mother’s age. She moved closer to him and said, “
Bist an undzeriker
?” (“Are you one of us?”).

Though Bento had picked up only small bits of Yiddish from his commercial dealings with Ashkenazi Jews, he understood her question perfectly yet was unable to answer. Finally, shaking his head, he whispered, “Sephardic.”

“
Ah, ir zayt an undzeriker. Ot iz a matone fun Rifke
.” (“Then you are one of us. Here, here is a gift from Rifke.”) She reached into her apron pocket, handed him a sizeable chunk of fresh bread, and pointed to the canal.

He nodded thanks, and as she walked away, Bento slapped his forehead and murmured to himself, “Tashlich. Astounding . . . it’s Rosh Hashanah—how could I have forgotten?” He knew the ceremony of Tashlich well. For centuries congregations of Jews had held a Rosh Hashanah service near the banks of running water that ended by their throwing bread into the water. The words of the scriptures came back to him: “The Lord will take us back in love; He will cover up our iniquities. You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19).