Americans in Europe

Part 8

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that if I simply open a blank screen on my computer and stare at it long enough that something will happen.

The cat jumps up onto the ledge of the window in front of my writing desk, waiting for me to think of something.



Nothing happens until there’s a morphogenic idea to get things moving.

Sophie…

There’s one!

If I ever get a little female puppy, I’m going to name her Sophia. I love the name. Sophie’s mother, Elizabeth Stuart, exiled Electress of the Rhenish Palatinate, loved it too. That’s why she named her Sophia.

Like I said in last week’s column, Sophia’s life didn’t turn out the way anybody expected it to when she was born in 1630. That should come as no surprise. In 17^th century Europe there was very little of the “IF THIS, THEN THAT.” Like, IF I pull my boots up in the morning and show up for work on time and follow the rules, THEN I could expect to get a better job than the old man – the Idea of Progress. Growing up in America in the 50s, you grew up with the Idea of Progress. You could count on it. But in 17^th century Europe, it was hard to count on anything.

When Sophia was born, Europe still had to endure 18 more years of the Thirty Year’s War. Her father died when she was two years old. The widowed mother and her eleven surviving children no longer lived in a big castle overlooking the town, but they weren’t poor, either. They had royal connections in the Netherlands who set them up in a nice palace with servants. The estate had fields of grass and flowers to run around in and laugh. Sophia had lots of older brothers and sisters to play with.

The young girl received a first-rate education, with private tutors in Leiden and the Hague. Much of it concerned Calvinist doctrine, but branched off into the sciences and the arts and mathematics and philosophy. Familiarity with the latest ideas was emphasized in the family, like it was in the Dutch nation as a whole at the time. The peoples’ religion there had been founded on new ways of looking at things. The Dutch artists of the period – the “Dutch Masters” – were famous for the way they played around with different perspectives. The Dutchman Leeuwenhoek peered through his microscope into a drop of rainwater and saw a universe teeming with life and purposeful activity. Sophia’s older sister, Elisabeth, maintained a regular correspondence with the famous French philosopher René Descartes, who visited the family whenever he was passing through.

Historians refer to this period as the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. There was lots of money floating around. While Germanic peasants fought the wars, Dutch bankers financed them. The Dutch East India Company was formed. The world grew increasingly indebted to a small area on the western coastline of the Eurasian landmass where the Rhine flows into the sea. The leader of its leading family would soon possess the British crown and the whole operation would be moved over there.

Though shielded from the sounds of cannon, the uncertainties of the times were never far away. Sophia’s brothers would go off to fight in the wars. Her uncle, her mother’s brother, was beheaded.

Following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Rhenish Palatinate was returned to the family. An older brother was named the new Elector, and Sophia, then 18, moved with him back to the castle in Heidelberg. Ten years later, in 1658, she married a minor duke who was, however, first in line to inherit the throne of Hanover and the big castle there that went along with it. They had to wait 20 years for the reigning Hanover sovereign to die, but when he did they moved into the castle and took over.

Everything was going along just fine, about the way anybody could reasonably have expected it to at the time when Sophia was born. She was fifty years old and the mother of seven children when they moved into the Hanover castle. The Thirty Years War was becoming the memory of a bad dream. She performed her social duties. Managed affairs. She began writing her memoirs, a turbulent story settling down into a settled life.

But then she met Leibniz and suddenly the fate of the world was in her hands. She had to do something. At least go to work.

I can imagine that at first she was shocked by his ideas.

I know I was.

I first met Leibniz during the fall of 1976 in a used bookstore in Bozeman, Montana. I remember that it was 1976 because the flags were out for the nation’s Bicentennial. The Vietnam war was finally over and the next one had not yet started. I had quit my job at the newspaper to see what was going on out there, “On the Road” of American road lore, Route 66 and all that jazz.

I hitchhiked everywhere and slept out. I cooked beans and Indian bread over open campfires and had lots of adventures, including a couple nights in a Georgia jail for pissing alongside a rural highway.

I met lots of vets out there back from the war, trying to find what they’d been fighting for.

I met a gal in Bozeman and in the morning I was walking around the downtown area when I noticed the bookstore. I was into philosophy at the time and so I started browsing the store’s philosophy section.

A slim volume by somebody I’d never heard of caught my attention.

The book cost me 15 cents.

I slipped it into my backpack and took off.

That night, camped in a thicket of cedars just off the highway crossing the Bitterroots in Idaho, by the light of a flickering campfire I read the Monadology and realized the fate of the world was in my hands.