Philosophy

"The Ethica of Spinoza" by Shoshannah Brombacher


Philosophy


I used to sit in the cafe
of existentialism,
lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,
contemplating the suicide
a tiny Frenchman
might commit by leaping from
the rim of my brandyglass.

I used to hunger to be engaged
as I walked the long shaded boulevards,
eyeing women of all nationalities,
a difficult paperback riding
in my raincoat pocket.

But these days I like my ontology
in an armchair,
a rope hammock, or better still,
a warm bath in a cork-lined room--
disengaged, soaking in the calm,
restful waters of speculation.

Afternoons, when I leave the house
for the woods, I think of Aquinas
at his desk,
fingers interlocked upon his stomach,
as he deduces another proof
for God's existence,

intricate as the branches
of these bare November trees.
And as I kick through the leaves and snap
the windfallen twigs, I consider Leibniz
on his couch reaching the astonishing
conclusion that monads,

those windowless units of matter,
must have souls.
But when I finally reach the top
of the hill and sit down
on the flat tonnage of this boulder,
I think of Spinoza,
most rarefied of them all.

I look beyond the treetops
and the distant ridges and see him
sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight
slowly stirring his milky tea
with a spoon.
Since dawn he has been at his bench
grinding lenses,

but now he is leaving behind
the saucer and table,
the smokey chimneys
and tile roofs of Amsterdam,
even the earth itself, pale blue,
aqueous, cloud-enshrined, titled back
on the stick of its axis.

He is rising into that high dome
of thought where loose pages of Shelley
float on the air,
where all the formulas of calculus
unravel, tumbling in the radiance
of a round Platonic sun--

that zone just below the one
where angels accelerate and
the ampitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.
And now I stand up on the ledge
to salute you, Spinoza,
and when I whistle to the dog
and start down the hill,

I can feel the thick glass of your eyes
upon me as I step from the rock
to glacial rock, and on her
as she sniffs her way through the leaves,
her tail straight back,
her body low to the ground.


~ Billy Collins ~

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