Descartes Before Dehorse In Flanders Fields

But since Descartes kept his discovery secret, he is credited with launching the field of analytic geometry, inventing the Cartesian coordinates, and making other important advances in mathematics, but not with the founding of topology -- the studies of the properties of space. Others would receive the accolades for founding this field.

La-de-freakin'-dah.

Hey, I'd handle being known for ONE of these things that revolutionized the world of ideas. The late sixteenth/early seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes was, as Amir C. Aczel's Descartes' Secret Notebook premises (ISBN 0767920333), also involved through his adult life in war and peace and math and seeking a mystical connection among all things mathematic. Truth, the man we probably best know for Cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am.") was also involved -- alleged, it's apparently never proved -- with the Rosicrucians that sought the same connections among all things. It's due to that mystic (read: non-Christian) involvement that Descartes had to impart this knowledge in code and hide it from the streaming Inquisition in Europe that would have burned it and him at the stake! (Galileo's more their poster child, but I digress.) The parts that weren't translated after their code was cracked decades later are apparently still lost.

At least that's how I read the story. For please don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading this true-life story but it's something you slog through. But let's jump forward nearly three hundred years where the masses of France are battlefields where first the French and Germans and then pretty much whoever they can drag into the fighting with them fight in World War I, known then of course at the Great War. The Brian Busby edited collection In Flanders Fields and Other Poems of the First World War (ISBN 1841933465) definitely keeps you reading -- in fact, last night I intended to go to bed and I was midway in this book, laying back in bed where I normally fall asleep ... and I finished it. All the thirty poets excerpted in here died during the war, and that can make their writing all the more poignant. At least it does for me, and with its period reproductions, reading this on the hundredth anniversary of World War I beginning -- really hit.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

(first stanza of title poem by John McCrae)

A century later, cross the Atlantic with me and proceed far inland, sixty-five miles west from the geographic center of North America (seriously, Rugby, North Dakota is the geographic center) to the city of Minot. Sunday morning it was especially slippery outside when I was out delivering the papers before going to church for Bethany Lutheran's Christmas cantata that Martha sang in for both services -- and her voice is a little strained from that -- and later the kids got to sing in their own Christmas program Sunday afternoon! After fellowship and refreshment and Merry Christmases all around, we got home and I could barely stay awake that first day of winter. (Yep, yesterday was the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, though really the snow you see outside isn't much for our time of year. BUT YOU WHO HAVE IT CAN STILL HAVE IT, TRUST ME ON THIS!) Twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit and staying that way -- just don't tempt fate walking outdoors and run!

'dere be ice and it be cold, David