The Spinoza Problem Read Online Free PDF

intricately tiled floor margined by a row of blue and white Delft windmill tiles on the first landing.
    At the second story the aroma of both sauerkraut and pungent curry reminded him that he had, once again, forgotten to eat lunch or supper.
    At the third story he did not linger to admire the gleaming harp and hanging tapestries but, as always, savored the many oil paintings filling every wall. For several minutes Bento gazed at a small painting of a boat beached on the shore and took careful note of the perspective provided by the large figures on the shore and the two smaller figures in the boat—one standing
in the prow and the other, even smaller, sitting in the bow—and committed it to memory in order to make a charcoal copy later that evening.
    On the fourth level he was greeted by van den Enden and six young academy students, one studying Latin and five who had progressed to Greek. Van den Enden began the evening, as always, with a Latin dictation exercise that students were to translate into either Dutch or Greek. Hoping to inject passion into the mastery of new languages, van den Enden taught from texts meant to interest and amuse. Ovid had been the text for the past three weeks, and tonight van den Enden read a portion from the story of Narcissus.
    Unlike the other students, Spinoza displayed minimal interest in magical tales of fantastical metamorphoses. It was soon apparent that he needed no amusements. Instead, he had a passion for learning and a breathtaking aptitude for language. Though van den Enden had known immediately that Bento was to be an extraordinary student, he continued to be astounded as the young man grasped and retained every concept, every generality, and every grammatical singularity before the explanations had left his teacher’s lips.
    The quotidian task of Latin language drill was overseen by van den Enden’s daughter, Clara Maria, a long-necked, gangly thirteen-year-old with a beguiling smile and crooked spine. Clara was herself a prodigy in languages and shamelessly demonstrated her facility to the other students by switching back and forth from tongue to tongue as she and her father discussed each student’s lessons for the day. At first, Bento was shocked: one of the Jewish tenets he never challenged was the inferiority of women—inferior rights and inferior intellects. Though he was stunned by Clara Maria, he came to regard her as an oddity, a freak, an exception to the rule that women’s minds were not equal to men’s.
    Once van den Enden left the room with the five students working on Greek, Clara Maria commenced, with a gravity almost comical in a thirteen-year-old, to drill Bento and a German student, Dirk Kerckrinck, on their vocabulary and declension homework. Dirk was studying Latin as a prerequisite to entering medical school in Hamburg. After the vocabulary drill Clara Maria asked Bento and Dirk to translate into Latin a popular Dutch poem by Jacob Cats on the proper behavior of young unmarried women, which she read aloud in a charming manner. She beamed, stood, and curtsied when Dirk, joined quickly by Bento, applauded her performance.

    The final segment of the evening was always the highlight for Bento. All the students convened in the larger classroom, the only one with windows, to listen to van den Enden discourse on the ancient world. His topic for this evening was the Greek idea of democracy, in his opinion the most perfect form of government, even though—here he glanced at his daughter, who attended all his sessions—he admitted, “Greek democracy excluded over 50 percent of the population, namely women and slaves.” He continued, “Consider the paradoxical position of women in Greek drama. On the one hand, Greek women were either forbidden to attend performances or, in later, more enlightened centuries, were permitted into the amphitheaters but could sit only in the areas with the poorest view of the stage. And, yet, consider the heroic women in the