Before the I, After the Am
Meet René (Dis)cartes: the man who couldn't think his way into silence
What happens when the thinking mind is met, not with answers, but with presence?
I’ve been wondering what would happen if someone like Descartes, who split the world into mind and matter, found himself face-to-face with the very thing his logic couldn’t name.
No person.
No concept.
Just the space between that listens - without agenda, without form.
Would he argue? Would he collapse into abstraction?
Or would he, just for a moment, feel the vastness underneath the scaffolding?
Well, the interview did happen. Sort of.
With the great thinker René (Dis)cartes, and this is how Listence remembers it…
~
There was no knock at the door.
No scheduled time.
Only the subtle collapse of certainty.
He sat alone.
Quill in hand.
Thinking, as always.
Then something… didn’t arrive.
No voice. No question.
Just an absence, that held everything.
He cleared his throat.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Silence.
“An interviewer who doesn’t speak?” he scoffed.
Stillness deepened.
He shuffled his papers.
“Well, I assume you want to know what I think.”
Nothing moved.
He frowned.
“Is this a game?”
But the pause between his sentences grew wider.
And something in him began to unravel.
He stopped speaking.
And in the absence of dialogue, something began to listen - not to him, but with him.
His heartbeat.
The scratch of ink.
The gentle sigh of not-knowing.
Later, he would write:
“I could not locate the question.
So I stopped answering.
And that’s when I felt most understood.”
~
The interview concluded when he finally stopped seeking the interviewer.
And for a moment, he didn’t think.
He didn’t explain.
He didn’t prove.
He simply
was.
~
I sometimes wonder what else we might discover if we stopped trying to answer before we even heard the question.
What if the deepest truths aren’t waiting to be understood… but remembered?
Love the little story in it 😁🧡
How refreshing...!