Descartes shirked his duties, visiting Christina’s draughty castle only a handful of times that winter, choosing instead to spend time with his friend Pierre Chanut, a French ambassador living in Sweden, at whose house he was staying a few blocks away. Together the pair made readings with one of the first-ever barometers to determine whether atmospheric pressure could, in fact, be used to forecast the weather. But unbeknownst to Descartes, other storms he couldn’t predict were amassing. At the time, in 1650, it was expected in upper circles that Queen Christina, ruler of Protestant Sweden, would soon be converting to Catholicism. To ensure that plan wasn’t derailed, a French missionary based in Stockholm named Jacques Viogué is believed to have offered Descartes an arsenic-laced communion wafer. Ironically (or perhaps symbolically), the major sticking point for Stockholm’s colluding cadre of Catholics was the supposed incompatibility of Descartes’s theories with the belief of transubstantiation. Descartes’s doctor attributed the philosopher’s death to his inability to adjust to the Nordic chill, somehow discounting the blood in his urine — a symptom associated with poisoning, not pneumonia — and the fact that Descartes, well versed in medicine and likely realizing he had been poisoned, asked for an emetic to induce vomiting. I wonder if, in these final hours, Descartes still believed in the controvertible existence of his body.

I never did buy the Cartesian vision of mind-body separation. It always struck me as a kind of ur-text for a contemporary society of floating heads glued to screens, in which the body was an inconvenient afterthought. And yet it is ingrained in our language. For me to even say “your body” or “my body” suggests an essence which is “you,” an essence which is “me” — essences which are separate from our bodies and can claim ownership over them. This “you” and “me” seem to have eternal ownership over this flesh and these bones even in death. “Here lies the body of Jordan Tannahill,” someone might say when standing over my grave many years from now (hopefully). Like the way you would always say, “There’s the old McGregor farm,” pointing out the car window at a ruin in a field near the cottage. But is there some immortal essence that is us rambling around inside our bodies like the McGregors once did on their farm? An essence that will live on in new earthly forms or in some spectral realm, just as the descendants of the McGregors now live in distant cities and have no memory of this ruin? And is it this belief in an immortal, immaterial soul that gives our person, the thing that is I, perpetual ownership over our bodies? Is it for this reason that the person standing over my grave might say, “Jordan Tannahill is buried here” rather than “The body that was Jordan Tannahill is buried here”? We have constructed our language in this way because we do not want to imagine death as an end. Because we do not want to imagine a body belonging to no one.