You said you liked books that excavated the lost stories of powerful women in history, which struck me as a nobler way of saying you enjoyed reading about monarchs. You had more or less exhausted the British royal family, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, the Medicis, the Borgias, the wives of the Ottoman sultans, and the Roman empresses, so figured you might as well give Scandinavia a go. You were held rapt by the lengths these women had to go to be heard in the courts of men. And they were the one percent. I mean, I can’t imagine how it must have been for other women. But you did, you spent a lot of time imagining how life must have been for all kinds of women throughout time, in ancient Egypt, Edwardian England, imperial Japan, tsarist Russia, the rapes, the dowries, the trysts, the childbirths, the backstabbing, the ambitions thwarted and achieved, as you lay in bed with your reading lamp on well past midnight.

“Wasn’t Descartes her tutor?” I asked, pouring a bit more cereal into the leftover milk in my bowl.

“Yes. And he sounds like a real prick.”

Descartes was able to convince himself that he could be immaterial. That his mind could exist without his body. The heap of sand without a single grain. He believed the mind and body were separate entities; that while the body was composed of physical matter, the mind was a non-physical substance. It was a proposal that fit cleanly with the vision of the body as a vessel for an immortal soul. Some of his pals, like the French priest and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, went so far as to suggest that the mind and body didn’t interact to produce sensation at all, but that it was in fact God who generated every feeling, from hitting one’s finger with a hammer to the explosive orgasm of a winning blow job. Malebranche’s God was an unseen smith of the senses, tailor-making bespoke reactions to every imaginable permutation of human experience.

Descartes also reasoned animals only had bodies, not the immaterial substance of consciousness. Only humans were fortunate enough to be gifted with minds. And for Descartes, the mind was ultimate — “I think therefore I am.” And it was through some rather impressive gymnastics of logic that Descartes managed to doubt whether he had a body at all, whether his was not simply an apparition in a dream or a tricky illusion conjured by an evil demon (we’ve all had those days). But try as he could, he was unable to deny the existence of his mind. Therefore, he reasoned, the mind (and soul) could exist without the body but not the other way around.