What would Descartes do?

On a day like this, I wake up wondering; what would Descartes do? I expect if he were me and woke here, when the sky isn’t quite sunshine and the morning isn’t quite over, he would curse himself for sleeping so late. He had important thoughts which needed to be considered, so getting up was pretty important. And then? I wonder if he would make himself coffee and put on clean underwear, or whether he’d tumble out of bed urgently with words and notebooks to record everything that happened in his sleep, discover whether or not he really was dreaming. I would like to know. It would be nice to have something to model my mornings on, to see if it resulted in my own genius utterances and spasms of recognition. Perhaps he would go for a walk to clear his mind. It might work, but first there would need to be the daily debacle of dressing, washing, breakfast…and before you know it all of last night’s thoughts are tangled up in toothpaste and normalities. So perhaps not. I do know, however, that there are things which Descartes would not do. He would not, for example, dance round a bedroom in his underwear all caffeine high, or lazily check his emails, or put on lipstick. So there’s a start to take note of. Maybe on a day like this Descartes would not get up at all. Perhaps he would sit up in bed and start to think, and carry on thinking all day, while children learned arithmetic on blackboards, and old women bought squashed tomatoes in markets, and wives conducted seedy and tawdry affairs, and people ate and washed and talked and drank and smoked and kissed and danced, think until the sun set again, and still not sort it all out. It seems a shame to miss out on the joy of these daily mundanities, even if there is the ultimate nature of reality to be considered. But then again, I’m not Descartes, and the sun is starting to shine behind the clouds. Time for more coffee.