An Afternoon with Immanuel Kant in Königsberg - September 30, 1784

It was the smell that reached me first. Cabbage and river water, horse manure, and a distant whiff of smoke wafting from the Pregel River. Königsberg smelled like what it was: a self-sufficient city. I stood on the Kneiphof, an island between the arms of the Pregel, and looked across at the cathedral, its brick tower rising into the thin September light as if to prove that Gothic architecture, too, could be a force to be reckoned with.