No one, however, could top the French tightrope walker Charles Blondin (1824–1897), who announced that he would cross Niagara Falls in the summer of 1859. “Thoughtless people, meaning no special harm, may promise themselves a sort of excitement in looking at a fellow creature in deadly peril and in shuddering through the moments of the indecent exhibition,” The New York Times chided. They certainly did. Some twenty-five thousand people turned out to see Blondin walk across the 1,100-foot span on a rope stretched 160 feet above the water. The riverbanks above the chasm were packed with picnickers. Brass bands played and banners flew.
The show began at 5:00 p.m., when Blondin appeared on the American side, blond, mustachioed, carrying his balancing pole and wearing tights covered in shining spangles. From far across the falls in Canada he appeared to be “a mere thread over an awful abyss,” a reporter noted. “The slightest misstep, the merest dizziness, the least uncertainty, would cast him at once into the perdition beneath.” But Blondin was never uncertain. While crossing, he waved to friends and to a steamboat below. He paused to lie down on the rope and balanced the pole across his chest. He tossed a line down to the boat, and then used it to pull up a bottle, from which he took a sip. And when he’d gone all the way to Canada and back again, the cheering crowd hoisted him onto their shoulders.
All summer long, Blondin crossed the gaping ravine—walking, say, with a sack over his head so he couldn’t see, or blindfolded, or, once, in shackles. He turned somersaults on the rope, walked across backward, crossed at night and stood on his head as fireworks blazed all around him. He wasn’t done yet. He pushed a wheelbarrow into what appeared to be midair, carting a chair out there and sitting on it midway. He carried a 136-pound man from one side to the other on his back. And once he hauled a cookstove out onto his tightrope, lit a fire, cracked some eggs, and made an omelet. Two ladies fainted when he pretended to slip during another performance. The next summer, he revamped the routine once more, capering on the rope for thousands of admirers, including the visiting Prince of Wales, and making the trip on stilts. “Thank God, it is all over!” the prince said afterward, presenting Blondin with a diamond-encrusted ring.
Blondin, who began walking the tightrope at four years old and traveled the world, continued to perform audacious feats in China, Japan, India, and across Europe until he was well into his seventies. Whenever he carried people over the falls on his back, he told them to be still, not to choke him—and not to look down. He never admitted to any nervousness whatsoever and usually whistled or hummed as he went. “I have never felt fear,” he told a reporter in 1894. “Not even when I first crossed Niagara. Puf. They laughed and said: ‘There’s a fool of a Frenchman going to commit suicide,’ or ‘I don’t believe he’ll ever try,’ and so on, but I have crossed Niagara 300 times since then.”
Like Marcel Proust’s fictional demimondaine Odette de Crécy, during the mid-nineteenth century, stylish Parisiennes took to the Bois de Boulogne every afternoon around four or five, circling the lake in magnificent carriages or languidly strolling down the Allée des Acacias. Ostensibly, they went to take the air, but, as Proust noted, the chance to see and be seen was the real draw. As if “paying scant attention to the passers-by,” he wrote of Odette, who wore a small bunch of violets pinned to her bodice and a pheasant feather in her hat, she walked with her carriage trailing behind her, “as though the important thing for her, her one object in being there, was to take exercise, without thinking that she was seen, and that every head was turned towards her.”
The Bois was the place to flaunt the most outrageous new fashions, as riding in a carriage one could wear an outfit deemed too racy for the street. “In a carriage,” explained the Viscountess de Renneville, writing in the mid-1800s, “one can risk any fashionable extravagance and novelty; it is the pedestal of eccentricity: pelisses in muslin, white embroidered dresses, rich silk dresses in soft colors, taffetas with impossible checks, bareges with chantilly flounces, and pompadour or star-speckled tarlatans.” Diamonds and emeralds were acceptable in a carriage in the Bois, but never in the morning, or on foot anywhere beyond the park’s borders. The women arrived each afternoon via the Champs-Élysées, lined with benches and chairs three deep so the fashion fans could watch them pass.
Then, in the 1890s, the bicycle took off and utterly changed the city’s elaborate notions of chic. Parisian socialites thrilled to the new toy, almost immediately abandoning their frothy carriage costumes for scandalously simple biking attire—bloomers and pantaloons. Couturier Charles Frederick Worth offered smart cycling suits, and the minister of the interior lifted a ban on women wearing pants in order to accommodate the fad. “Fashionable women first tried the bicycle in the country in the grounds of the château,” a journalist of the era noted. “What could have been in Paris a sinful outrage to the prejudices of good society became possible behind one’s own gates. One is not always upon dress parade in the country.” Before long, however, they were back on parade in the Bois, while, as ever, pretending to be there for their health. Madame did not like to be seen around town in her bicycling costume, a writer explained. “So she rides to the Bois in her coupé, and meets the groom who brings her bicycle. The man, if he can ride, follows at a respectful distance, and the return to town is made in the same discreet manner.”
As often happened, however, on the other side of the Atlantic such radically fashionable notions did not go over well. “Some people have questioned whether cycling is healthful for women,” an American journalist warned in 1892. “Some say that it is too much of an exertion, that it is liable to injure a woman internally, besides being unfeminine and immodest.” Cycling had not yet been accepted as the “correct thing,” the writer concluded. In Newport, Bar Harbor, and Southampton, society women who’d cycled the Bois in Paris pushed the new style, as locals balked. One early adopter in upstate New York, Huybertie Pruyn, was stopped on the street by several older women while wearing a bicycling suit she’d bought in France. Their advice: get rid of it. “It went down acceptably in Paris—nobody noticed it, but later in Albany it was a sensation,” Pruyn recalled. A California dentist refused to pull the tooth of a woman who turned up wearing bloomers, and in Alabama a man attempted suicide because his wife was similarly dressed. “The woman who has the courage of her convictions can put on a pair of bloomers and mount her wheel secure in the conviction that every man she passes will turn around and look at her,” a New York journalist reported.
Harassed in Manhattan’s parks, some bloomer-clad women asked their tailors to design bicycle costumes with pockets to hold pistols. Others rode with chaperones. But even in Paris, bloomers could still prove provocative. A young American writing for The New York Times in 1900 described her turn in the Bois and the many men who commented as she passed, including one who cycled up beside her, grinning and making certain propositions. She was shocked, having during all her years of cycling in New York endured only the occasional “comment of the butcher boy.” She rolled on. In the end, no matter how much attention she attracted, or what the unsavory types had to say, she couldn’t imagine life without the freedom of the ride. “I said to myself, in solemn conclave: ‘Will you give up riding?’ ” she wrote. “ ‘Never,’ replied myself, ‘not for all the contemptible cowards in France who call themselves men!’ ”
For thousands of years the mechanics of the rainbow remained a mystery, even to the exalted minds who studied the phenomenon. Aristotle (384–322 BCE), one of the first scholars to devote time to sky watching, saw two lunar bows during his fifty years. Iraqi mathematician and physician Alhazen (965–1039 CE) continued the study, writing on rainbows, shadows, mirrors, and the Milky Way while under house arrest for failing to dam the Nile by order of the caliph. The thirteenth-century Franciscan scientist, and closet alchemist, Roger Bacon (ca.1220–1292) discovered while at Oxford that the rainbow appeared when there was a span of 42 degrees between the line of sight and the sun’s rays. “Each of a hundred men,” he explained, �
�would see a different rainbow, to the center of which his own shadow would point.”
Philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) diminished the rainbow’s remaining secrets during the 1620s. Rainbow fountains, like those at the Villa d’Este near Rome, were then de rigueur in Europe’s posh gardens. To visitors, such a fountain was “a very great wonder, and those who see it, would swear it were a natural rainbow indeed,” one reported, marveling at the colors the fountain threw into the air. Descartes, however, strove to remove any doubts, exposing the fountain’s scientific inner workings. He vowed to replace reverence for magical garden design with a respect for math, philosophy, and what he called the “science of miracles,” recasting the biblically significant rainbow, and the trick rainbow, as the scientific rainbow, using a glass sphere and methodically laying out a mechanical theory of refraction. His reasoning was too complex for most people. Instead, it was Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), offering nonscientists a straightforward explanation of refraction—and the rainbow—with his Opticks in 1704, who would forever after be known as the rainbow killer.
English poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and John Keats (1795–1821) and essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) debated the issue at a raucous dinner party in London in 1817. Newton’s work prized science over poetry, the poetry crowd bemoaned, and his theory promoted just the kind of factual information that disrupted the lyrical flow. Lamb attacked the old scientist, calling him a “fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle.” Then the trio drank to “Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics!” Keats pressed the subject further in his poem Lamia, published in 1820, writing:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow.…
Wordsworth, on the other hand, disagreed with his literary peers, arguing that scientific knowledge only enhanced the artistic imagination, when the two were properly woven together. He held that nothing could dim the rainbow’s wondrous power, no matter what our understanding of the laws of light. “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky,” he wrote. “So was it when my life began; / So is it now I am a man.…”
In almost any age there is nothing poets like better than gathering outdoors to muse upon nature and the nature of life over a glass of wine. Their efforts give soul to the landscape and provide an inspiring lens through which to see the world.
These elements came together perfectly one hallowed April afternoon in China in 353 CE during a party hosted by the acclaimed calligrapher Wang Xizhi (ca.303–ca.361), who turned the gathering into a legend with his remembrance of it, a beloved example of ancient Chinese prose.
Wang Xizhi had invited forty-one friends to celebrate the Bathing Festival in his country garden in the mountains near what is now Shaoxing, Zhejiang. In the Orchid Pavilion, the group lounged beside a “swirling, splashing stream, wonderfully clear, which curved round it like a ribbon,” and they played an old game, challenging each other to create a perfect poem in the amount of time it took a floating wine cup to drift on the stream’s gentle current from one player to the next. When the cup arrived, each player held forth with an attempt at spontaneous verse, then drank the contents. “I release my pent-up feelings / Among these hills and streams; / Serenely I abandon all restraints,” one of the poets sang. And then he drank down his wine. Another chimed in: “All my hopes and longings / Have as their limit / These mountains and streams.” And he snatched up a cup. Then came poet Yu Yue’s elegant response, “My spirit glides / Between heaven and earth.” It was a great day for feeling free.
Wang Xizhi collected all their poetic efforts—only twenty-six guests were up to the task—into a treasured volume of early Chinese poetry, creating a cult of the Orchid Pavilion in generations to come. The party was depicted in scrolls and paintings in China and in Japan. Garden designers created pavilions with special “wine-cup streams” built into their floors.
In those days, landscape painting, gardening, calligraphy, and poetry were so closely intertwined that to truly excel in any of the arts, an artist needed intimate knowledge of each. Literary scholars were asked to name the most striking aspects of an important garden. An especially nice spot, for example, might be dubbed the Place for Listening to the Sighing Pines, Lotus Cove, or the Place of Clear Meditation. “If we leave the chief sights and pavilions without a single name or couplet,” a writer explained, “the garden, however lovely with its flowers and willows, rocks and streams, cannot fully reveal its charm.” Signs printed with poetry hung in the gardens. Polished rocks were inscribed with a few lines of verse.
Composing poetry and creating a garden represented the same urge to merge with the natural world. “This was a day when the sky was bright and the air was pure. A gentle breeze warmed us,” Wang wrote of that hallowed afternoon by the Orchid Pavilion’s stream. “Upwards we gazed to contemplate the immensity of the universe; downwards we peered to scrutinize the abundance of living things. In this way, we let our eyes roam and our emotions become aroused so that we enjoyed to the fullest these sights and sounds. This was happiness, indeed!”
A certain type of American adventurer—the tramp poet—spent his afternoons searching for a snug, dry place to spend the night on the road. After drifting through art school, poet Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) set out tramping in the summer of 1912. He meandered on foot for hundreds of miles, from his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, to Missouri, through Kansas, up and down Colorado, and into New Mexico, boyishly handsome in a yellow corduroy suit, a fancy sombrero, and a flaming-red tie. All the way, he walked “meditating on the ways of Destiny” and preaching what he called the “Gospel of Beauty,” as described in his one-page pamphlet “for making America lovelier,” and in a small booklet called “Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread,” which he offered to those he met.
Lindsay’s was the “church of the open sky,” he liked to say, and it was governed by a series of self-imposed rules, which were, basically, to have “nothing to do with cities, railroads, money, baggage or fellow tramps.” “I always walked penniless. My baggage was practically nil,” he wrote. He recommended that anyone out tramping should seek a big lunch at about ten forty-five in the morning, and start looking for dinner, lodging, and the next morning’s breakfast by around a quarter to five. When hungry, he would try some five potential benefactors before finding one who happened to be “in the meal-giving mood.” In a letter home to Springfield, he wrote, “if eating were as much in my letters as in my thoughts, this would be nothing but a series of menus!” Sometimes he cut weeds or hoed potatoes for his patrons in return. As for accommodations, competition among tramps on the trail made each night a scramble. Still, as Lindsay described it, life on the road was sweet: “Sleeping in a hay-loft is Romance itself. The alfalfa is soft and fragrant and clean, the wind blows through the big loft doors, the stars shine through the cottonwoods.”
For the vagrant poet, encountering the world at large and escaping the suffocation of a monotonous, workaday world was life’s aim. Harry Kemp (1883–1960), author of the best-seller Tramping on Life (1922), described the horrors of getting caught up in conventionality with this verse:
Now that white sheets have held me
For many a wakeful night,
Convention’s bonds have spelled me,
And slain is my delight.…
Likewise, some years earlier, in 1884, the twenty-five-year-old writer Charles F. Lummiss (1859–1928) sought bliss in the wilds while trudging cross-country from Ohio to California, a trip of 143 days and 3,507 miles, and a journey “spiced with frequent danger.” Alone on the open road, he set his own
broken arm and got lost in a blizzard. It was all part of the rush. “I was after neither time nor money, but life—not life in the pathetic meaning of the poor health-seeker, for I was perfectly well and a trained athlete,” he explained carefully, “but life in the truer, broader, sweeter sense, the exhilarant joy of living outside the sorry fences of society, living with a perfect body and a wakened mind, a life where brain and brawn, leg and lung all rejoice and grow alert together.”
When the English naturalist Robert Hooke published Micrographia in 1665, his descriptions of the minuscule life forms he found under the microscope shook the world. Hooke’s observations and drawings were not only minute, they were inspired. Under his lens, fleas seemed “adorn’d with a curiously polished suite of sable Armour, neatly jointed.” Watching the action magnified, Hooke (1635–1703) let one of the armored creatures shimmy over to his finger to suck his blood. “I could plainly perceive a small current of blood, which came directly from its snout, and past into its belly,” he wrote, observing that “there seem’d a contrivance, somewhat resembling a Pump, pair of Bellows, or Heart.” He looked at a needle, a grain of sand, and flecks of charcoal, recording each with careful renderings. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Diarist Samuel Pepys stayed up until two o’clock in the morning poring over Micrographia, later reporting to his friends that it was “the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.”
Naturally, curious readers sought entrée to this magical miniature world. In the eighteenth century, lecture demonstrations provided highbrow amusement across Europe, as did scientific toys like the microscope. At court, microscope gazing was all the rage. English poet Stephen Duck (1705–1756) penned a few lines on the subject, dedicated to Queen Caroline:
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