Became religion,
and the heart ran o’er
With silent worship of the great of old.…
With a reverence for those great old days, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) took in the famed ruins under a full moon in 1787. “Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight it is impossible to form a conception, without having witnessed it,” he wrote. “All single objects are swallowed up by the great masses of light and shade, and nothing but grand and general outlines present themselves to the eye.” Goethe came across a hermit living inside the Colosseum and beggars sleeping around a fire they’d lit beneath its crumbling arches. The romantic scene was, he noted, “exceedingly glorious.”
In the next century, American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) picked his way among the shadowy stones, as did scores of others, each detailing the mournful nightscape—the flitting bats, the sound of a carriage rolling away in the distance, the convent bell. Moonlight poured in “through a hundred rents in the broken walls—through a hundred lonely arches, and blackened passage-ways, it streamed in, pure, bright, soft, lambent, and yet distinct and clear, as if it came there at once to reveal, and cheer, and pity the mighty desolation,” an American visitor wrote. “I can only say that I came away paralyzed, and passive as a child.”
For British chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), the old arena triggered a more extreme reaction in the autumn of 1819. His experience was mystical, or maybe hallucinatory. He saw “a bright mist in one of the arcades,” Davy remembered. “I approached towards it, when suddenly it enveloped me; an aromatic smell, like that of fresh orange flowers, seemed to penetrate not only into my nostrils, but even into my respiratory organs, accompanied with sweet sounds, so low that they seemed almost ideal; and a sort of halo, of intense brilliancy, and of all the hues of the rainbow above which appeared a female form of exquisite beauty.” He swooned meeting this spectral Roman goddess, but later admitted it might have been a daydream.
Expectations ran high for French writer Stendhal (1783–1842), who’d hoped to have the place to himself for the night. “As soon as other sightseers arrive at the Colosseum, the pleasure of the traveler is almost entirely eclipsed,” he huffed. “Instead of losing himself in sublime and affecting reverie, he will, despite himself, observe the absurdities of the newcomers, and it always seems that they have plenty to observe.” Similarly, intrepid British travel writer Anna Jameson (1794–1860) came away disappointed, not with the Colosseum per se, which, she wrote, “surpassed all I had anticipated,” but with how crowded it had become. “I returned home vowing that while I remained at Rome, nothing should induce me to visit the Colosseum by moonlight again.”
Not to be left out, Henry James (1843–1916) weighed in with his lukewarm assessment. “The Colosseum itself was all very well,” he wrote after viewing it one night under a radiant starlit sky. But while James seemed unimpressed, he couldn’t deny the cultural magnitude of his outing. The pivotal scene in his controversial novel Daisy Miller (1879) takes place during a nocturnal tour of the Colosseum. His heroine, a young and reckless American, dares to visit the monument unescorted, that is to say, alone with a rakish Italian man. “I was bound to see the Colosseum by moonlight,” she reasons. “I shouldn’t have wanted to go home without that.”
Considering the dangerous freedom she tastes that moonlit night, it’s hardly surprising when Daisy catches a deadly case of malaria there, payment for her indiscretion. But undaunted, doomed though she is, she won’t deny the pleasure of her jaunt. “Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight!” she chirrups from her sickbed. “That’s one good thing.”
China’s largest harbor opened its doors during the 1930s to all manner of exotic vices, from chewing gum to Hollywood movies. While Nanking Road blazed with the neon lights of coffeehouses, dance halls, and cabarets, Shanghai oozed with the gritty kind of glamour that film noir was made of. It was “the place to give a bachelor all the fun he could possibly ask for,” according to one denizen.
High-class ballrooms like the Paramount, the Black Cat, and Ciro’s drew an elite clientele during those years, daring women who had brilliantined hair and wore the latest Western fashions with plenty of makeup to match. The bohemians went to the Peach Blossom Palace. The film crowd went to the Ambassador. By 1936, there were more than three hundred cabarets within the Concessions, the territories run by the English, Americans, and French. The city’s brazen new attitude sparked an urban literature all its own, smoky, jazz inflected, and cinematic.
One of the movement’s brightest lights, Mu Shiying (1912–1940), began at the age of eighteen publishing stories notable for their steamy bravado and use of working-class slang. In his well-pressed Western suit, he haunted Shanghai’s cabarets by night, especially the Moon Palace, where he alternately danced a mean foxtrot and sat at his table, pen in hand, waiting for inspiration to strike. “At the center, on the smooth floor, fluttering skirts and drifting gowns, exquisite heels, heels, heels, heels, heels,” he wrote in 1932. “Fluffy hair and a man’s face. A man’s white shirt collar and a woman’s laughter, arms extended, green jade earrings dragging onto the shoulders … The aroma of wine, the scent of perfume, the smell of English ham and eggs, the taste of cigarettes.” It was that fabulous.
At one of the clubs, Mu Shiying fell in love with a dance hostess, whom he then chased all the way to Hong Kong. Eventually they were married. His was the voice of a generation, and his writing, swirling with fedora-wearing gunmen and femmes fatale, clanging trams, and speeding Buicks, all moving in time to the “whoowhoo” of the saxophone, conferred a lasting hard-boiled image on the city. “Shanghai,” he wrote, “a heaven built on hell.”
“Early to bed, early to rise” was for the dull. At London’s Vauxhall Gardens on the south bank of the Thames, fashionable people liked to show up two hours after the scene was thought to be over. “The present folly is late hours,” Horace Walpole (1717–1797) wrote in 1777. “Everybody tries to be so particular by being too late, and as everybody tries it, nobody is so.” What made Vauxhall such a draw wasn’t its long formal alleys, but the late hours and novel attractions—a lovers’ walk, fireworks, acrobats, music, carousels, and dancing.
The first amusement parks grew from public gardens like Vauxhall, where a battery of breathtaking new rides was eventually added to the mix. Most exciting of all were the roller coasters, which were inspired by the towering and fearsome ice slides that had been popular around St. Petersburg since the sixteenth century. Constructed in the same manner, Les Montagnes Russes, a wooden roller coaster that opened in Paris in 1804, sent thrill seekers in wheeled carts barreling along a track at almost 40 mph while they feigned sangfroid. Some forty years later, monkeys rode the city’s first loop-the-loop coaster during safety trials before a brave workman volunteered to take the plunge. “While going down he could see everything around him,” one newspaper reported, “but when within the loop he was unable to see anything. Going upgrade, he had clapped his hands as he ascended. He had no trouble breathing and during the loop proper experienced such a delicious feeling that he wanted to try again.”
Similarly, a love of newfangled nightlife—and of falling—entranced those who sampled the roller coasters at New York’s Coney Island between 1880 and 1920. The Switchback Railway there powered around a six-hundred-foot track at “a frightful rate of speed,” a journalist reported in 1884. Two months later, there were four more coasters at Coney Island, and by 1907 there were more than twenty, including Serpentine Railroad, Flip-Flap, Snow and Ice Railway, and Shoot-the-Chutes. “They ride before eating to stir up an appetite, they ride after eating to soothe the ‘hot dogs,’ they ride when exuberant for the fun of riding, they ride when jaded to buck themselves up,” a visitor noted.
The most imposing of all was the Cyclone, a ride that aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) was said to have deemed more fun than flying in an airplane. It’s not certain whether pioneering pilot Orville Wright (1871–1948) found the experie
nce as giddy, but he did confirm that riding the Cyclone was like “being pushed off a 10-story building.” Once, when a man who hadn’t spoken a word in six years rode the Cyclone, he got off and said, “I feel sick.”
Queasiness was a necessary risk—and a welcome one for those who came to the park with romantic notions. A reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle got it right when reviewing Coney’s rides, including a giant swing that accommodated nearly a hundred people buckled into little boats. “No matter how frightened they get, the girls have to stay there once the machine is started and that gives glorious opportunity to rescue them with both arms,” the writer noted. “Hence, the thing has made a hit.”
IN ANCIENT CHINA, AUTUMNAL MOON viewing was an artful occasion. At September’s full moon, T’ang dynasty (618–907 CE) courtiers and other glittering guests drifted through picturesque gardens, where swaying bamboo cut perfect silhouettes across the bright orb, and where quaint pavilions overlooked tranquil ponds. Musicians played, sweet and doughy mooncakes were eaten, and poets held forth, extolling every aspect of the shining moon’s beauty.
Few loved the moon as famously, or as violently, as the poet Li Po (701–762). He was known for his wondrous way with words, and for his dedication to the practice of spontaneity—the code of wu wei, or “doing nothing”—that guided his aimless rambling across China. During these journeys he composed reams of verse, dedicating nearly half his poems to the wondrous moon. Li Po’s tactical approach to writing was to drink enough wine to suppress his restless ego and to clarify his focus, then to gaze deeply into the night sky. Inspired, in his poem “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon” he wrote:
I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;
I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.
Li Po roamed south of the Yangtze River toward the end of his life. It’s said he drowned one night when he fell out of a boat while trying to embrace the moon.
On a cold November day in 1749, the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) left choir school wearing three old shirts and a worn-out coat to keep warm. His sweet soprano voice had begun to break, and the choir had no use for boys who no longer sounded angelic. And so he set off to seek his fortune in Vienna, where a fellow musician had offered him a place to sleep in the tiny garret apartment he shared with his wife and newborn baby. A kindly lace maker lent the promising young man enough money to see him through the lean times. And though Haydn considered joining a monastery in order to stave off hunger, he eked out a living giving music lessons, playing in three churches on Sunday mornings, and, at night, roving the city streets with his friends, serenading the local beauties with some of his own compositions. Vienna loved its musicians. “On fine summer nights you may come upon serenades in the streets at all hours,” an eighteenth-century visitor wrote. “However late a serenade is given, all windows are soon filled and in a few minutes the musicians are surrounded by an applauding crowd.”
The nineteen-year-old composer’s fortunes changed one night when Haydn and his friends played under the window of an especially pretty actress. Her husband, actor Johann Josef Felix von Kurz (1717–1784), liked the song wafting up from the street so well that he rushed down and invited Haydn up to join him. They might put together a show, Kurz suggested upstairs, instructing Haydn to accompany his pantomime. As Kurz flung himself across a chair on his stomach while pretending to drown, kicking and paddling his arms and legs, Haydn sat at the clavier. Kurz told him to picture a tempest out at sea. Hadyn had never seen the ocean. Kurz hadn’t, either, but he said, “Imagine a mountain rising and then a valley sinking, and then another mountain and another valley.” Hadyn still couldn’t get the gist. Finally giving up, he cried, “The devil take the tempest!” running his hands together from one end of the keyboard to the other in a long glissando. It was exactly what Kurz was looking for and he leapt up and gave the young composer a kiss. “Haydn, you’re the man for me!” he crowed. So began their collaboration on Haydn’s first opera, Der krumme Teufel, or The Lame Devil, a musical burlesque performed in the spring of 1753 and quickly banned from the stage for being vulgar and obscene. (Some years later the duo collaborated on a revival, Return of the Lame Devil.)
Playing and composing in those early days didn’t make Haydn rich, but it made him happy. “When I sat at my old, worm-eaten clavier,” he later remembered, “I envied no king his good fortune.”
As a sixteenth-century English scholar explained, humans named the stars because “things cannot be taught without names.” The bright stars hanging in the night sky seem to form pictures, rendering the seas navigable by night and providing sky watchers with a primitive handle on the wonders of outer space.
Some constellations still in use in the modern system, like Lyra (Lyre) and Cygnus (Swan), were first picked out by the ancient Greeks. But the Greeks weren’t the only ones to see patterns in the stars. Ancient Chinese stargazers called the brightest star in their sky “the Emperor,” and the second-brightest “the Crown Prince.” Two long chains of stars represented the walls of the imperial palace, while others within the confines of that Purple Forbidden Enclosure stood in for concubines, eunuchs, and court officials. They named stars for temples, philosophical ideas, markets, warriors, and farmers. Our Big Dipper was their Bushel, or Plough, and was thought to regulate the seasons. Ancient Egyptians, too, developed a constellation system based on their mythology, naming stars after gods and animals, as did the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Mesopotamians, and the Berbers. The ancient Greek configuration, based primarily on the Mesopotamian model, included forty-eight constellations, from the goat-fish Capricorn to the great twins of Gemini.
“Why did not somebody teach me the constellations,” the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) lamented, “and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don’t half know to this day?” But during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, knowing the night sky became a complex undertaking. The period’s far-flung explorers and surveyors competed to chart new constellations in the southern skies, information useful to their navigation, introducing Lacerta (Lizard), Vulpecula (Little Fox), Phoenix, and Chamaeleon. A French explorer cruising the south celestial polar region named one star Pictor (Easel) and another Microscopium (Microscope), while his contemporaries named stars in honor of various rulers and regents. A German astronomer added Machina Electrica (Electrostatic Generator), as well as Officina Typographica (Printing Office). And on it went until the last remaining gaps overhead were a tangle of ancient mythology and cutting-edge mechanics.
The result was “derangement and confusion,” a nineteenth-century writer complained, “serpents and dragons trailed their perplexing convolutions through hour after hour of right ascension.” Even worse, “palpable blunders, unsettled discrepancies, anomalies of all imaginable kinds, survive in an inextricable web of arbitrary appellations,” she went on, “until it has come to pass that a star has often as many aliases as an accomplished swindler.” In 1922, members of the International Astronomical Union came together to purge the sky of extraneous constellations, limiting the number of constellations to the eighty-eight now considered official.
When, in 1955, a few friends asked Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), then a gangly, unknown twenty-nine-year-old poet living in San Francisco, to put together a reading at a local art gallery, he declined, “not knowing of any poetry worth hearing.” Yet, right around that time, he composed part 1 of his magnificent poem Howl in a fiery burst, typing it out “madly in one afternoon,” he remembered. “I thought I wouldn’t write a poem, but just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind—sum up my life—something I wouldn’t be able to show anybody, writ for my own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears.” He sent the first six pages to his golden-eared friend Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) down in Mexico City.
And luckily, something changed his opinion about the San Francisco scene, because that October Gins
berg arranged for six seriously decent unknown poets to read at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street. The invitation promised “Allen Ginsberg blowing hot; Gary Snyder blowing cool,” as well as “abandon, noise, strange pictures on walls, Oriental music, lurid poetry. Extremely serious.” The place was packed with North Beach beatniks. Kerouac, back in town, brought the wine. Poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) stepped in as master of ceremonies. The evening was Beat history in the making. Ginsberg, dressed in his best gray suit, began reading the first part of Howl just after eleven o’clock. “Scores of people stood around in the darkened gallery straining to hear every word,” Kerouac wrote.
Ginsberg’s masterwork told of all he’d seen on the gritty, groovy scene: “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”—“angelheaded hipsters” who burned “for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” and who “copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting …” Reading the piece, Ginsberg, who’d started out slightly tipsy, became clear and sober, and later admitted that as the poem progressed he was overtaken by a “strange ecstatic intensity.” Howl was an anthem, a rebel yell, and an affront to the “system of academic poetry, official reviews, New York publishing machinery, national sobriety and generally accepted standards to good taste,” he later wrote. And it was a sensation. “Everyone was yelling ‘Go! Go! GO!’ ” Kerouac remembered, though others reported that Kerouac himself yelled loudest of all. Afterward, the whole crew—Ginsberg, Kerouac, and fellow Beats Neal Cassady, Natalie Jackson, and Peter Orlovsky—went to the Nam Yuen restaurant in Chinatown, then on to The Place, where they drank and talked into the morning.
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