Humboldt did not suffer such intimidation. Few Europeans before him had crossed the regions through which he travelled, and this absence offered him an imaginative freedom. He could unselfconsciously decide what interested him. He could create his own categories of value without either following or deliberately rebelling against the hierarchies of others. When he arrived at the San Fernando mission on the Rio Negro, he was free to think that everything, or perhaps nothing, might be interesting. The needle of his curiosity followed its own magnetic north and, unsurprisingly to the future readers of his Journey, ended up pointing at plants. ‘In San Fernando we were most struck by the pihiguado or pirijao plant, which gives the countryside its peculiar quality. Covered with thorns, its trunk reaches more than sixty feet high,' he reported at the top of his list of what was interesting in San Fernando. Next Humboldt measured the temperature (very hot), then noted that the missionaries lived in attractive houses that were matted with liana and surrounded by gardens.
I tried to imagine an uninhibited guide to Madrid; how I myself might have ranked the city's offerings according to a subjective hierarchy of interest. I had three-star levels of interest in the underrepresentation of vegetables in the Spanish diet (during the last proper meal I had eaten, only a few limp, bleached and apparently tinned spears of asparagus had appeared between a succession of meat dishes) and the long and noble-sounding surnames of ordinary citizens (the assistant in charge of organizing the conference, for example, had owned a train of surnames connected by de and la, an appellation that suggested an ancestral castle, faithful servants, an old well and a coat of arms, a projection in sharp contrast with the reality of her life: a dust-coated SEAT Ibiza and a studio flat near the airport). I was interested in the smallness of Spanish men's feet
Esmeralda, on the Orinoco, engraved by Paul Gau ci after a drawing by Charles Bentley
and in the attitude towards modern architecture evident in many newer districts of the city—specifically, the fact that whether or not a building was attractive appeared to be less important than that it was obviously modern, even if this meant giving something a vile bronze facade (as though modernity were a longed-for substance that one needed in extra-strong doses to compensate for an earlier lack). All these matters would have appeared on my subjective list of interesting things in Madrid if my compass of curiosity had been allowed to settle according to its own logic, rather than being swayed by the unexpectedly powerful force field of a small green object by the name of The Michelin Street Guide to Madrid, which pointed its needle resolutely towards, among other targets, a brown-looking staircase in the echoing corridors of the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales.
8.
In June 1802, Humboldt climbed up what was then thought to be the highest mountain in the world: the volcanic peak of Mount Chimborazo in Peru, 6,267 metres above sea level. ‘We were constantly climbing through clouds,' he reported. ‘In many places, the ridge was not wider than eight or ten inches. To our left was a precipice of snow whose frozen crust glistened like glass. On the right lay a fearful abyss, from eight hundred to a thousand feet deep, with huge masses of rocks projecting from it.' In spite of the danger, Humboldt found time to notice elements that would have passed most mortals by: ‘A few rock lichens were seen above the snow lines, at a height of 16,920 feet. The last green moss we noticed about 2,600 feet lower down. A butterfly was captured by M. Bonpland [his travelling companion] at a height of 15,000 feet and a fly was seen 1,600 feet higher.'
Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland at the Foot of Chimborazo, 1810
How does a person come to be interested in the exact height at which he or she sees a fly? How does he or she begin to care about a piece of moss growing on a volcanic ridge ten inches wide? In Humboldt's case, such curiosity was far from spontaneous: his concern had a long history. The fly and the moss attracted his attention because they were related to prior, larger and—to the layman—more understandable questions.
Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask, ‘Why is there good and evil?' ‘How does nature work?' ‘Why am I me?' If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until at some point we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing. The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up wondering about flies on the sides of mountains or about a particular fresco on the wall of a sixteenth-century palace. We start to care about the foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about the role of peat in the Thirty Years' War.
The chain of questions that led Humboldt to his curiosity about a fly on the ten-inch-wide ledge of Mount Chimborazo in June of 1802 had begun as far back as his eighth year, when, as a boy living in Berlin, he had visited relatives in another part of Germany and asked himself, ‘Why don't the same things grow everywhere?' Why were there trees near Berlin that did not grow in Bavaria, and vice versa? His curiosity was encouraged by others. He was given a microscope and a library of books about nature; tutors who understood botany were hired for him. He became known as ‘the little chemist' in the family, and his mother hung his drawings of plants on her study wall. By the time he set out for South America, Humboldt was attempting to formulate laws about how flora and fauna were shaped by climate and geography. His seven-year-old's sense of inquiry was still alive within him, but now it was articulated through more sophisticated questions, such as, ‘Are ferns affected by northern exposure?' and ‘Up to what height will a palm tree survive?'
On descending to the base camp below Mount Chimborazo, Humboldt washed his feet, had a short siesta and almost immediately began writing his ‘Essai sur la geographie des plantes', in which he defined the distribution of vegetation at different heights and temperatures. He stated that there were six altitude zones. From sea level to approximately 3,000 feet, palms and pisang plants grew. Up to 4,900 feet there were ferns, and up to 9,200 feet, oak trees. Then came a zone that nurtured evergreen shrubs (Wintern, Escalloniceae), followed, on the highest levels, by two alpine zones: between 10,150 and 12,600 feet, herbs grew, and between 12,600 and 14,200 feet, alpine grasses and lichens thrived. Flies were, he wrote excitedly, unlikely to be found above 16,600 feet.
9.
Humboldt's excitement testifies to the importance of having the right question to ask of the world. It may mean the difference between swatting at a fly in irritation and running down a mountain to begin work on an ‘Essai sur la geographie des plantes'.
Unfortunately for the traveller, most objects don't come affixed with the question that will generate the excitement they deserve. There is usually nothing fixed to them at all; when there is something, it tends to be the wrong thing. There was a lot fixed to the
Geographie des Plantes Equinoxiales from Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland's Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins, 1799—1803
Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, which stood at the end of the long traffic-choked Carrera de San Francisco, but it hardly helped me to be curious about it:
The walls and ceilings of the church are decorated with nineteenth-century frescoes and paintings, except those in the chapels of saints Anthony and Bernardino, which date from the eighteenth century. The Captila de San Bernardino, the first chapel on the north side, contains in the centre of the wall a Saint Bernardino of Siena preaching before the King of Aragon (1781), painted by Goya as a young man. The sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.
The information gave no hint as to how curiosity might arise. It was as mute as the fly on Humboldt's mountain. If a traveller was to feel personally involved with (rather than guiltily obedient towards) ‘the walls and ceilings of the church decorated with nineteenth-
century frescoes and paintings…', he or she would have to be able to connect these facts—as boring as a fly—with one of the large, blunt questions to which genuine curiosity must be anchored.
For Humboldt, the question had been, ‘Why are there regional variations in nature?' For the person standing before the Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, the question might be, ‘Why have people felt the need to build churches?' or even ‘Why do we worship God?' From such a naive starting point, a chain of curiosity would have the chance to grow, involving questions such as ‘Why are churches different in different places?', ‘What have been the main styles of churches?' and ‘Who were the main architects, and why did they achieve success?' Only through such a slow evolution of curiosity
Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande
could a traveller stand a chance of greeting the news that the church's vast neoclassical facade was by Sabatini with anything other than boredom or despair.
A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
The risk is compounded by geography in the way that cities contain buildings or monuments that may be only a few feet apart in space but are leagues apart in terms of what is required to appreciate them. Having made a journey to a place we may never revisit, we feel obliged to admire a sequence of things which have no connection to one another besides a geographic one and a proper understanding of which would require a range of qualities unlikely to be found in any one person. We are asked to be curious about Gothic architecture on one street and then promptly fascinated by Etruscan archaeology on the next.
The visitor to Madrid, for example, is expected to be interested both in the Palacio Real, an eighteenth-century royal residence famed for its chambers decorated with lavish rococo chinoiserie by the Neapolitan designer Gasparini, and—a few moments later—in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, a whitewashed gallery devoted to twentieth-century art, whose highlight is Picasso's Guernica. Yet the natural progression for someone deepening his or her appreciation of eighteenth-century royal architecture would be to ignore the gallery altogether and head for the palaces of Prague and St Petersburg instead.
Travel twists our curiosity according to a superficial geographical logic, as superficial as if a university course were to prescribe books according to their size rather than subject matter.
10.
Towards the end of his life, his South American adventures long behind him, Humboldt complained, with a mixture of self-pity and pride, ‘People often say that I'm curious about too many things at once: botany, astronomy, comparative anatomy. But can you really forbid a man from harbouring a desire to know and embrace everything that surrounds him?'
We cannot, of course, forbid such a thing; a pat on the back feels more appropriate. But our admiration for Humboldt's journey may not preclude our feeling a degree of sympathy for those who, even in the most fascinating cities, have occasionally been visited by a strong wish to remain in bed and take the next flight home.
LANDSCAPE
V
On the Country and the City
1.
We left London by an afternoon train. I had arranged to meet M. below the departure board at Euston Station. Watching crowds step off the escalators and onto the concourse, I thought it miraculous that in the midst of so many people, I should ever be able to find her—as well as testimony to the strange particularities of desire that it should be precisely she whom I needed to find.
We travelled up the spine of England, and as night fell, there were intimations of countryside, though gradually all we could see was our own faces in windows that had turned into long black mirrors. Somewhere above Stoke-on-Trent I visited the buffet car, sensing once again, on my way through a succession of carriages that swayed as if I were drunk, the excitement caused by the prospect of eating something cooked in a moving train. The timer on the microwave gave off a chunky mechanical sound, like a detonator in an old war film, then rang a dainty bell to signal that it had finished with my hot dog—just as the train went over a level crossing, behind which I could make out the shadow of a group of cows.
We arrived at Oxenholme Station, subtitled ‘The Lake District', shortly before nine. Only a few others alighted with us, and we walked silently along the platform, our breaths visible in the night chill. Back inside the train, passengers were dozing or reading. The Lake District would, for them, be one stop among many, a place where they would look up from their books for a moment and take in the concrete pots arranged symmetrically along the platform, check the station clock and perhaps let out uninhibited yawns before the Glasgow train pulled off again into the darkness and they returned to a new paragraph.
The station was deserted, though it could not always have been thus, for unusually many of the signs were subtitled in Japanese. We had called from London to rent a car and found it at the end of a parking bay under a street lamp. The rental company had run out of the small models we had asked for, and had delivered instead a large burgundy family saloon that had a heady new-car smell to it, and an immaculate grey carpet across which the marks of a vacuum cleaner were still visible.
2.
The immediate motives for our journey were personal, but they might also be said to have belonged to a broader historical movement dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century, in which city dwellers began for the first time to travel in great numbers through the countryside in an attempt to restore health to their bodies and, more important, harmony to their souls. In the year 1700, 17 percent of the population of England and Wales lived in cities and towns. By 1850, 50 percent did, and by 1900, 75 percent.
We headed north towards the village of Troutbeck, a few miles above Lake Windermere. We had reserved a room at an inn called the Mortal Man, where two narrow beds with stained blankets had been pushed together. The landlord showed us the bathroom, warned us of the high phone charges, which he suspected (from our clothes and our hesitant manner at the reception desk) we would be unable to afford, and, as he took his leave, promised us three days of perfect weather and welcomed us to the Lake District.
We tried the television and found news from London but after a moment switched it off and opened the window instead. There was an owl hooting outside, and we thought of its strange existence, out there in the otherwise silent night.
I had come in part because of a poet. That evening in our room, I read another section of Wordsworth's Prelude. The cover of the paperback was illustrated with a portrait by Benjamin Haydon, which showed Wordsworth severe and aged. M. declared him an old toad and went to have a bath, though later, while standing by the window applying face cream, she recited several lines from a poem whose title she had forgotten, which she said had moved her perhaps more than anything else she had ever read:
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind
Ode, Intimations of Immortality
We went to bed, and I tried to read further, though it became hard to concentrate after I found a long blond hair caught on the headboard that belonged neither to M. nor to me and hinted at the many guests who had stayed in the Mortal Man before us, one of whom was perhaps now on another continent, unaware of having left a part of herself behind. We fell into fitful sleep to the sound of the owl outside.
3.
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the small town of Cocker-mouth on the northern edge of the Lake District. He spent, in his words, ‘half his boyhood in running wild among the Mountains' and aside from interludes in London and Cambridge and travels around Europe, lived his whole life in the Lake District, first in a modest two-storeyed
stone dwelling, Dove Cottage in the village of Gras-mere, and then, as his fame increased, in a more substantial home in nearby Rydal.
And almost every day he went on a long walk in the mountains or along the lakeshore. He was unbothered by the rain that, as he admitted, tended to fall in the Lake District ‘with a vigour and perseverance that may remind the disappointed traveller of those deluges of rain which fall among the Abyssinian mountains for the annual supply of the Nile'. His acquaintance Thomas De Quincey would estimate that Wordsworth had walked between 175,000 and 180,000 miles over his lifetime—a statistic that was all the more remarkable, added De Quincey, considering his physique: ‘For Wordsworth was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that I ever heard lecture upon the topic' Sadly, De Quincey continued, ‘the total effect of Wordsworth's person was always worst in a state of motion, for, according to the remark I have heard from many country people, “he walked like a cade”—a cade being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion.'
It was during his cadelike walks that Wordsworth derived the inspiration for many of his works, including ‘To a Butterfly', ‘To the Cuckoo', ‘To a Skylark', ‘To the Daisy' and ‘To the Small Celandine'—poems about natural phenomena that poets had hitherto looked at only casually or ritualistic ally, if at all, but that Wordsworth now declared to be the noblest subjects of his craft. On the sixteenth of March 1802—according to the journal of his sister, Dorothy, who kept a record of her sibling's movements around the Lake District—Wordsworth walked across a bridge at Brothers Water, a placid lake near Patterdale, and then sat down to write the following:
The Art of Travel Page 8
