The Art of Travel

IV

On Curiosity

1.

In the springtime I was invited to Madrid to attend a three-day conference that was scheduled to end on a Friday afternoon. Because I had never visited the city before and had been told on several occasions of its many attractions (which were apparently not limited to museums), I decided to extend my stay by a few days. My hosts had booked me a hotel on a wide, tree-lined avenue in the southeastern part of the city. My room overlooked a courtyard in which a short man with a certain resemblance to Philip II occasionally stood and smoked a cigarette while tapping his foot on the steel door of what I supposed was a cellar. On the Friday evening, I retired early to my room. I had not revealed to my hosts that I would be staying the weekend, for fear of forcing them into a halfhearted hospitality from which neither side would benefit. But my decision also meant that I had to go without dinner, for I realised on walking back to the hotel that I was too shy to venture alone into any of the neighbourhood restaurants, all dark, wood-panelled places, many with a ham hanging from the ceiling, where I risked becoming an object of curiosity and pity. So I ate a packet of paprika-flavoured crisps from the minibar and, after watching the news on satellite television, fell asleep.

When I awoke the next morning, it was to an intense lethargy, as though my veins had become silted up with fine sugar or sand. Sunlight shone through the pink-and-grey plastic-coated curtains, and traffic could be heard along the avenue. On the desk lay several magazines provided by the hotel, offering information about the city and two guidebooks that I had brought from home. In their different ways, they conspired to suggest that an exciting and multifarious phenomenon called Madrid was waiting to be discovered outside, promising an embarrassment of monuments, churches, museums, fountains, plazas and shopping streets. And yet the prospect of those enticements, about which I had heard so much and which I knew I was privileged to be able to see, merely provoked in me a combination of listlessness and self-disgust at the contrast between my own indolence and what I imagined would have been the eagerness of more normal visitors. My overwhelming wish was to remain in bed and, if possible, catch an early flight home.

2.

In the summer of 1799, a twenty-nine-year-old German by the name of Alexander von Humboldt set sail from the Spanish port of La Coruna, bound for the South American continent on a voyage of exploration.

‘From my earliest days I had felt the urge to travel to distant lands seldom visited by Europeans,' he would later recall. ‘The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.' The young German was ideally suited to follow up on his fascination. Along with great physical stamina, he had expertise in biology, geology, chemistry, physics and history. As a student at the University of Göttingen, he had befriended Georg Forster, the naturalist who had accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage, and mastered the art of classifying plant and animal species. Since finishing his studies, Humboldt had been looking for opportunities to travel to someplace remote and unknown. Plans to go to Egypt and Mecca had fallen through at the last moment, but in the spring of 1799, Humboldt had had the good fortune to meet King Charles IV of Spain and had persuaded him to underwrite his exploration of South America.

Humboldt was to be away from Europe for five years. On his return, he settled in Paris and over the next twenty years published a thirty-volume account of his travels, entitled Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. The length of the work was an accurate measure of Humboldt's achievements. Surveying these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was to write, ‘Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar, like the Admirable Crichton, who appear from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties—a universal man.'

Much about South America was still unknown to Europe when Humboldt set sail from La Coruna: Vespucci and Bougainville had travelled around the shores of the continent, and La Condamine and Bouguer had surveyed the streams and mountains of the Amazon and of Peru, but there were still no accurate maps of the region, and little information had been gathered on its geology, botany and indigenous peoples. Humboldt transformed the state of knowledge. He travelled fifteen thousand kilometres around the northern coastlines and interior, on the way collecting some sixteen hundred plants and identifying six hundred new species. He redrew the map of South America based on readings supplied by accurate chronometers and sextants. He researched the Earth's magnetism and was the first to discover that magnetic intensity declined the further one got from the poles. He gave the first account of the rubber and cinchona trees. He mapped the streams connecting the Orinoco and Negro river systems. He measured the effects of air pressure and altitude on vegetation. He studied the kinship rituals of the people of the Amazon Basin and inferred connections between geography and cultural characteristics. He compared the

Eduard Ender, Alexander von Humboldt andAtmeBonplandtn Venezuela, e. 1S50

salinity of water from the Pacific and the Atlantic and conceived the idea of sea currents, recognising that the temperature of the sea owed more to drifts than to latitude.

Humboldt's early biographer, F. A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: ‘I) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants and minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5) The acquaintance with new species of the human race—their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.'

What may be accomplished in a lifetime—and seldom or never is.

3.

It was a maid who was ultimately responsible for my own voyage of exploration around Madrid. Three times she burst into my room with a broom and basket of cleaning fluids and, at the sight of a huddled shape under the sheets, exclaimed with theatrical alarm ‘Hola, perdone!' before leaving again, taking care to let her utensils collide loudly with the door as she slammed it. Because I did not wish to encounter this apparition a fourth time, I dressed, ordered a hot chocolate and a plate of batter sticks in the hotel bar and made my way to a part of town identified by one of my guidebooks as ‘Old Madrid':

When Felipe II chose Madrid as his capital in 1561, it was a small Castilian town with a population of barely twenty thousand. In the following years, it was to grow into the nerve centre of a mighty empire. Narrow streets with houses and medieval churches began to grow up behind the old Moorish fortress, which was later replaced by a Gothic palace and eventually by the present-day Bourbon palace, the Palacio Real. The sixteenth-century city is known as the ‘Madrid de los Austrias ‘ after the Habsburg dynasty. At this time, monasteries were endowed and churches and palaces were built. In the seventeenth century, the Plaza Mayor was added and the Puerta del Sol became the spiritual and geographical heart of Spain.

I stood on the corner of the Calle de Carretas and the Puerta del Sol, an undistinguished half-moon-shaped junction in the middle of which Carlos III (1759—1788) sat astride a horse. It was a sunny day, and crowds of tourists were stopping to take photographs and listen to guides. And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

4.

Humboldt was never pursued by such questions. Everywhere he went, his mission was unambiguous: to discover facts and to carry out experiments towards that end.

Already on the ship carrying him to South America, he had begun his factual researches. He measured the temperature of the seawater every two hours from Spain to the ship's destination, Cumanä, on the coast of New Granada (part of modern Venezuela). He took readings with his sextant and recorded the different marine species that he saw or found in the net he had hung from the stern. And once he landed in Venezuela, he threw himself into an exhaustive study of the vegetation around Cumanä. The hills of calcareous rock on which the town stood were dotted with cacti and opuntia, their trunks branching out like candelabras coated with lichen. One afternoon, Humboldt measured a cactus {Tuna macho) and noted its circumference: 1.54 metres. He spent three weeks cataloguing many more plants on the coast, then ventured inland into the jungle-covered New Andalusia mountain range. He took with him a mule bearing a trunk containing a sextant, a dipping needle, an instrument for calibrating magnetic variation, a thermometer and a Saussure's hygrometer, which measured humidity and was made of hair and whalebone. He put all of these to good use. In his journal he wrote, ‘As we entered the jungle the barometer showed that we were gaining altitude. Here the tree trunks offered us an extraordinary view: a gramineous plant with verticillate branches climbed like a liana to a height of eight to ten feet, forming garlands that crossed our path and swung in the wind. At about three in the afternoon we stopped on a small plain known as Quetepe, some 190 toises above sea level. A few huts stood by a spring whose water was known by the Indians to be fresh and healthy. We found the water delicious. Its temperature was only 22.5°C, while the air was 28.7°C.'

5.

But in Madrid everything was already known; everything had already been measured. The northern side of the Plaza Mayor is 101 metres, 52 centimetres long. It was built by Juan Gómez de Mora in 1619. The temperature that day was 18.5 degrees centigrade, the wind from the West. The equestrian statue of Philip III in the middle of the Plaza Mayor is 5 metres, 43 centimetres high and was crafted by Giambologna and Pietro Tacca. The guidebook occasionally seemed impatient in presenting its facts. It sent me to the Pontificia de San Miguel, a grey building apparently designed to repel the casual glances of passersby and declared:

The basilica by Bonavia is one of the rare Spanish churches to have been inspired by the eighteenth-century Italian baroque. Its convex facade, designed as an interplay of inward and outward curves, is adorned with fine statues. Above the doorway is a low relief of saints Justus and Pastor, to whom the basilica was previously dedicated. The interior is graceful and elegant with an oval cupola, intersecting ribbed vaulting, flowing cornices and abundant stuccowork.

If my level of curiosity was so far removed from Humboldt's (and my impulse to return to bed so strong), it was in part because of the range of advantages with which any traveller on a factual, as opposed to touristic, mission is blessed.

Facts have utility. Knowing the precise dimensions of the northern edge of the Plaza Mayor will be helpful to architects and students of the work of Juan Gómez de Mora. Accurate measurements of the barometric pressure on an April day in central Madrid will be of use to meteorologists. Humboldt's discovery that the circumference of the Cumanän cactus (Tuna macho) was 1.54 metres was of interest to biologists throughout Europe, who had not suspected that cacti could grow so large.

And with utility comes an (approving) audience. When Humboldt returned to Europe with his South American facts in August 1804, he was besieged and feted by interested parties. Six weeks after arriving in Paris, he read his first travel report to a packed audience at the Institut National. He informed his listeners of the respective water temperatures on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of South America, and of the fifteen different species of monkeys he had recorded in the jungles. He opened twenty cases of fossil and mineral specimens, which a crowd pressed around the podium to see. The Bureau of Longitude Studies asked for a copy of his astronomic facts; the observatory requested his barometric measurements. He was invited to dinner by Chateaubriand and Madame de Staél and admitted to the elite Society of Arcueil, a scientific salon whose members included Laplace, Berthollet and Gay-Lussac. In Britain, his work was read by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker. Charles Darwin learnt large parts of his findings by heart.

As Humboldt walked around a cactus or stuck his thermometer into the Amazon, his own curiosity must have been guided by a sense of others' interests, and bolstered by it in the inevitable moments when lethargy or sickness threatened. It was fortunate for him that almost every existing fact about South America was wrong or questionable. When he sailed into Havana in November 1800, he discovered that even this most important strategic base for the Spanish Navy had not been placed correctly on the map. He unpacked his measuring instruments and worked out the correct geographical latitude. A grateful Spanish admiral invited him to dinner.

6.

Sitting in a café on the Plaza Provincia, I acknowledged the impossibility of new factual discoveries. My guidebook enforced the point with a lecture:

The neoclassical facade of the Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande is by Sabatini, but the building itself a circular edifice with six radial chapels and a large dome 33 metres j 10$ feet wide, is by Francisco Cabezas.

Anything I learnt would have to be justified by private benefit rather than by the interest of others. My discoveries would have to enliven me; they would have in some way to prove ‘life-enhancing'.

The term was Nietzsche's. In the autumn of 1873, Friedrich Nietzsche composed an essay in which he distinguished between collecting facts like an explorer or academic and using already well known facts to the end of inner, psychological enrichment. Unusually for a university professor, he denigrated the former activity and praised the latter. Entitling his essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', Nietzsche began with the extraordinary assertion that collecting facts in a quasi-scientific way was a sterile pursuit. The real challenge, he suggested, was to use facts to enhance ‘life'. He quoted a sentence from Goethe: ‘I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity'

What would it mean to seek knowledge ‘for life' in one's travels? Nietzsche offered suggestions. He imagined a person who, depressed about the state of German culture and the lack of any attempt being undertaken to improve it, went to an Italian city—Siena or Florence, say—and there discovered that the phenomenon broadly known as the Italian Renaissance had in fact been the work of only a few individuals, who with luck, perseverance and the right patrons had been able to shift the mood and values of a whole society. This tourist would learn to seek in other cultures ‘that which in the past was able to expand the concept “man” and make it more beautiful', thus joining the ranks of those ‘who, gaining strength through reflecting on past greatness, are inspired by the feeling that the life of man is a glorious thing.'

Nietzsche also proposed a second kind of tourism, whereby we may learn how our societies and identities have been formed by the past and so acquire a sense of continuity and belonging. The person practising this kind of tourism ‘looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city'. He can gaze at old buildings and feel ‘the happiness of knowing that he is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that his existence is thus excused and indeed justified'.

To follow the Nietzschean line, the point of looking at an old building may be nothing more but then again nothing less than recognising that ‘architectural styles are more flexible than they seem, as are the uses for which buildings are made'. We might look at the Palacio de Santa Cruz, for example {‘Constructed between 162g and 164], this building is one of the jewels of Habsburg architecture'), and think, ‘If it was possible then, why not something similar now?'

Instead of bringing back sixteen thousand new plant species, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.

7.

There was another problem: the explorers who had come before and discovered facts had at the same time laid down distinctions between what was significant and what was not—distinctions that had, over time, hardened into almost immutable truths about where value lay in Madrid. The Plaza de la Villa had one star, the Palacio Real two stars, the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales three stars, and the Plaza de Oriente no stars at all.

Such distinctions were not necessarily false, but their effect was pernicious. Where guidebooks praised a site, they pressured a visitor to match their authoritative enthusiasm, and where they were silent, pleasure or interest seemed unwarranted. Long before entering the three-star Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, I knew the official enthusiasm that my own response would have to accord with: “The most beautiful convent in Spain. A grand staircase decorated with frescoes leads to the upper cloister gallery, where each of the chapels is more sumptuous than its predecessor. ‘ The guidebook might have added, ‘and where there must be something wrong with the traveller who cannot agree'.

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.