1.
In the springtime, I was invited to Madrid to attend a three-day conference which was scheduled to end on a Friday afternoon. Because I had never visited the city before and had been told of its attractions (which were apparently not limited to museums) on several occasions, I decided to extend my stay by a few days. My hosts had booked a room for me in a hotel on a wide, treelined avenue in the south-eastern part of the city. It overlooked a courtyard, in which a short man with a resemblance to Philip II occasionally stood and smoked a cigarette while tapping his foot on the steel door of what I supposed to be 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 half-hearted hospitality from which neither side would benefit. But the decision also meant that I had to go without dinner, for I realized on walking back to the hotel that I was too shy to venture alone into any of the neighbourhood restaurants, 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 mini-bar 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 plasticcoated curtains and traffic could be heard along the avenue. On the desk lay several magazines offered by the hotel with information on 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, made up of monuments, churches, museums, fountains, plazas and shopping streets. And yet these elements, about which I had heard so much and which I knew I was privileged to see, merely provoked in me a combination of listlessness and self-disgust at the contrast between my own indolence and what I imagined to be 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 Coruña, bound for a voyage of exploration of the South American continent.
'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 he had mastered the art of classifying plant and animal species. Since finishing his studies, Humboldt had been looking for opportunities to travel to somewhere remote and unknown. Plans to go to Egypt and Mecca had fallen through at the last moment, but in the spring of 1799, he had had the good fortune to meet King Carlos 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 Fourney 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 Coruña: Vespucci and Bougainville had travelled around the shores of the continent, La Condamine and Bouguer had surveyed the streams and mountains of the Amazon and of Peru-but there were still no accurate maps and little information on geology, botany and the life of indigenous people. Humboldt transformed the state of knowledge. He travelled 15,000 kilometres around the northern coastlines and interior and, on the way, collected 1,600 plants and identified 600 new species. He redrew the map of South America based on readings from accurate chronometers and sextants. He researched the earth's magnetism, and was the first man to discover that magnetic intensity declines the further one is from the poles. He gave the first account of the rubber and cinchona trees. He mapped the streams connecting the Orinoco and the Rio 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 salinity of the water in the Pacific and Atlantic and conceived of the idea of sea currents, recognizing that the temperature of the sea owes 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, and summarized the areas of his extraordinary curiosity: '1. 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, language and 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 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 in the sheets, exclaimed with theatrical alarm, 'ìHolà! 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 20,000. 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 16th 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 17th 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—88) 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 I was to do here, what I was to think.
4.
Humboldt had not been 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 sea water every two hours from Spain to the ship's destination, Cumaná, 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 a net he had hung from the stern. And once he landed in Venezuela, he threw himself into study of the vegetation around Cumaná. The hills of calcareous rock on which the town stood were dotted with cacti and opunda, their trunks branching out like candelabras coated with lichen. One afternoon, Humboldt measured a cactus (Tuna macho) and noted its circumference. It was 1.54 metres. He spent three weeks measuring many more plants on the coast, then ventured inland into the jungle-covered New Andalusia mountains. He took with him a mule bearing a trunk containing a sextant, a dipping needle, an instrument to calibrate magnetic variation, a thermometer and Saussure's hygrometer, which measured humidity and was made of hair and whalebone. He put the instruments 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 climbs like a liana to a height of 8 to 10 feet, forming garlands that cross our path and swing 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 stand by a spring whose water is known by the Indians to be fresh and healthy. We found the water delicious. Its temperature was only 22.5C while the air was 28.7C.'
5.
But in Madrid everything was already known, everything had already been measured. The northern side of the Plaza Mayor was 101 metres and 52 centimetres long. It was built by Juan Gómez de Mora in 1619. The temperature was 18.5 centigrade, the wind was from the west. The equestrian statue of Philip III in the middle of the Plaza Mayor was 5 metres and 43 centimetres high and had been crafted by Giambologua and Pietro Tacca. The guidebook occasionally seemed impatient in presenting its facts. It sent me to the Pontificia de San Miguel, a grey building designed to repel the casual glances of passers-by, and declared:
The basilica by Bonavia is one of the rare Spanish churches to have been inspired by 18C Italian Baroque. Its convex façade 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. Measuring the dimensions of the north face of the Plaza Mayor will prove useful to architects and students of the work of Juan Gómez de Mora. Knowledge of the barometric pressure on an April day in central Madrid will be useful to meteorologists. Humboldt's discovery that the circumference of the Cumanán 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 fêted by interested parties. Six weeks after arriving in Paris, he read his first travel report before a packed audience at the Institut National. He informed them of the sea temperature on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of South America and of the fifteen different species of monkey in the jungles. He opened twenty cases of fossil and mineral specimens and many pressed around the podium to see them. The Bureau of Longitude Studies asked for a copy of his astronomic facts, the Observatory for his barometric measurements. He was invited to dinner by Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël and admitted to the élite 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 in the Amazon, his own curiosity must have been guided by a sense of others' interestsand 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 neo-classical façade 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 33m/108ft 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 'lifeenhancing'.
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 for the sake 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 quasiscientific way was a sterile pursuit. The real challenge 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' from one's travels? Nietzsche offered suggestions. He imagined a person depressed about the state of German culture and the lack of any attempt to improve it, going to an Italian city, Siena or Florence, and there discovering that the phenomenon broadly known as 'the Italian Renaissance' had in fact been the work of only a few inpiduals 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'. 'Again and again there awaken some who, gaining strength through reflecting on past greatness, are inspired by the feeling that the life of man is a glorious thing.'
Nietzsche suggested 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 inpidual 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 one is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that one's existence is thus excused and, indeed, justified'.
To follow the Nietzschean line, the point of looking at an old building might be nothing more, but then again nothing less, than recognizing 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 ('constructed between 1629 and 1643, 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 1,600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfêted 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 which 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.
The distinctions were not necessarily false, but their effect was pernicious. Where guidebooks praised a site, they pressured a visitor to match their authoritative enthusiasm, 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 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 had crossed the regions through which he travelled and their 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 had the freedom to think that everything, or perhaps nothing, would be interesting. The needle of his curiosity followed its own magnetic north and, unsurprisingly to 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 matted with liana and surrounded by gardens.
I tried to imagine an uninhibited guide to Madrid, how I might have ranked its sights according to a subjective hierarchy of interest. I had three-star levels of interest in the under-representation of vegetables in the Spanish diet (at the last proper meal I had eaten, only a few limp, bleached and apparently tinned asparagus had appeared between a succession of meat dishes) and in the long and noble-sounding surnames of ordinary citizens (the assistant in charge of organizing the conference had owned a train of surnames connected by de and la, an appellation which suggested an ancestral castle, faithful servants, an old well and a coat of arms, and contrasted 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 male feet and in the attitude towards modern architecture evident in many newer districts of the city: specifically the way it appeared to be less important that a building was attractive than that it was obviously modern, even if this meant giving something a vile bronze façade (as though modernity were a longed-for good that one needed in extra-strong doses to compensate for an earlier lack). All of these 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 spun by the unexpectedly powerful forcefield of a small green object by the name of The Michelin Streetguide 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 800 to 1,000 feet deep, huge masses of rocks projecting from it.' Despite the danger, Humboldt found time to spot 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 … '