On the Sublime

Long partial to deserts, drawn to photographs of the American West (bits of tumbleweed blowing across a wasteland) and the names of the great deserts (Mojave, Kalahari, Taklamakan, Gobi), I booked a charter flight to the Israeli resort of Eilat and went to wander in the Sinai. On the plane journey over, I talked to a young Australian woman beside me, who was taking up a job as a lifeguard at the Eilat Hilton, and I read Pascal:

When I consider...the small space I occupy which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me [l’infinie immensité des espaces que j’ignore et qui m’ignorent], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here?

- Pascal, Pensées, 68

Wordsworth urged us to travel through landscapes in order to feel emotions that may benefit our souls. I set out for the desert so as to be made to feel small. It is usually unpleasant to be made to feel small, whether by doormen in hotels or by comparison with heroes of great achievement. But there may be another and more satisfying way for a person to feel diminished. Intimations of this may be felt by any viewer who stands in front of Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak (1863) by Albert Bierstadt, An Avalanche in the Alps (1803) by Philip James de Loutherbourg or Chalk Cliffs on Rugen by Caspar David Friedrich. What do such barren, overwhelming spaces do for us?

Two days into my Sinai trip, the group of twelve that I have joined reaches a valley empty of life, without trees, grass, water or animals. Only boulders lie strewn across its sandstone floor, as though the stamping of a petulant giant had caused them to roll off the sides of the surrounding mountains. These mountains look like naked Alps, their nudity revealing geological origins normally concealed beneath coats of earth and pine forest. There are gashes and fissures that speak of the pressures of millennia, offering up cross sections through disproportionate expanses of time. The Earth’s tectonic plates have rippled granite as though it were linen. The mountains spread out in seeming infinity over the horizon until eventually the high plateau of the southern Sinai gives way to a featureless, baking gravel pan to which the Bedouins have given the name El Tih, or ‘the Desert of the Wandering’.

There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence by means of which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, night skies and deserts. In their presence one was likely to experience, and count on being understood if one reported that one had felt, a sense of the sublime.

The word itself had originated around 200 AD., in a treatise ‘On the Sublime’ ascribed to the Greek author Longinus, but it had languished until a retranslation of the essay into English in 1712 sparked a renewed, intense interest among critics. While these writers often differed in their specific analyses of the word, their shared assumptions were striking. They grouped into a single category, by virtue of their size, emptiness or danger, a variety of hitherto unconnected landscapes, and argued that such places provoked an identifiable feeling that was both pleasurable and morally good. The value of landscapes would henceforth be decided not solely on the basis of formal aesthetic criteria (the harmony of colours, for example, or the arrangement of lines) or even economic or practical concerns, but rather according to the power of places to arouse the mind to sublimity.

Joseph Addison, in his ‘Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination’, wrote of the ‘delightful stillness and amazement’ he felt before ‘the prospects of an open champian country, a vast uncultivated desert, huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices and a wide expanse of waters’. Hildebrand Jacob, in an essay entitled ‘How the Mind Is Raised by the Sublime’, offered a list of the places and things that were most likely to invoke this prized feeling: oceans, either in calm or storm, the setting sun, precipices, caverns and Swiss mountains.

Travellers set off to investigate. In 1739, the poet Thomas Gray undertook a walking tour of the Alps, the first of many such self-conscious pursuits of the sublime, and afterwards reported, ‘In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry.’

The southern Sinai at dawn. What, then, is this feeling? It is generated by a valley created four hundred million years ago, by a granite mountain 2,300 meters high and by the erosion of millennia marked on the walls of a succession of steep canyons. Beside all these, man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter—pleasurable; intoxicating, even—with human weakness in the face of the strength, age and size of the universe.

In my backpack, I am carrying a torch, a sun hat and Edmund Burke. At the age of twenty-four, after giving up his legal studies in London, Burke composed A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was categorical: sublimity had to do with a feeling of weakness. Many landscapes were beautiful—meadows in spring, soft valleys, oak trees, banks of flowers (daisies especially)—but they were not sublime. ‘The ideas of the sublime and beautiful are frequently confounded,’ he complained. ‘Both are indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing and sometimes of natures directly opposite’—a trace of irritation on the part of the young philosopher with those who might have gasped at the Thames from Kew and called that sublime. A landscape could arouse the sublime only when it suggested power—a power greater than that of humans, and threatening to them. Sublime places embodied a defiance to man’s will. Burke illustrated his argument with an analogy about oxen and bulls: ‘An ox is a creature of vast strength; but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and not at all dangerous for which reason the idea of an ox is by no means grand. A bull is strong too; but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive....The idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons.’

There were oxlike landscapes, innocent and ‘not all dangerous’, pliable to human will; Burke had spent his youth in one such, at a quaker boarding school in the village of Ballitore in County Kildare, thirty miles southwest of Dublin: a landscape of farms, orchards, hedges, rivers and gardens. Then there were bull-like landscapes. The essayist enumerated their qualities: they were vast, empty, often dark and apparently infinite because of the uniformity and succession of their elements. The Sinai was among them.

But why the pleasure? Why seek out this feeling of smallness—delight in it, even? Why leave the comforts of Eilat, join a group of desert devotees and walk for miles with a heavy pack along the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, all to reach a place of rocks and silence where one must shelter from the sun like a fugitive in the scant shadow of giant boulders? Why contemplate with exhilaration rather than despair beds of granite and baking gravel pans and a frozen lava of mountains extending into the distance until the peaks dissolve at the edge of a hard blue sky?
One answer is that not everything that is more powerful than us must always be hateful to us. What defies our will can provoke anger and resentment, but it may also arouse awe and respect. It depends on whether the obstacle appears noble in its defiance or squalid and insolent. We begrudge the defiance of the cocky doorman even as we honour that of the mist-shrouded mountain. We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean but awed by what is powerful and noble. To return to and extend Burke’s animal analogy, a bull may arouse a feeling of the sublime, whereas a piranha cannot. It seems a matter of motives: we interpret the piranha’s power as being vicious and predatory, and the bull’s as guileless and impersonal.

Even when we are not in deserts, the behaviour of others and our own flaws are prone to leave us feeling small. Humiliation is a perpetual risk in the world of men. It is not unusual for our will to be defied and our wishes frustrated. Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities. The sense of awe may even shade into a desire to worship.

Because what is mightier than man has traditionally been called God, it does not seem unusual to start thinking of a deity in the Sinai. The mountains and valleys spontaneously suggest that the planet was built by something other than our own hands, by a force greater than we could gather, long before we were born, and set to continue long after our extinction (something we may forget when there are flowers and fast-food restaurants by the roadside).

God is said to have spent much time in the Sinai, most notably two years in the central region, looking after a group of irascible Israelites who complained about the lack of food and had a weakness for foreign gods. ‘The Lord came from Sinai,’ said Moses shortly before his death (Deuteronomy 33:2). ‘And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly,’ we are told by Exodus (19:18). ‘And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed and stood afar off. And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you...’ (Exodus 20:18—19).

But biblical history serves only to reinforce an impression that would have occurred anyway to a traveller encamped in the Sinai: an impression that some intentional being must have had a hand in this, something greater than man and with an intelligence that mere ‘nature’ does not possess—a ‘something’ for which the word God still seems, even to the secular mind, a far from unlikely appellation. The knowledge that natural rather than supernatural forces can also create beauty and an impression of power seems peculiarly ineffective when one stands before a sandstone valley rising towards what appears to be a giant altar, above which hangs a slender crescent moon.

Early writers on the sublime repeatedly connected sublime landscapes with religion:

• Joseph Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712): ‘A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.’

• Thomas Gray, Letters (1739): ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument.’

• Thomas Cole, ‘Essay on American Scenery’ (1835): ‘Amid those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, the associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.’

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’ (1836): ‘The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.’

It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside. The landscapes offered them an emotional connection to a greater power even as they freed them of the need to subscribe to the more specific and now less plausible claims of biblical texts and organized religions.

The link between God and sublime landscapes is made most explicit in one book of the Bible. The circumstances are peculiar: God is asked by a righteous but desperate man to explain why his life has become full of suffering. And God answers him by bidding him to contemplate the deserts and the mountains, rivers and ice caps, oceans and skies. Seldom have sublime places been asked to bear the burden of such a weighty, urgent question.

At the beginning of the Book of Job, described by Edmund Burke as the most sublime book of the Old Testament, we learn that Job was a wealthy, devout man from the land of Uz. He had seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys. His wishes were obeyed, and his virtue was rewarded. Then one day disaster struck. The Sabaeans stole Job’s oxen and asses, lightning killed his sheep and the Chaldeans raided his camels. A hurricane blew in from the desert and wrecked the house of his eldest son, killing him and his siblings. Painful sores developed from the soles of Job’s feet to the top of his head, and, as he sat in the ashes of his house, he scratched them with a piece of broken pottery and wept.

Why had Job been so afflicted? His friends had the answer: he had sinned. Bildad the Shuhite told Job that his children could not have been killed by God unless they and Job himself had done wrong. ‘God will not reject a righteous man,’ said Bildad. Zophar the Naamathite ventured that God must have been generous in his treatment of Job: ‘Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.’

But Job could not accept these words. He called them ‘proverbs of ashes’ and ‘defenses of clay’. He had not been a bad man—so why had bad things happened to him?
It is one of the most acute questions asked of God in all the books of the Old Testament. And from a whirlwind in the desert, a furious God answers Job as follows:

Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou has understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?...

By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?

Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder?...

Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?

Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?

Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee?...

Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?

Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings towards the south?

Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?

Asked to explain why Job has been made to suffer even though he has been good, God draws Job’s attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way, he declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way, for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.

There is a strictly religious message here. God assures Job that he has a place in his heart, even if all events do not centre around him and may at times appear to run contrary to his interest. When divine wisdom eludes human understanding, the righteous, made aware of their limitations by the spectacle of sublime nature, must continue to trust in God’s plans for the universe.

But the religious answer to Job’s question does not invalidate the story for secular spirits. Sublime landscapes, through their grandeur and power, retain a symbolic role in bringing us to accept without bitterness or lamentation the obstacles that we cannot overcome and the events that we cannot make sense of. As the Old Testament God knew, it can be helpful to back up deflationary points about mankind with reference to the very elements in nature which physically surpass it—the mountains, the girdle of the earth, the deserts.

If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

- Alain de Botton

Useful Vacations

You’re sitting in an outdoor cafe in the Piazza della Serenissima in one of those stone Tuscan hill towns, and you’ve just finished 20 minutes of rapture while touring a gemlike little basilica far off the normal tourist paths. You’ve pulled a few iron tables together to accommodate the urbane couples you met inside, and as you sip drinks that back home would qualify as cough syrup, you begin trading vacation stories. Somebody mentions a recent journey to the Göreme Valley of central Turkey and the glories of the caves the Hittites carved into the volcanic mud-ash, when suddenly a gentleman wearing a shirt with an enormous number of pockets leans back and interjects, “Ah, yes. But the whole Cappadocia region has just been ruined by all the tourists.”

After a few minutes someone else at the table relates some fascinating bits she learned from the tour guides while on an eco tour of southern Belize. “It really hasn’t been the same since electrification,” the man with all the pockets laments. You have come face to face with a travel snob. There are a certain number of sophisticated travelers who wear their past destinations like little merit badges. Their main joy in life comes from dropping whopping hints that everywhere you are just going they went to long ago when it still meant something. It’s hard to know where such people get the time to go all these places, unless some evil philanthropist pays them to go around the world making other travelers feel inferior about their cultural repertoire. They are masters of the insufferable question. “Didn’t the Atabeg of Damascus stop there in 1139?” one of them will ask at the mention of a certain faraway oasis before peering around the table with a hopeful expression, as if everybody else were going to jump in to confirm that little bit of data. They seem to spend their evenings boning up on obscure ethnic groups: “The Mobabi tribe once fished there, I believe, until the Contutis pushed them further upriver.” And needless to say, they merge with that other atrocious population segment, language snobs: “I suppose you can get by with a little Chinook?” They don’t say, “I know” such-and-such a language. They’ll say, “I have a little Portuguese” or “I have a few of the romance languages, of course,” in that faux offhand manner that makes you want to stick the person’s head in a vise and squeeze it until the eyes pop out.

Unfortunately, few people act on this noble impulse, even though they know that when such a person appears, the Vietnam syndrome is not far behind. This is the psychosis that causes people to steer all their conversations to a single destination: their life-altering trip to Vietnam.

The travel braggart begins slowly. Just a few sly hints about his vast cultural capital. Then as the conversation goes along, he gets a little more voluble. He is biding his time, sucking you in. There will be a ray of hope when someone else in the group starts talking about Mount Everest. Ah, he’s been Tibetted, you’ll think. Surely he can’t be so smug around someone who’s been to Tibet. But, of course, he was doing Tibet before Into Thin Air.

And then it begins. He’s describing his journey up the Ho Chi Minh Trail or the rail trip from Hue on the crowded non-air-conditioned train. He starts describing all the odd glories of North Vietnam, the aroma of camphor, the flurry of bicycles. Suddenly you realize you are in a quagmire. There will be much suffering. There is no way now to withdraw from the conversation with honor.

“I never knew that feeding geese could be such a spiritual experience,” he will be saying while passing around photos of himself standing with a group of locals amidst the rice paddies near My Lai (he’s the one in the sunglasses). He’ll be describing a former VC whose oxcart he rode on up the Red River Valley. In his stories he always depicts himself as a masterful Dr. Livingstone, but you know that when he walked into a village, the locals saw him as this big flapping wallet with dollar bills flying out. If this person were suddenly found dead with a dozen butter knives up his nose, it would be like an Agatha Christie novel; everyone would have a motive.

I suspect that what keeps us from finishing off the travel braggart is that none of us is pure. All of us in the educated class are travel snobs to some degree. It’s just that while we are snobs toward the hordes of fat tourists who pile out of vast buses and into Notre Dame, he is snobbish toward us. He’s just a bit higher on the ladder of sophisticated travel.

The code of utilitarian pleasure means we have to evaluate our vacation time by what we accomplished what did we learn, what spiritual or emotional breakthroughs were achieved, what new sensations were experienced? And the only way we can award ourselves points is by seeking out the unfamiliar sights, cultivating above-average pleasures. Therefore, Bobos go to incredible lengths to distinguish themselves from passive, nonin dustrious tourists who pile in and out of tour buses at the old warhorse sights. Since the tourists carry cameras, Bobo travelers are embarrassed to. Since tourists sit around the most famous squares, Bobo travelers spend enormous amounts of time at obscure ones watching non- tourist-oriented pastimes, which usually involve a bunch of old men rolling metal balls.

Since tourists try to move quickly from sight to sight, the hard-working traveler selects the slowest possible means of transportation. Bobo travelers tour the Loire Valley by barge, looking down on the packs who zip through in cars. They cruise through New Zealand by bike, dismissive of those who take the train. They paddle through Costa Rica on a raft, feeling superior to those who jet past on airplanes. If tourists seem to be flocking to one sight, Bobos will make sure they are at another. “While most tourists in Tanzania go to Serengeti National Park to see the wildlife, the Selous Game Reserve is bigger and less disturbed,” writes Natural History magazine editor Bruce Stuts in fine cultivated-traveler mode. It doesn’t even matter if the Selous Game Reserve has less to see than the Serengeti. The pleasure the Bobo traveler derives from doing the more industrious thing more than compensates.

Lewis and Clark didn’t return from their trip and say, “Well, we didn’t find the Northwest Passage, but we did find ourselves.” But that is the spirit of Bobo travel. Our travel dollars are investments in our own human capital. We don’t just want to see famous sights; we want to pierce into other cultures. We want to try on other lives.

But not just any other lives. If you observe Bobo travel patterns and travel literature, you will detect a distinct set of preferences. The Bobo, as always, is looking for stillness, for a place where people set down roots and repeat the simple rituals. In other words, Bobo travelers are generally looking to get away from their affluent, ascending selves into a spiritually superior world, a world that hasn’t been influenced much by the global meritocracy. Bobos tend to relish People Who Really Know How to Live-people who make folk crafts, tell folk tales, do folk dances, listen to folk music—the whole indigenous people/noble savage/tranquil craftsman repertoire.

Therefore, Bobos are suckers for darkly garbed peasants, aged farmers, hardy fishermen, remote craftsmen, weather-beaten pensioners heavyset regional cooks— anybody who is likely to have never possessed or heard of frequent flier miles. So the Bobos flock to or read about the various folk locales where such “simple” people live in abundant hills of Provence, Tuscany, Greece, or the hamlets of the Andes or Nepal. These are places where the natives don’t have credit card debts and relatively few people wear Michael Jordan T-shirts. Lives therefore seem connected to ancient patterns and age-old wisdom. Next to us, these natives seem serene. They are poorer people whose lives seem richer than our own.

The small things—an olive grove or a small chapel take on greater meaning to a Bobo on vacation. Ideally, Bobo travelers want to spend a part of each day just savoring. They’ll idle away at a trattoria so far removed from the crush of events that the natives don’t even feel compelled to have an opinion about Bill Gates. They will swoon over some creamy polenta or a tangy turtle soup and even educate their palate with some dish that prominently features bone marrow. They will top off their coffee cup with cream squeezed straight from the cow and enjoy the sturdy obesity of the peasant woman in the kitchen, the picturesque paint peeling off the walls, the smiles of the other diners who seem to be welcoming them into their culture.

The pace of life is so delicious in such places. But the lease on the vacation rental only goes for two weeks, so Bobo travelers had better do their spiritual development quickly. Most Bobos come up with a few serendipity techniques that will allow them access to a few moments of authentic peasant living. Hovering on the edges of local weddings often works. Exaggerating their genealogical connection to the place while conversing with the locals is another winning tactic: “Actually my grandmother’s second husband came from Portugal.” If done correctly, these techniques can allow the Bobo pilgrim to have 6 unforgettable moments a morning, 2 rapturous experiences over lunch, 1.5 profound insights in the afternoon (on average), and .667 life-altering epiphanies after each sunset.

- David Brooks

Curiosity - Travel

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.’

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, I Humboldt washed his feet, had a short siesta and almost immediately began writing his ‘Essai sur Ia 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 (Wintera, 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.

Humbolt’s excitement testifies to the importance of having the right question to ask of the world. It may mean the differencebetween swatting at a fly in irritation and running down a mountain to begin work on an ‘Essai sur la geographic 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 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 Capilla 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 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.

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.

- Alain de Botton

a sign in holland

On disembarking at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport, I am struck, only, a few steps inside the terminal, by the appearance of a sign hanging from the ceiling, which announces the way to the arrivals hall, the exit and the transfer desks. It is a bright-yellow sign, one meter high and two meters across, simple in design, a plastic fascia in an illuminated aluminum box suspended on steel struts from a ceiling webbed with cables and air-conditioning ducts. Despite its simplicity, even its mundanity, the sign delights me, a delight for which the adjective exotic, though unusual, seems apt. The exoticism is located in particular areas: in the double a of Aankomst, in the neighborliness of the u and the i in Uitgang, in the use of English subtitles, in the word for ‘desk’, balies, and in the choice of practical, modernist fonts, Frutiger or Univers.

If the sign provokes in me genuine pleasure, it is in part because it offers the first conclusive evidence of my having arrived elsewhere. It is a symbol of being abroad. Although it may not seem distinctive to the casual eye, such a sign would never exist in precisely this form in my own country There it would be less yellow, the typeface would be softer and more nostalgic, there would—out of greater indifference to the confusion of foreigners—be no subtitles, and the language would contain no double as, a repetition in which I sense, confusedly, the presence of another history and mind-set.

A plug socket, a bathroom tap, a jam jar or an airport sign may tell us more than its designer intended; it may speak of the nation that made it. And the nation that made the sign at Schipol Airport seems very far from my own. A bold archaeologist of national character might trace the influence of the lettering back to the de Stiji movement of the early twentieth century, the prominence of the English subtitles to the Dutch openness towards foreign influences and the foundation of the East India Company in 1602, and the overall simplicity of the sign to the Calvinist aesthetic that became a part of Holland’s identity during the war between the United Provinces and Spain in the sixteenth century.

That a sign could evolve so differently in two places is evidence of a simple but pleasing idea: countries are diverse, and practices variable across borders. Yet difference alone would not be enough to elicit pleasure, or not for long. The difference has to seem like an improvement on what my own country is capable of. If I call the Schipol sign exotic, it is because it succeeds in suggesting, vaguely but intensely, that the country that made it and that lies beyond the uitgang may in critical ways prove more congenial than my own to my temperament and concerns. The sign is a promise of happiness.

- Alain de Botton