Richard Holmes – The Age of Wonder

Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder takes us into the period between about 1760 and 1830, a time of rapid change in the sciences – and indeed everywhere else. In literary and philosophical matters, we saw the rise of Romanticism, a counterforce to the stodgy orderliness of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason and humanity’s perfectibility. Romanticism, against that backdrop, emphasized a rather more complex view of human nature and the world, one full of the interplay between light and dark, reason and unreason, and chaos and order, where nothing was ever quite completed and put away neatly. It also, in poetry, in particular, brought attention to the importance of personal, subjective experience in a way that had never really been the case before. It is hard for us now to appreciate just how revolutionary Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were when it was first published in 1798.

In others of his books that I have read on this blog, Holmes has dealt with the heroes and heroines of British Romanticism – the likes of Keats, Shelley, and Byron. In the Age of Wonder, he puts forward a Romantic science, to go alongside literary Romanticism. Both science and art, he argues, are linked by a feeling of wonder. Romantic science and its popularizes took Romantic ideas of genius and work, that “ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery”, and used it to shape the myths it told about its famous figures – astronomers, explorers of continents and the contents of test tubes.

One of Holmes’ many achievements in the book is to draw together science and arts once more, to demonstrate to a new set of readers that the two cultures set out in C. P. Snow’s famous lecture of the same name need not be divided but ought instead to be harmonious. Coleridge and Humphry Davy inhaled laughing gas together, after all. But beyond simply making use of the material facts, it is Holmes’ particular artistic talent which serves this end. Holmes makes science exciting – to a non-scientist such as myself – by infusing it with flesh and blood. The Age of Wonder is the fruit of countless years of research. It takes figures from the past and brings them into immediacy so that their discoveries seem to matter, not just for us, whose world is based upon the past, but for their contemporaries. We see just how revolutionary, for example, Davy’s safety lamp for mining was, because Holmes recreates the world of the miner – ugly, dirty, brutish, and short.

We meet a cast of characters ranging from Joseph Banks, who in his youth was an explorer and botanist and who later came to lead the Royal Society (Britain’s great academy for the sciences) for over forty years, to William Herschel and his sister Caroline, Germans from Hanover who after emigrating to England came to revolutionize our understanding of the stars. Although the focus is on British science, Holmes gives us a sense of how European science was at the time, highlighting the connections between figures like Lichtenberg and Humboldt in the German lands, Linnaeus further North, and various French scientists, with their British counterparts.

At the same time, Holmes shows an increasing politicisation of science that is now somewhat familiar. Much of the book takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, and although these wars were punctuated by years of peace, relations between France and Britain were not always cordial. British scientists were often awarded prizes in France which they were kindly advised not to collect. The technology of hot air balloons, which to us now seems so innocent, once was a source of great anxiety, as it was feared that the French could use it to send an entire army across the Channel to catch the British by surprise. 

Perhaps this is most obvious in the case of Mungo Park. He was an explorer from Scotland who took two journeys in West Africa around the turn of the century. The first time he travelled almost on his own, a kind of proto-backpacker, relying on the kindness of the locals he met to see him safely home. The result of this was kidnap and torture, and his papers only survived because they were stored safely in his hat. Still, rather surprisingly, Park made it out of Africa and told his tale. He returned to country life in Scotland but grew restless. He declared he “would rather brave Africa and all its horrors” than stay in these “lonely heaths and gloomy hills”. He organized another expedition, but this time his financial backing came from the Colonial Office. Instead of a one-man jaunt, he led nearly a hundred soldiers. As happened all too often, a few cheery letters arrived from the coast and then rumour ended up being all was left of Park. Captain Cook, whose arrival at Tahiti begins The Age of Wonder, also died after peaceful methods of engaging with natives were replaced by a more aggressive, violent, and indeed imperial approach.

Holmes’ telling of Park’s story is gripping. It wouldn’t look out of place next to Lytton Strachey’s tale of General Gordon in Eminent Victorians. Of course, that is why Holmes’ book is so effective. This is less a work of history than a group biography, “a relay race of scientific stories,” that “link together to explore a larger historical narrative”. Through these stories – of balloonists and astronomers, physicians, and inventors – we have a sense of history passing.

Though there are dates, this is not history as a cascade of facts. We see time passing through the ageing and decline of a cast of characters. Joseph Banks goes from a spry young man to a gout-ridden old one, Davy suffers a stroke and a rapid decline. Almost without noticing it, we realise that one cast of characters has, by the book’s end, been shifted out for another. William and Caroline Herschel have been replaced by their son John, Charles Babbage has come onto the scene, and Michael Faraday has begun to eclipse his mentor Davy. With them, Holmes stops.

Though we wish he could continue forever, his endpoint is not an arbitrary one. Science and artistic Romanticism could coexist for a good reason. Wonder was the natural feeling of these scientists because they could more or less maintain Christian belief as they worked. Their discoveries seemed to reveal God’s greatness – the watchmaker analogy suggested by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity – more than they did His absence. There was not as yet a pronounced sense that science was undermining God.

But by the end of The Age of Wonder, this is much less true. Materialism, founded on a sense of deep time and deep space, begins chipping away at the old certainties. And when the book finally ends with Charles Darwin setting off in 1831 towards the discoveries that would make his name, we have a sense almost of apprehension. Gone are the days when a man like Davy could write bad poetry and play with gases, or Novalis could journey into the depths of the earth to look at rocks before writing poetry that actually works. The armies have been drawn up – the artists, retaining their romantic ethos; and the scientists, retaining their commitment to truth. To this day, there are too few connections between them.

Holmes’ work is itself a source of wonder. And for that, it already serves to begin building bridges between science and the arts. To restore the sense of wonder at science is essential to rekindling our present interest in it. The facts are never as important as we may claim they are, at least when we ourselves are not donning lab coats. An artistic approach, that teaches us to see in a new way by recreating the past and the excitement of its questions and problems, is what is truly necessary to make us more rounded readers and beings in the world. And that is exactly what The Age of Wonder provides.

More Holmes can be found here and here.

Cormac McCarthy – The Crossing

The world that Cormac McCarthy creates in The Crossing is one that we can conceive but are grateful not to inhabit. Its keynotes are death, violence, and injustice. The story of Billy Parham and his journey through Mexico, first with a wounded wolf and then with his brother, is one of such desperate bleakness that even reading it is a challenge. There is such failure that we are left asking what the point of all the suffering Billy experiences is. But McCarthy’s language lifts us and his work’s world into something mythic and timeless so that against the darkness there is also a corresponding array of powerful sources of ways to make sense of the world. The fundamental tension of the work lies between these meaning making methods and the world that they attempt to make meaning for. For this is a terrible place, and it does not let itself be redeemed lightly.

The first part of the Crossing is really a novella in itself. Billy Parham and his father attempt to track down a pregnant wolf which has crossed into their land in New Mexico. When Billy catches the wolf, though, he decides to take her back to her home in the mountains across the border rather than kill her. And so, he abandons his family and goes with the limping wolf down to the south, where she is confiscated by the local authorities as “contraband” and then put into a fair.

Billy’s reasons for saving the wolf are murky at best. He is not a talkative person. At one point he says “I’m goin to take her down there and turn her loose”; at several others the narrator reports him saying “that the wolf had been entrusted to his care but that it was not his wolf and he could not sell it”. A strange and even rather modern sense of environmental stewardship animates him, of returning some order to nature which we are responsible for damaging.

This is Billy’s meaning, in this first part of the book – to save the wolf, to set things right. But it does not work. The truth and justice he feels in his soul remain there only. He finds at the fair a stand reflecting little the reality he knows: “they’d rigged a makeshift tent of sheeting over the little tumbril of a cart and they’d put up a sign at the front that gave her history and the number of people she was known to have eaten”. Later on, she is taken to an estate and there she is set upon by dogs for the pleasure of a great mass of onlookers.

It is at this point that Billy steps into the ring to protect her, but the young man in control of the estate stops him and tells him a different story of the wolf to Billy’s own because he is powerful and Billy is not. Billy’s truth is obliterated and with it his power to save the wolf from death: “he looked like a man standing on a scaffold seeking in the crowd some likeness to his own heart.”

Billy manages to bury the wolf’s bones. But as for his mission, it is a failure. When he returns home after his doomed enterprise, he finds an empty house covered in bloodstains. His parents have been murdered, the horses stolen, perhaps in an act of revenge for Billy’s transgression south of the border, perhaps for a moment of kindness earlier in the book. In any case, he reunites with his younger brother, Boyd, who had hidden, and together they go south once more, in an attempt to set things right and recover the horses. The Crossing then follows their journey, with its failures and disappointments, to its inevitably grim conclusion.

A journey itself is a thing that gives structure to a life. It’s a narrative, clear and simple. But the structure it gives is not a thing that stabilises a life – it merely lets us understand it at a glance by seeing its shape. That is one of the truths of the novel. Billy crosses over into Mexico several times throughout The Crossing, but are we to take these as separate journeys or instead as one thing? On the way back home after the death of the wolf, Billy meets some Indians. The elder of them tells him “he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself.” And what is The Crossing if not a story of just such an estrangement, built page by dreadful page?

In the novel’s third part the two brothers encounter a prima donna gypsy they had met earlier. Her words also speak to a truth of journeys, similar to the previous one – namely that journeys are not necessarily a thing that binds people but rather a thing that leaves the distances between them unbridged:

Long voyages often lose themselves.

Mam?

You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travellers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all… You will see. The shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears that shape but only the one. And every voyage begun upon it will be completed. Whether horses are found or not.

McCarthy’s world is a world that is not godless so much as ruled over by the shadow of a cruel god, an Old Testament God perhaps. We have people who seem truly cursed, like Job, to suffer. But there is a God here, or the potential for Him: “God [does not] whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair.” This is God, but no comforting spirit.

Near the end of the book, Billy meets a woman who is praying. He asks her whom she prays for and receives the following answer:

“She said that she only prayed. She said that she left it to God as to how the prayers should be apportioned. She prayed for all. She would pray for him.”

Having read hundreds of pages of The Crossing by this point we may find the woman slightly absurd. What use are prayers, when the world is so full of evil – proper evil, incomprehensible and earth-shattering? But the narrator turns this idea on its head. They ask instead how many tragedies the woman’s prayers might have averted. Perhaps, they suggest, we should instead be grateful to her, and others like her. Without them who knows how much worse the world would be.

This is what I like about McCarthy. He creates a distinctive image of the world, but he also leaves much about its inner nature up for debate. We cannot say whether God is absent here, or merely next-to-powerless. Justice, as with the wolf, is rare, but it does exist. Billy and Boyd have some success in retrieving their horses, no matter their subsequent failures, after all – and not just because they carry their father’s shotgun. Kindness does come, and beauty is all around us. The important thing is that in this world questions concerning its deeper nature do not seem an afterthought but are essential to our very survival.  

Perhaps the most extraordinary, unforgettable scene in The Crossing involves a doctor. He comes to deal with a bullet wound and for page, after page, we are treated to his work, detail by detail. We are there in the dark, watching the operation by the light of flickering candles, like guests in a painting by Rembrandt. And yet there is barely any dialogue, no philosophy. The plot would not suffer if the section were drastically cut. Yet taken as a whole it represents a world beyond violence, of healing and of care. It is a moment of redemption in a sea of pain.

We find ourselves in a world where things matter. Death and violence leave us unable to hide behind such structures as society and its rules when constructing our own meanings. Instead, we have to sort things out for ourselves. Every man and woman in The Crossing is a philosopher. Their religions and philosophies and narratives may be false, but nobody reading the book can doubt that they come from a passionate engagement with the reality of their world. That is why, indeed, McCarthy’s philosophising never gets dull – it is always pertinent because it is never a choice for his characters. Montaigne wrote that “to philosophise is to learn how to die.” Nobody knows this more truly than do the characters of McCarthy’s world, for whom evil and death lurk around every corner.

The Death of the Black Hen

It was lucky I was at my desk or else I wouldn’t have seen them. Two foxes, big ones, and ahead of them flapping, hurtling, racing, mad as a damaged missile – the white hen. By the time I had unbolted the front door, they had had several seconds to continue their attack unimpeded. I was roaring monstrously, but far too slow to deal any damage – the foxes fled before I lay my hands on them. I chased them as far as the tall grass, but then I had to turn back.

The white hen was in the boiler room, buried in a corner with her back to the door. Perhaps she didn’t want to see her end if it was coming. Or perhaps she retained that childish notion that what she could not see, could not see her either. I picked her up and took her to the hen house, locking her in the enclosure. She was hurt, but less badly than I had thought. Her feathers littered the drive, but her attackers had not drawn blood.

I went to find the black hen.

I went through the garden, up and down the drive, and across the front lawn. I found feathers, a lot of them, on the path by the firepit. I found also the little hollow the foxes had made under the wire fence going into the undergrowth. I followed it, and as I advanced something moved ahead of me, retreated still further into the deep green darkness. But I came across a clearing covered in black feathers and I understood that I had come far too late.

Many of the pessimists whom I wrote about last week asked whether life was a good or a bad thing, all considered. One thought experiment they conducted was to ask who would be willing to live their life through again. The answer, they concluded sadly, was few of us. We may have plenty of pleasures and happiness in our time upon the earth, but when we consider the pains – grief, sorrow, illness – we find that they far outweigh the former in intensity, even if in quantity they may be evenly matched.

The girls

Our hens lived good lives. They had a huge area to roam, customers who did not insist on eggs – for neither myself nor my brother actually like them all that much – and food and water and love and warmth. Last year the smaller of the two black hens died of an illness, leaving us with just the big black one and the white one. And now the white one is all alone.

It’s funny the things that a death like this makes you think of. It’s funny really, that it can get to you at all. But I felt guilt, a lot of it, and still do in my way. Earlier that morning I had heard the hens, and I had thought then that it was simply the triumphant clucking of a successful egg-laying operation. But perhaps that had been a cry for help that I had missed.

When a friend visited, he told how all of his hens let him take them in his arms. Ours were much less affectionate. But still, you knew that they loved us. The white hen always let you stroke her if you insisted. And after the small black hen died the big black hen finally let us stroke her too.

More so than a pet, even, you feel a lot of responsibility for something like a hen. A cat or a dog has no real natural predators, at least in restive rural England. We cannot be at fault if an accident occurs because we have done our best. But with hens, it is a different matter. We could never have let them out, to begin with, we could have guarded them more carefully, and so on. Here, responsibility feels more firmly placed upon our shoulders.

Hens have personalities, you come to realise. Secretly, we’re glad that the white one survived because she is bossy boots and a real character. She is always bothering us. She comes and pecks my shins if her food is even a minute late in coming. She is always the most deranged, the wildest, and for all that the most human of the birds we had.

She survived a fox attack earlier in the year too. That was while I was away in Russia. She spent a week living in a little box on the side in the kitchen, and then went back to her business as normal. I am home alone, and boxes in the kitchen are beyond me, but I have brought her food and water, had various discussions and heart-to-hearts with her, and cleaned out her house. I even made her rice, which I was told is a particular delicacy among hens – and she ate the whole pan’s worth.

She limps now, but after a day spent hiding in the hen house, she now comes out into the larger hen run again and hobbles about. She is laying again and already talks. After the attack I was struck by how quiet she was – the only noise she made was terrible, heavy breathing. Understandable, given the circumstances, but so strange to hear coming from her when she is normally so chatty.

All this is to say that I was struck by how human she was. This is an obvious point, but still worth stating. In the relationship you have with these animals in your care they perhaps remain as animals – loved, but not quite fully human. And here the little hen was like a little child.

But the foxes were human too. This was the thing that shook me: the look in their eyes. There was something human about it, but not in any positive sense. We may, from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox or else cute pictures on the internet, assume that all foxes are rascals with hearts of gold. Like wolves, we may secretly admire them. But these two foxes had a look of hatred, human hatred, in their eyes, mixed with what can only be described as bloodlust. They hated me because I had arrived and driven them off and in doing so had deprived them of their kill. And although I am often annoying, never have I seen that look directed at me. Never have I felt the full force of another’s desire to see hurt come to me, never until then. It is not a feeling I’d like to feel again.

The white hen will recover. She is a fighter, after all. When I was talking about the attack with our gardener, she told me a story about another house she had worked on which also had hens and also was the site of a tragedy. In this place, the hens, about twenty of them, roamed on a field with a pond in the middle. They were rescue hens, taken from battery farms – jittery, nervous, and undersized creatures who have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. But one day two foxes got into their field too, and it was a massacre. Every single hen was slaughtered, all but one. As the others were being ripped and torn apart, she had gone to the pond and flown in. She had gone against her nature out of an instinct for survival that even the battery farms had not extinguished. In a way, it’s inspiring.

Looking particularly like a white onion in this one.

Schopenhauer has a famous example to illustrate the truth of his pessimism. He notes that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain… is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” This is something we instinctively agree with (though as proof of pessimism it probably does not convince us), but I really felt its truth after saving the white hen. The fear, the terror of her eyes – and she had survived. How much more would the black hen have suffered, I can only guess. And all that for a tasty meal that would be forgotten soon enough. A soul extinguished for a full belly. The scales are not in balance, that’s for sure. But then again, neither the eater not the eaten is given much to philosophising. This is just nature at work.

The thought experiment, would you be willing to live your life again, is an old one. Nietzsche turned it around into a positive guide with his da capo (“let’s do it all again”) attitude, saying that the potential for eternally repeating your life should be the guide for how you live it. In the case of pessimists, they answered that we would not wish to live our lives again, and our certainty in this would only grow as we got older. Illness and grief are things the experience of which is simply too great, they argue, to let us want to see the other things. Mara Van der Lugt in her book, however, notes that the experiment uses a kind of sleight-of-hand. If asked whether we wanted to play our lives through exactly as they were, perhaps we would say no. But if we were asked whether we wanted simply to live again, then many more of us would say yes. No matter how well lived, our lives will always lack novelty to one who has already lived them. But a new life, with new pain and new joy, probably tips the scales towards life being something worth experiencing.

But still, would the hens choose to live again? Two or three years of roaming the garden, the drive, the fields, pecking at me and the ground, pestering the gardener and my mother, but ending up being literally ripped limb from limb. Would they choose that?

Our lives are unlikely to end in us being ripped limb from limb. But one thing that has stuck with me after the attack was how unnecessary violence is for us as human beings. We do not need to rely on the suffering of humans and other animals to get our food, our water, our clothing, and our shelter. That we do is simply a reflection of our generally inadequate attempts to build a better world. But still, it must be possible. Whereas for these wild foxes, at least for the moment, a reason not to eat our hens is not going to be forthcoming. All our feathered friends and we, their carers, can do is be extra vigilant.

When I went to see the white hen this most recent time, she was already racing to the door out from her hen run into the world, even with her limp. I have decided that she is no longer a symbol of a willingness to fight to live against the odds. Instead, dear readers, she is simply as thick as beans.