Glaciers, Climate and Humility

In The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes describes the delight at the discovery of nature’s secrets that animated both artists and scientists around the time of the Romantics. Wonder, that sense of awe in the face of the mysterious and great, drove men and women to explore the world on ship and saddle and plumb its depths and farthest reaches. Few things were more exciting than glaciers, those vast marble-white creatures that sit at the tops of the world and lour down at us mortals beneath.

It was the investigation of glaciers that led to the discovery of the climate and its changes which are of vital importance to the present day. Surprisingly enough, however, it was not until the late 20th century that fears began to focus on global warming rather than global cooling. Initially, it was these masses of ice who were our enemy, unpredictable beasts whose movement downwards was felt to be unstoppable and perfectly destructive. The cooling of the planet would decimate crop yields and lead to mass starvation and social unrest, and as late as the 1970s the CIA was preparing for such a potentiality.

We know now, of course, that the present problem we face lies not in cooling, but in heating. After first briefly looking at the history of our understanding of the climate, I briefly consider the relationship between the technological mastery of the earth and human nature.

It was a Genevan scientist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who set off the beginnings of our understanding of the climate towards the end of the 18th century. A committed Alpinist, in his Voyages dans les Alpes he first used the word geology but was puzzled by the question of why we did not freeze to death during the night. This seems slightly silly at first glance, but if you shuffle off your knowledge of modern science you can see it for the challenge it once was. When the source of most of our heat is clearly the sun, why does that heat not disappear the moment the sun sets in the evening? Saussure built a kind of mini greenhouse in the 1770s and thus discovered that the atmosphere itself is capable of holding heat long after its sources have been removed.

One problem was resolved, but others remained. In the 19th-century, people were interested in whether there had been an Ice Age at all – not just the posthumously christened “Little Ice Age” of the 16th to 19th centuries – but an actual period of frozen wastes and mass starvation. This was proven by Louis Agassiz, another Swiss scientist with a passion for glaciers. In 1837, he suggested that there had indeed been an ice age, and the evidence was all around us – valleys, gorges, mountains, and so many boulders and stones thrown far from their homes. Agassiz evocatively termed glaciers “God’s great plough” for their work. For proposing that global temperatures had indeed been much lower, and for an extended period of time, Agassiz can be thought of as the founder of the idea of climate and its changes.

Finally, John Tyndall, a British scientist with a passion for the Alps, began investigating glaciers and their movements. Building upon the work of the others above, he realised that some gases, in particular carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) and water vapour, contributed to the greenhouse effect that Saussure had discovered. This was not enough to cause concern about a changing climate. It was only when the Swedish professor Svante Arrhenius began modelling the effects of changing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, reaching conclusions that are not too far from our modern models, that cause and effect were truly linked. Arrhenius himself was not worried. Writing at the end of the 19th century, he believed carbon dioxide concentrations were rising very slowly, and that it would take over three thousand years for figures to double. That was far enough down the road, and in any case, he held the view, not uncommon until relatively recently, that warming could only be a good thing – making the world more hospitable and increasing the yields of crops.

Of course, at the end of the 19th-century things were indeed so. This did not last. As the 20th century got underway the world only produced more and more carbon emissions from new inventions such as cars, the widespread electrification (on a coal power basis) of developed countries, and from a growing population that wanted to consume more and more. How exactly the world would change was still a subject of contention, rather than the consensus it is now, but there was no denying that the atmosphere was indeed changing. An American scientist, Charles David Keeling, created the famous Keeling Curve using data gathered at the Mauna Loa meteorological observatory in Hawaii (and then elsewhere too). This showed in unambiguous terms that the amount of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere was growing, and growing fast.

The Keeling Curve, courtesy of the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The shocking thing, and the one that really gives those sceptics who claim that the climate has always changed (and it has, that is true) and that humans have nothing to do with it no legs to stand on, is when we consider the curve over a longer period, as below.
The uptick is quite extraordinary, going far beyond the natural cycles beforehand. And it shows no signs of stopping.

It is amusing to think that we once thought that the ice was our problem, but not without its symbolic interest. Imagine a man or woman, standing before a glacier. The difference in scale is extraordinary. Unlike mountains, which are relatively stationary and thus pose no threat except to climbers, and bodies of water, which can be fished and dammed and bridged, glaciers are a force of nature that seems completely unmasterable. (These scientists were mostly writing before Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1867). If a glacier came, or if the temperature dropped, death would seem inevitable. Crops would fail, and cities would be swept away. And that would be it.

The damage from cooling is easy to visualise – just last year the world was rocked by images of French farmers, huddled around grape vines with torches, an almost medieval scene, as they tried to prevent a cold snap from destroying their harvest. But such images also reveal the problem with this great fear of cooling – it is so clearly remediable by heating. Houses could be insulated even in the 19th century, trees could be chopped for firewood, coal could be burned, and warmer clothes could be worn. If one were really being chased by glaciers, then of course a couple of (hundred thousand) sticks of dynamite could be used to break up the beasts and let what sun remained work upon them more effectively.

This fear of cooling reflects, we can say, the legacy of a pre-Enlightenment view of humanity, one where we were small and vulnerable to the world and God’s whimsy. The Enlightenment was not just a time of new knowledge, it was also a time of new mastery and power over nature, individuals, and whole societies. Glaciers appeared as something that, in spite of our advances, remained frightening and uncontrollable – an uncanny reminder that we were not as great as we thought we were. A kind of living white injunction to be humbler. But then we kept advancing, and soon we no longer feared even them. Human arrogance had won out. The kind of arrogance that was the darkest legacy of the Enlightenment because it allowed us to commit the terrible social experiments of the 20th century (Stalinism, fascism, and so on), convinced us that we not only had the might but also the right, to change the world.

In the case of the climate, we really could have benefited from learning our lesson in humility the first time around. The world is warming rapidly, the human and other animal toll is likely to be massive and, worst of all, entirely avoidable. But unlike with battling glaciers, where one is not a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but actually capable of fighting back effectively, we cannot so easily deal with heating. Fire brings warmth, but what takes it away? Even if you have the answer, it comes to mind far less readily than fire does to the question of creating warmth. We can take our clothes off, but public decency demands we exercise this ability within certain limits, and in any case, there are only so many clothes we can take off before we need to look at other options.

Fridges and air conditioners are not the solutions they may seem to be. Both of them actually worsen the problem because of their own chemical and electricity demands, which leads to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But even beyond that technical point, both fridges and air conditioners cool a small area, and an enclosed one. Hold the fridge door open and open all your windows and the cooling effects are so much reduced as to be essentially imperceptible. A fire might work the same way, but it heats much more effectively than these objects cool. And in terms of fuels, a fire can eat anything, whereas these things require electricity, which is comparatively complex to produce.  

Pretty much everything in the world is about heating. We heat oil to distillate it into its component parts, which we then heat to make our internal combustion engines work, build new chemicals, or power our power plants. We heat our food before we eat it, we heat our homes, and the production of the dyes we use in everything around us is dependent on heat too. Plastic is basically the result of heating certain chemical compounds to certain temperatures. The same is true of metals. How do you go from iron to steel? The answer, with some intervening steps, is heat.

Even when heating is not the primary factor, heat is the waste product. A gas-fired power plant heats water to produce steam, which puts a turbine into motion, generating electricity. What is left over is that heat. The smashing of mined ore that is part of its processing also produces heat. Within the home, our devices heat up when we use them too much. I am currently balancing my computer on a book so that it does not heat my lap. And speaking of my lap, the human body provides us with another example of heat’s omniprevalence. We heat up as we think, exercise, in a word live, and then lose that heat through things like sweating.

A glacier is an easy example of a cooling climate, the bad guy to be fought. When the climate warms, there is no such enemy coming. Instead, things just die. Deserts grow, plants don’t, natural disasters like hurricanes increase in frequency, and bad weather events like snowstorms and heat waves do too, but in all of these cases we are dealing with something essentially diffuse and impersonal. The problem cannot be dynamited away. And because it is a global problem, it is not as if we could just throw down a fridge and be done with it. Being a global problem, it is harder to accept it as our particular problem. A growing glacier is a specific issue for a specific place, while a shrinking glacier is a general loss, but because of its generality, we end up being only able to care so much about it.

This psychological issue is perhaps the main reason why so few people do any of the things that we can do to reduce global warming. (The complicating issue, one beyond the scope of this piece, is about whether individuals or corporations should be more responsible for emissions). Fire and heat are both easier to arrange than things to cool, they also have a more obvious effect with their burning. Likewise, the delayed effect of climate change, where today we are seeing the consequences of emissions released into the atmosphere quite literally before I was born, means that there’s an element of resignation in dealing with global warming which means that some people may simply not bother doing what they can.

I noted that at the time when people feared the return of the glaciers, they had every reason to do so, being comparatively less able to fight them off. Technological change prevailed, and the Enlightenment dream of power over all things was allowed to continue. Humans need to learn humility, but I doubt climate change is going to teach them it. Some of the most promising developments in fighting against carbon dioxide overproduction are likely to have the effect of letting us “off the hook” for our failure to reduce our consumption earlier. I have in mind technologies such as those for direct air capture, essentially giant reverse air conditioning units that suck carbon out of the air at immense cost and electricity demand, or perhaps nuclear fusion, which was in the news earlier this month.  

Of course, the alternative to being let off the hook – and I should be clear that these technologies are unlikely to save us, only compensate somewhat for our utter inability to do anything about reducing our demand for fossil fuels – is to watch our world disintegrate in fire and brimstone, metaphorically speaking and literally too in some places. A loss of diversity, a loss of nature, a loss of human life in the developing world, in particular, all of this is a catastrophe, even if it’s not “the end of the world”, only the end of “our world.” None of us wishes to see that either.

What then will change us? What then will bring humility? What then will lead a majority of us to take actions to build a better world, rather than continue statically upon the destructive paths that others have laid for us? I wish I knew. The world is a wondrous place, but wonder has not done enough, nor even has fear. Time will tell, I hope, what thing truly is needful. The alternative is not encouraging to think about.

This post was inspired by Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, and the information on the scientists comes primarily from it.

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain

What an extraordinary book this is. What a novel. The Magic Mountain is so easy to criticise – so fun to, even. It’s a ridiculous book. Even in John Woods’ translation, which is a great improvement on Helen Lowe-Porter’s, the characters sometimes sound as if they are still getting accustomed to human flesh, especially at the beginning. Of particular note is our main character, Hans Castorp, who laughs so much at things that are manifestly not funny that it seems as if he has perhaps swallowed too much laughing gas. Beyond that, we are constantly treated to such sentences as: “there was asparagus soup, followed by stuffed tomatoes, a roast with several vegetables, an especially well done dessert, and a tray of cheese and fruit.” This is incredibly dull stuff, the kind of detail we are pleased to be rid of in our more modern novels.

And yet, and yet. The Magic Mountain deserves the name. Thomas Mann’s novel takes us into another world, a world where I can be interested in the fact that the characters are having pineapple with their five-course dinner, because in this world the rules are different from our own. I have descended from the mountain every bit an evangelist. But another could quite easily descend, fed up and exhausted from the trip. The problem is that we come down and try to explain something that is to those below quite incomprehensible – even if we are criticising it we have to speak a different language, one it itself dictates. The Magic Mountain is its own world, for better or worse. We have to enter into it in order to work out what it is about.

Here is our plot. Early in the 20th century Hans Castorp, a young man who intends to work on a shipyard as an engineer, goes up a mountain to visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a sanatorium near Davos, where the latter is attempting to fight off his tuberculosis infection. Castorp himself comes down with something and spends seven years at the sanatorium, where he meets various characters – of note the Russian Madame Chauchat, the Dutchman with an imposing personality Peeperkorn, the Italian Settembrini, the Jewish Jesuit Naphta.

This is one of those books that contain multitudes. It is a desperately intellectual book. Virginia Woolf’s comment on Middlemarch, that it is a novel written for grownups, is very much true here. I cannot think how disappointed I would have been, trying to read this when I was younger. There is no action to entertain us. The emotions we and our characters feel are all intellectual, even the love that runs through the pages has something cerebral about it. And yet, the greatest complement we can make of this book is that it makes those intellectual emotions feel every bit as valid and as important as the kind of passions that make us want to abandon our families or murder somewhat innocent people.

The Magic Mountain is a book of learning. One of the most exhilarating chapters is entitled “Research”, and in it we sit through the night with Hans Castorp as he engages deeply with that most important of questions, “what is life?”. It is a question that seems to have less impact on our existence than those more common cursed queries, like “what shall I do?”, or “who is to blame?”. And yet, in ways “lyric, medical, and technical”, Mann throws us into the world of this other question. We hurtle, as if in the presence of a great magician, from the smallest atoms to the greatest of stars, as we and Hans Castorp seek the answers. The world seems to rush past us, brilliant and bright:

“The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike centre, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. That was not merely a metaphor – any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells”. A city, a state, a social community organised around the division of labour was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovered above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade.”

If this is too much for you, turn away now. In “Research” alone there are pages and pages of long, dense, blocky paragraphs. In other chapters we learn of things like music or botany. The chapter “Snow” has one of the most extraordinary descriptions of snowfall you will ever read, but it does go on and on. You must commit yourself to reading The Magic Mountain, just as Hans Castorp commits himself to treatment at the sanatorium. Any haste, any desire to get on with reading something else or getting to some action, will spoil the book completely. To invert a metaphor, in the same way that a beloved food can lose all of its taste when we are ill, when we do not have the constitution for it The Magic Mountain it will appear a hill of boredom. I know there were definitely chapters I rushed and shouldn’t have.

The Magic Mountain is a bildungsroman – it is about education, yes, but also about cultivation, that other idea of Bildung. It is about Hans Castorp growing from a relatively simple young man who is unable to participate in philosophical debates except as a witness to a man of respectable complexity, well-read, passionate about music, and willing and able to hold his own in any discussion. Just as the novel does not hide its engagement with learning, so too does it not conceal its engagement with teaching. “Pedagogy” is one of its watchwords.

Two characters are above all concerned with this – Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta. These two, who literally live next to each other, are the most obvious teachers for Hans Castorp in the novel. Their debates and discourses go on for pages, often without any kind of interruption or riposte. In any other work of fiction this would be horribly bad form, but again, The Magic Mountain is no normal work of fiction. It dazzles us with its ideas, so why should it be obliged to conceal them from us by chopping them up into manageable little phrases or numbing them with retorts before they have first demonstrated their full power? Put another way, if we are to take the ideas seriously, they must be expressed properly. And since, unlike a Russian novel, the characters here do not act their ideas out (with a few exceptions), we must make do with characters speaking their ideas out.

And what are those ideas? Well, we might say that Settembrini is a humanist. He is buoyed by a beautiful hope for a better world, a cosmopolitan world of peace and fairness. Even stricken by illness, he is a member of all sorts of international committees and organisations that aim to improve the world. To give an example of the sort of work he does, he is engaged with creating a volume for The Sociology of Suffering, a series of books that aims to categorise every sort of suffering in the world that it may then be eliminated through the power of reason. Settembrini is the bright light of the Enlightenment, the heroic intellectual that we never have enough of. “Order and classification are the beginning of mastery, whereas the truly dreadful enemy is the unknown,” he tells us. A hero he is, but also limited. There are only so many international organisations that seem to be doing very little other than convening which we can handle.

Leo Naphta is a Jew who became a Jesuit. It was he whom I was most excited to meet, opening The Magic Mountain for the first time. Described quite often as a proto-fascist, I wanted to make the acquaintance of this man who seemed to smell of forbidden knowledge. Naphta is every bit as incendiary as his name, with its similarity to naphtha, suggests. He is a nihilist, but as always that term is not hugely useful. What I can say is that he is in many ways the antithesis of Settembrini, even down to the ways that they decorate their respective rooms. Where Settembrini envisions are future world of progress, Naphta’s visions are all of blood and violence. The medieval church with its crude punishments dealt “to save souls from eternal damnation”, are far more valid to him than the punishments of the modern nation state, which thinks it is legitimate but is anything but. He is a destructive thinker, who at times reminded me of Nietzsche with his disregard for what we take to be “true”. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is – terror.” This is scary stuff, scary in particular because Mann articulates it so well. And Hans Castorp is taken in by Naphta, with his dark world and his hatred of everything bourgeois. So, at times, are we.

And there are other characters, each of whom, in their own way, has something to say – either by themselves, or through themselves. One of the most memorable is Mynheer Peeperkorn, an extraordinarily funny fellow introduced late in the novel. He is unable to express anything at all, his language comes in stops and starts and terrible bluster, but through his person he commands the attention of everyone – he has that thing every politician wishes they had: presence. In contrast to the two pedagogues his inability to fit together a sentence is all the more pronounced. (“What did he say? Nothing very intelligible, and even less so the more he drank”). But again, he has presence. Against the world of ideas, he seems to offer an alternative – drinking, eating, existing.

A Russian friend who has recently left their country told me recently that The Magic Mountain was their favourite book. Perhaps I should just leave this sentence here, hanging.

This is not a book for lovers of action, but for those who love contemplation. We need to be idle, even – possibly – sick to appreciate it properly. Were I stuck in bed for a month or a year, this is all I would want. It is all I would need. The Magic Mountain is the answer you want to give if you are asked what one book you would take to a desert island when you love Western culture but don’t want to look as basic as those who name the complete works of William Shakespeare. We may find it overly intellectual, but life is full of intellectual engagement for many of us, and if not intellectual then at least populated with ideas. Compared to reading a dry work about the history of ideas, we can read about Settembrini and Naphta who, even if they go on for page and page, at least feel autonomous, real, and serious in their views. They are excited in a way that a writer reporting on the views of the dead-and-buried never can be.

The Magic Mountain is a modern book. Although the “Forward” declares that a vast gulf divides it from the present (1924), it is not so. The arguments here about life and ways of looking at the world only became more relevant after the First World War. What happened, though, was that they were translated into actions – horrific, terrible actions, whose consequences we continue to feel to this day. Perhaps we can say this – The Magic Mountain reflects the last time when a bunch of Europeans could gather together on a frozen hillside to debate the nature of the world, before all of the innocence of such intellectual tomfoolery was lost.

The novel reminds me of one day, years and years ago, when together with two friends, while playing croquet on a well-maintained lawn by a trickling stream, hidden from the world by a stone wall, I debated the consequences of the People’s Budget of 1909. Thinking back on it now, there’s something sickly about the isolation that allows us to go so deeply into intellectual things. But there is something equally sickly about the attitude that never engages with any kind of ideas at all. The novel is a balancing act, well aware of itself and what it says, and the criticisms we might make of it from afar – about its lack of engagement with action and so on – are all answered within its pages. It is an encyclopaedia. It is a world. If we are able to enter it without losing our sense of the world around us, we will be rewarded with one of the most vital, the most intelligent, the most thoughtful books that we will ever read.

I just want to read it over and over again.

The Birth of Romanticism – Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels

I always love these books that try to recreate the world out of which an idea arose. No matter how significant I am told a thought is, it seems unimportant until I can see the people who came up with it, how it affected them and why they needed it in their lives. Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb, which I read last year, or Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, are all such books. Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, which deals with the thinkers surrounding the University of Jena in Germany around the beginning of the 19th century, is yet another. What distinguishes Wulf’s contribution is that it also has a lot in common with the works of Richard Holmes, whose “Glorious” naturally adorns the dustjacket. By this, I mean that Wulf’s book is as much a story as it is an engagement with the ideas. Yet Wulf’s attempt to craft all this into a story is both Magnificent Rebels’ strength and its weakness.

The story takes us from 1794 to 1806, with a prologue and an epilogue to tidy things up. A short time period, but veritable anni mirabiles for the arts, philosophy, and world. In the tiny town of Jena, almost everyone worth knowing in German culture was gathered together, at a time when the German people were about to make earth-shattering contributions to the world after so many centuries of doing very little (the exception being Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, who helped set the stage). Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Tieck represented poetry and prose, then there were the Schlegel brothers and Fichte and Schelling and finally Hegel for philosophy and theory. Wulf also draws our attention to the women – in particular, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel and Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. They were every bit as important in theorising – and writing – as their husbands, and Magnificent Rebels helps put them back in the intellectual arena.

These names listed above are the foundational figures in Romanticism. Yes, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, but here we have the heavy stuff, the theory and the ideas that gave German – and later European Romanticism – its intellectual heft. (Coleridge, we learn, never made it to Jena, but he still stole verbatim an awful lot of Schelling and was instrumental, alongside Carlyle, in popularising German thought in the Anglophone world). We have the idealisation of love, the obsession with the infinite, nature, experience and the importance of the self which all came ultimately to characterise Romanticism, such as any of us may be able to put our fingers on what it actually means.

Wulf’s primary intellectual contention is that these guys helped place the individual at the centre of the world for the first time. The philosopher Fichte, in particular, declared that you must “attend to yourself; turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self. Such is the first demand that Philosophy imposes upon the student. We speak of nothing that is outside you, but solely of yourself.” Wulf uses the historical context to explain how revolutionary this was. At the time, in the German states one needed permission from the ruler to divorce, and often to travel too. Not just women, but even men were heavily restricted in their individual autonomy. The philosophers of Magnificent Rebels, so we learn, set off a chain reaction of self-centredness (in good ways and bad) whose ramifications are still being felt to this day.

So why Jena? Jena was a small town, but its university became famous in this brief period because it was perhaps the best place in Germany for freethinkers. The reason for this was that it was a prime example of the dysfunctional governance that characterised much of “Voltaire’s Nightmare” – the Holy Roman Empire. Jena’s university was governed, at the same time, by the rulers of the four Saxon states – Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Saxe-Meiningen. As you can imagine, this meant that nobody could agree on the rules and those that were agreed upon were practically impossible to enforce. This was one factor.

The second factor was friendship. Magnificent Rebels is to a large extent a paean to the power of friendship to achieve massive leaps forward in any area where friends strive together. Everyone invited their friends and relatives so that even if someone did not have a teaching position at the university at Jena, they still had plenty of good reasons to be there. In the evenings all these clever people got together and drank and thought and read – what Novalis called “symphilosophising” because, like a symphony, it was a group activity. Everyone built atop the other. Fichte built atop Kant’s philosophy, then Schelling atop Fichte, and Hegel atop them both, so that by the time the book ends it is no longer possible for any of the philosophy described to be comprehended by a normal human being such as your humble reviewer.

Friendship builds a wonderful thing, and then the ideal begins to fall apart for the same reason. Where we could perhaps have had twenty or thirty years of greatness, personalities get in the way. Fichte gets himself kicked out of the university for not knowing when to shut up, Schiller gets offended the entire time and loses all his friends but Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel is unable to do anything that would make him money and is far too combative for his own good. Novalis and then Schiller are killed by disease, and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline divorce. Everything and everyone break up, and then the French invade and ransack the town and that really puts the nail in Jena’s coffin.

Wulf’s story takes us through all of these characters’ lives, although with so many of them to meet, we cannot get too close to them. We get a rough idea of what they were each about, but not as much as I would have liked. I got the impression that Wulf was herself defeated by some of Schelling and Fichte’s notorious twaddle, which is fair enough. I learned that Goethe was fat and Schiller was always ill. The main thing that Wulf does in Magnificent Rebels is deal with their interconnections. How their relationships with one another changed over the years, through feuds and fights. We feel ourselves caught up in this whirlwind of creativity, and that’s probably the book’s best quality.

More than the reorientation towards the individual, Magnificent Rebels details the ideas that the early Romantics threw down that taken together hint towards what Romanticism as a whole might mean. We get Fichte’s self-centredness, “My will alone… shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe”, Friedrich Schlegel’s emphasis on the importance of words, “the letter is the true magic word”, and Novalis’s legendary definition: “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise”.

Nowadays we tend to think of Romanticism as slightly dangerous in its irrational tendencies. This isn’t entirely borne out in the book. It is holistic rather than anti-rational, though often its thinkers’ desire to make everything pulsing and interconnected went up against what the scientists were telling them. It was only growing old and the French armies that turned many of these theorists from dreamy, passionate believers in a new world into much darker figures of reaction and nationalism. If Wulf’s book has a message for us today, it is that the Romantics of Jena changed our world, but their gifts are ours to use or misuse. They liberated us by freeing our sense of self from being the exclusive possession of a monarch. But they also made possible the terrible self-centeredness and materialism that are destroying this liberated world. Reflection, the turn inwards, is a thing that needs to be learned again and again, by successive generations, and Magnificent Rebels is of clear value beyond teaching us history because it helps us do just that.

For me, the main thing I got out of the book was this sense of collaboration and its power. This year I held a little gathering of my own at my family’s home in Switzerland. For just over a week, I and several friends were treated, under the watchful eyes and extremely talented housekeeping of my girlfriend, to brilliant food and equally sparkling conversation. Each day we walked upon the forested mountains, or bathed in mountain lakes, or reached the foot of the glaciers. It was, in a word, divine. One evening I stood outside with a friend and discussed the intricacies of interpreting ancient biblical texts – he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel – on another day, we discussed the development of atonal music in a mountain restaurant. I can think of nothing better.

What is obvious to me is just how much I grow when I am surrounded by good company. However much I am grateful to books like this, and the voices of the dead that they contain, the real world is all that much more rewarding. There is no passion that fully withstands the cooling of its ink upon the page. Yet where could I find another Jena? I was at Cambridge, of course. There are quite a lot of clever people there. But now I am no longer there; the world has swallowed me up. Still, one mustn’t lose heart. Many of the figures who flit through Magnificent Rebels spent only a few years in Jena before having to leave, and still they left their mark upon their friends and the world. Life is long, making friends is hard, but one day, we may hope, we shall each of us have our Jena.