The basilica by Bonavia is one of the rare Spanish churches to have been inspired by the eighteenth-century Italian baroque. Its convex facade, designed as an interplay of inward and outward curves, is adorned with fine statues. Above the doorway is a low relief of saints Justus and Pastor, to whom the basilica was previously dedicated. The interior is graceful and elegant with an oval cupola, intersecting ribbed vaulting, flowing cornices and abundant stuccowork.
If my level of curiosity was so far removed from Humboldt's (and my impulse to return to bed so strong), it was in part because of the range of advantages with which any traveller on a factual, as opposed to touristic, mission is blessed.
Facts have utility. Knowing the precise dimensions of the northern edge of the Plaza Mayor will be helpful to architects and students of the work of Juan Gómez de Mora. Accurate measurements of the barometric pressure on an April day in central Madrid will be of use to meteorologists. Humboldt's discovery that the circumference of the Cumanän cactus (Tuna macho) was 1.54 metres was of interest to biologists throughout Europe, who had not suspected that cacti could grow so large.
And with utility comes an (approving) audience. When Humboldt returned to Europe with his South American facts in August 1804, he was besieged and feted by interested parties. Six weeks after arriving in Paris, he read his first travel report to a packed audience at the Institut National. He informed his listeners of the respective water temperatures on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of South America, and of the fifteen different species of monkeys he had recorded in the jungles. He opened twenty cases of fossil and mineral specimens, which a crowd pressed around the podium to see. The Bureau of Longitude Studies asked for a copy of his astronomic facts; the observatory requested his barometric measurements. He was invited to dinner by Chateaubriand and Madame de Staél and admitted to the elite Society of Arcueil, a scientific salon whose members included Laplace, Berthollet and Gay-Lussac. In Britain, his work was read by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker. Charles Darwin learnt large parts of his findings by heart.
As Humboldt walked around a cactus or stuck his thermometer into the Amazon, his own curiosity must have been guided by a sense of others' interests, and bolstered by it in the inevitable moments when lethargy or sickness threatened. It was fortunate for him that almost every existing fact about South America was wrong or questionable. When he sailed into Havana in November 1800, he discovered that even this most important strategic base for the Spanish Navy had not been placed correctly on the map. He unpacked his measuring instruments and worked out the correct geographical latitude. A grateful Spanish admiral invited him to dinner.
6.
Sitting in a café on the Plaza Provincia, I acknowledged the impossibility of new factual discoveries. My guidebook enforced the point with a lecture:
The neoclassical facade of the Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande is by Sabatini, but the building itself a circular edifice with six radial chapels and a large dome 33 metres j 10$ feet wide, is by Francisco Cabezas.
Anything I learnt would have to be justified by private benefit rather than by the interest of others. My discoveries would have to enliven me; they would have in some way to prove ‘life-enhancing'.
The term was Nietzsche's. In the autumn of 1873, Friedrich Nietzsche composed an essay in which he distinguished between collecting facts like an explorer or academic and using already well known facts to the end of inner, psychological enrichment. Unusually for a university professor, he denigrated the former activity and praised the latter. Entitling his essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', Nietzsche began with the extraordinary assertion that collecting facts in a quasi-scientific way was a sterile pursuit. The real challenge, he suggested, was to use facts to enhance ‘life'. He quoted a sentence from Goethe: ‘I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity'
What would it mean to seek knowledge ‘for life' in one's travels? Nietzsche offered suggestions. He imagined a person who, depressed about the state of German culture and the lack of any attempt being undertaken to improve it, went to an Italian city—Siena or Florence, say—and there discovered that the phenomenon broadly known as the Italian Renaissance had in fact been the work of only a few individuals, who with luck, perseverance and the right patrons had been able to shift the mood and values of a whole society. This tourist would learn to seek in other cultures ‘that which in the past was able to expand the concept “man” and make it more beautiful', thus joining the ranks of those ‘who, gaining strength through reflecting on past greatness, are inspired by the feeling that the life of man is a glorious thing.'
Nietzsche also proposed a second kind of tourism, whereby we may learn how our societies and identities have been formed by the past and so acquire a sense of continuity and belonging. The person practising this kind of tourism ‘looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city'. He can gaze at old buildings and feel ‘the happiness of knowing that he is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that his existence is thus excused and indeed justified'.
To follow the Nietzschean line, the point of looking at an old building may be nothing more but then again nothing less than recognising that ‘architectural styles are more flexible than they seem, as are the uses for which buildings are made'. We might look at the Palacio de Santa Cruz, for example {‘Constructed between 162g and 164], this building is one of the jewels of Habsburg architecture'), and think, ‘If it was possible then, why not something similar now?'
Instead of bringing back sixteen thousand new plant species, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.
7.
There was another problem: the explorers who had come before and discovered facts had at the same time laid down distinctions between what was significant and what was not—distinctions that had, over time, hardened into almost immutable truths about where value lay in Madrid. The Plaza de la Villa had one star, the Palacio Real two stars, the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales three stars, and the Plaza de Oriente no stars at all.
Such distinctions were not necessarily false, but their effect was pernicious. Where guidebooks praised a site, they pressured a visitor to match their authoritative enthusiasm, and where they were silent, pleasure or interest seemed unwarranted. Long before entering the three-star Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, I knew the official enthusiasm that my own response would have to accord with: “The most beautiful convent in Spain. A grand staircase decorated with frescoes leads to the upper cloister gallery, where each of the chapels is more sumptuous than its predecessor. ‘ The guidebook might have added, ‘and where there must be something wrong with the traveller who cannot agree'.
Humboldt did not suffer such intimidation. Few Europeans before him had crossed the regions through which he travelled, and this absence offered him an imaginative freedom. He could unselfconsciously decide what interested him. He could create his own categories of value without either following or deliberately rebelling against the hierarchies of others. When he arrived at the San Fernando mission on the Rio Negro, he was free to think that everything, or perhaps nothing, might be interesting. The needle of his curiosity followed its own magnetic north and, unsurprisingly to the future readers of his Journey, ended up pointing at plants. ‘In San Fernando we were most struck by the pihiguado or pirijao plant, which gives the countryside its peculiar quality. Covered with thorns, its trunk reaches more than sixty feet high,' he reported at the top of his list of what was interesting in San Fernando. Next Humboldt measured the temperature (very hot), then noted that the missionaries lived in attractive houses that were matted with liana and surrounded by gardens.