No sooner had the process begun than there was an explosion in the number of people travelling around the isles. For the first time,
Vincent van Gogh, Sunset: Wheat Fields near Aries, 1888
the Wye Valley was filled with tourists, as were the mountains of North Wales, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands, a trend that seems perfectly to confirm the contention that we tend to seek out corners of the world only after they have been painted and written about by artists.
The theory must of course be a sharp exaggeration, as sharp as the suggestion that no one paid any attention to fog in London before Whistler or to cypresses in Provence before van Gogh. Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm, nor does it arise from sentiments of which nonartists are devoid; it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
But that may—as the tourist office in Aries seemed to understand—be enough to influence where we choose to go next year.
VIII
On Possessing Beauty
1.
Among all the places that we go to but don't look at properly or that leave us indifferent, a few occasionally stand out with an impact that overwhelms us and forces us to take heed. They possess a quality that might clumsily be called beauty. This may not involve prettiness nor any of the obvious features that guidebooks associate with beauty spots; having recourse to the word might be just another way of saying that we like a place.
There was much beauty on my travels. In Madrid, a few blocks from my hotel, there lay a patch of waste ground bordered by apartment buildings and a large, orange-coloured petrol station with a carwash. One evening, in the darkness, a long, sleek, almost empty train passed several metres above the roof of the station and wended its way amongst the apartment buildings, on a level with their middle floors. With its viaduct lost in the night, the train appeared to float above the earth, a technological feat that looked more plausible given the train's futuristic shape and the pale ghostly-green light emanating from its windows. Inside the apartments, people were watching television or moving around their kitchens; meanwhile, dispersed through the carriages, the few passengers stared out at the city or read newspapers: the start of a journey to Seville or Cordoba that would end long after the dishwashers had reached the end of their cycles and the televisions fallen silent. The passengers and apartment dwellers paid little attention to one another; their lives ran along lines that would never meet, except for a brief moment in the retina of an observer who had taken a walk to escape a sad hotel room.
In Amsterdam, in a courtyard behind a wooden door, there was an old brick wall that despite a tear-inducing wind blowing along the canals had slowly heated itself up in a fragile early-spring sun. I took my hands from my pockets and ran them along the bricks' gnarled and pitted surface. They seemed light and ready to crumble. I felt the impulse to kiss them, so as to experience more closely a texture that reminded me of blocks of pumice or halva from a Lebanese delicatessen.
In Barbados, on the eastern shore, I looked out across a dark-violet sea that stretched unhindered to the coasts of Africa. The island suddenly seemed small and vulnerable, its theatrical vegetation of wild pink flowers and shaggy trees a touching protest against the sober monotony of the sea. In the Lake District, I took in the view at dawn from our window in the Mortal Man: hills of soft Silurian rock covered in fine green grass above which a layer of mist was hovering. The hills undulated as though they formed part of the backbone of a giant beast that had lain down to sleep and might at any point awake and stand up several miles high, shaking off oak trees and hedgerows like pieces of fluff caught on its green felt jacket.
2.
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.'
But beauty is fugitive, being frequently found in places to which we may never return or else resulting from rare conjunctions of season, light and weather. How then to possess it, how to hold on to the floating train, the halvalike bricks or the English valley?
The camera provides one option. Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter. Or else we can try to imprint ourselves physically on a place of beauty perhaps hoping to render it more present in us by making ourselves more present in it. In Alexandria, standing before Pompey's Pillar, we could try to carve our name in the granite, to follow the example of Flaubert's friend Thompson from Sunder-land. (‘You can't see the pillar without seeing Thompson's name, and consequently thinking of Thompson. This cretin has thus become part of the monument and has perpetuated himself along with it. … All imbeciles are more or less Thompsons from Sunderland.') A more modest step might be to buy something—a bowl, a lacquered box or a pair of sandals (Flaubert acquired three carpets in Cairo)—as a reminder of what we have lost, like a lock of hair cut from a departing lover's mane.
3.
John Ruskin was born in London in February 1819. A central part of his work was to pivot around the question of how we can possess the beauty of places.
From an early age, he was unusually alive to the smallest features of the visual world. He recalled that at three or four, ‘I could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet—examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses with rapturous intervals of excitement' Ruskin's parents encouraged his sensitivity. His mother introduced him to nature, while his father, a prosperous sherry importer, read the classics to him after tea and took him to a museum every Saturday. Over the summer holidays, the family travelled around the British Isles and mainland Europe, not for entertainment or diversion but for beauty, by which they meant chiefly the beauty of the Alps and of the medieval cities of northern France and Italy, in particular Amiens and Venice. They journeyed slowly in a carriage, never covering more than twenty-five miles a day and stopping every few miles to admire the scenery—a way of travelling that Ruskin was to practise throughout his life.
Ruskin's interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty was the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually. Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there were many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one's name on a pillar and taking photographs). Fourth, there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. And last, the most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so.
4.
Between 1856 and 1860, Ruskin's primary intellectual concern consisted in teaching people how to draw. ‘The art of drawing,' he maintained, ‘which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing and should be taught to every child just as writing is, has been so neglected and abused, that there is not one man in a thousand, even of its professed teachers, who knows its first principles.'