Measuring the World (2 page)

T
HE
S
EA

Alexander von Humboldt was famous in all of Europe for an expedition to the tropics he had led twenty-five years earlier. He had been in New Spain, New Granada, New Barcelona, New Andalusia, and the United States; he had discovered the natural canal that connects the Orinoco and the Amazon; he had climbed the highest mountain in the known world; he had collected thousands of plants and hundreds of animals, some living, the majority dead; he had talked to parrots, disinterred corpses, measured every river, every mountain, and every lake in his path, had crawled into burrows and had tasted more berries and climbed more trees than anyone could begin to imagine.

He was the younger of two brothers. Their father, a wealthy man of the minor nobility, had died early. When seeking advice on how to educate her sons, his mother had turned to no less a figure than Goethe.

The latter's response was that a pair of brothers in whom the whole panoply of human aspirations so manifested itself, thus promising that the richest possibilities both of action and aesthetic appreciation might become exemplary reality, presented as it were a drama capable of filling the mind with hope and feeding the spirit with much to reflect upon.

Nobody could make head or tail of this sentence. Not their mother, not Kunth the majordomo, a rail of a man with large ears. He took it to mean, he said finally, that it was a kind of experiment. The one should be educated to be a man of culture, and the other a man of science.

And which was which?

Kunth thought. Then he shrugged his shoulders and suggested that they toss a coin.

Fifteen highly paid experts came to lecture them at university level. For the younger brother it was chemistry, physics, and mathematics, for the elder it was languages and literature, and for them both it was Greek, Latin, and philosophy. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, with no time off and no holidays.

The younger brother, Alexander, was taciturn and frail; he needed encouragement in everything he did and his marks were mediocre. When left to his own devices, he wandered in the woods, collecting beetles and ordering them in categories he made up himself. At the age of nine he followed Benjamin Franklin's design and built a lightning conductor and attached it to the roof of the castle they lived in near the capital. It was only the second anywhere in Germany; the other was in Göttingen, mounted on physics professor Lichtenberg's roof. These were the only two places where one was safe from the heavens.

The elder brother looked like an angel. He could talk like a poet and from the earliest age wrote precocious letters to the most famous men in the country. Everyone who met him was dazzled, almost overcome. By thirteen he had mastered two languages, by fourteen four, by fifteen seven. He had never been punished; nobody could even remember him doing anything wrong. With English envoys he talked about economic policy, with the French the dangers of insurrection. Once he locked his younger brother in a cupboard in a distant room. When a servant found the little boy half-unconscious the next day, he swore he'd locked himself in; he knew nobody would believe the truth. Another time he discovered a white powder in his food. He knew enough about chemistry to identify it as rat poison. With trembling hands he pushed the plate away. From the other side of the table his elder brother watched him knowingly, his pale eyes impenetrable.

Nobody could deny that the castle was haunted. Nothing spectacular, just footsteps in empty corridors, sounds of children crying out of nowhere, and sometimes a shadowy man who asked in a rasping voice to buy shoelaces, little toy magnets, or a glass of lemonade. But the stories about the spirits were even eerier than the spirits themselves. Kunth gave the two boys books to read full of monks and open graves and hands reaching up out of the depths and potions brewed in the underworld and séances where the dead talked to terrified listeners. This kind of thing was just becoming fashionable and was still so novel that there was no familiarity that could inure people to the feelings of horror. And horror was necessary, according to Kunth, encountering the dark side of things was part of growing up; anyone innocent of metaphysical anxiety would never achieve German manhood. Once they stumbled on a story about Aguirre the Mad, who had renounced his king and declared himself emperor. He and his men traveled the length of the Orinoco in a journey that was the stuff of nightmares, past riverbanks so thick with undergrowth that it was impossible to land. Birds screamed in the language of extinct tribes, and when one looked up, the sky reflected cities whose architecture never came from human hands. Hardly any scholars had ever penetrated this region, and there was no reliable map.

But he would, said the younger brother. He would make the journey.

Naturally, the elder brother replied.

He really meant it!

Yes he understood that, said the elder brother and summoned a servant to note down the day and the exact time. The day would come when they would be glad they had fixed this moment.

Their teacher in physics and philosophy was Marcus Herz, Immanuel Kant's favorite pupil and husband of the famed beauty Henriette. He poured two substances into a beaker: the liquid did nothing for a moment, then suddenly changed color. He poured hydrogen out of a little tube, held a flame to its mouth, and there was a joyous explosion of fire. Half a gram, he said, produced a twelve-centimeter flame. Whenever things were frightening, it was a good idea to measure them.

Henriette held a salon every week for intellectual sophisticates who talked of God and their feelings, wept a little, wrote one another letters, and called themselves the Assembled Virtues. No one could remember how this name had come about. Their conversations were kept secret from outsiders, but all impulses of the soul were to be shared completely openly with other Assembled Virtues. If the soul failed to experience impulses, they had to be invented. The two brothers were the youngest. This too was an essential part of their upbringing, said Kunth, and they must never miss a single gathering. It served to educate the emotions. Specifically, he encouraged them to write to Henriette. A neglect of one's sentimental education early in life could bear the most unfortunate fruit. It went without saying that every letter must be shown to him first. As expected, the elder brother's letters were finer.

Henriette's replies were courteous, and written in an unsure child's hand. She herself was barely nineteen. A book that the younger brother had lent to her was returned unread:
Man a Machine
by La Mettrie. A proscribed work, an abominable pamphlet! She could not bring herself to so much as open it.

What a pity, said the younger brother to the elder. It was a notable book. The author was insistent that man was a machine, a highly sophisticated automaton.

And no soul, answered the elder brother. They were walking through a park that surrounded the castle; a thin layer of snow coated the bare trees.

No, the younger boy contradicted him. With a soul. With intimations and a poetic feel for expanse and beauty. Nonetheless this soul itself was no more than a part, even if the most complex one, of the machine. And he asked himself if this didn't correspond to the truth.

All human beings are machines?

Perhaps not all, said the younger boy thoughtfully. But we are.

The pond was frozen over, and the late afternoon dusk was turning the snow and the icicles to blue. He had something to tell him, said the older boy. People were worried about him. His silences, his reserve. His laborious progress at his lessons. A great experiment would either stand or fall with them. Neither of them had the right to let go of things. He paused for a moment. The ice looks quite solid.

Really?

Yes of course.

The younger boy nodded, took a deep breath, and stepped onto the ice. He wondered if he should recite Klopstock's ode to skating. Arms swinging wide, he glided to the middle and turned in a circle. His brother was standing bent slightly forward on the bank, watching him.

Suddenly everything was silent. He couldn't see anything any more and the cold knocked him almost unconscious. Only now did he realize that he was underwater. He kicked out. His head banged against something hard, the ice. His sheepskin hat came off and floated away, his hair was loose and his feet hit bottom. Now his eyes were accustoming themselves to the darkness. For a moment he saw a frozen landscape: trembling stalks, things growing above them, transparent as a veil, a lone fish, there for a moment then gone, like a hallucination. He made swimming motions, rose in the water, banged into the ice again. He realized he only had a few more seconds to live. He groped, and at the moment when he ran out of air, he saw a dark patch above him, the opening; he dragged himself up, gasped in air, breathed out again and spat, the sharp angles of the ice cut into his hands, he heaved himself out, rolled away, pulling his legs up after him, and lay there, panting and sobbing. Turning onto his stomach, he belly-flopped toward the bank. His brother was still standing there, bent forward the way he had been, hands in his pockets, his cap pulled down over his face. He reached out a hand and helped him to his feet.

That night the fever started. He was aware of voices and didn't know whether they belonged to figures in his dreams or the people who were standing round his bed, and he could still feel the cold of the ice. A man who must be the doctor was pacing up and down the room, and said it's up to you, you'll either make it or you won't, it's your decision, all you have to do is hold on, you know. But when he tried to answer, he could no longer remember what had been said; instead he was looking at the wide expanse of a sea under skies flickering with electricity, and when he opened his eyes again it was noon two days later, the winter sun was hanging all pale in the window and his fever had broken.

From now on his marks improved. He concentrated when he worked and began a habit of balling his fists while thinking, as if there were an enemy to conquer. He had changed, Henriette said in a letter to him, and now he made her a little fearful. He asked permission to spend a night in the empty room which was the most frequent source of nocturnal sounds. In the morning he was white and quiet, and the first vertical line had appeared in his brow.

Kunth decided that the elder brother should study jurisprudence, and the younger, public administration. Of course he traveled with them when they went to university at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder; he accompanied them to lectures and oversaw their progress. It was not a good higher education. If someone incompetent wanted to earn his doctorate, the elder boy wrote to Henriette, he could come here in full confidence. And for some unknown reason there was also a large dog which attended lectures most of the time, scratching incessantly and making noises.

It was the botanist Willdenow who introduced the younger boy to his first dried plants from the tropics. They had protuberances that looked like feelers, buds like eyes, and leaves with upper surfaces that felt like human skin. They seemed familiar to him from his dreams. He dissected them, made careful sketches, tested their reaction to acids and alkalis, and worked them up cleanly into preparations.

He knew now, he said to Kunth, what he wanted to concern himself with: Life.

He couldn't give his approval, said Kunth. One had more tasks on earth than mere existence. Life in and of itself did not supply the content for existence.

That wasn't what he'd meant, he replied. He wanted to investigate Life, to understand its strange grip on the world. He wanted to uncover its tricks!

So he was allowed to stay and study with Willdenow. Next semester the elder brother transferred to the University of Göttingen. While he was finding his first friends there, trying his first alcohol, and touching his first woman, the younger boy was writing his first scientific paper.

Good, said Kunth, but not yet good enough to be printed under the name of Humboldt. Publication would have to wait.

During the holidays he visited his elder brother. At a reception given by the French consul, he met Kästner the mathematician, his friend Privy Councilor Zimmerman, and Professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the most important experimental physicist in Germany. The latter, a hunchback, a clotted mass of flesh and intellect, with a flawlessly beautiful face, pressed his hand softly and stared up at him with a twinkle. Humboldt asked him if it was true he was working on a novel.

Yes and no, said Lichtenberg with a look that suggested he could see something beyond Humboldt's understanding. The work was called
About Gunkel
, had no story, and was making no progress.

Writing a novel, said Humboldt, seemed to him the perfect way to capture the most fleeting essence of the present for the future.

Aha, said Lichtenberg.

Humboldt blushed. It must be a foolish undertaking for an author, as was becoming the fashion these days, to choose some already distant past as his setting.

Lichtenberg observed him with narrowed eyes. No, he said. And yes.

On the way home, the brothers saw a second slice of silver, only slightly larger, alongside the newly risen moon. A hot-air balloon, the elder explained. Pilâtre de Rozier, a collaborator of the Montgolfier brothers, was in nearby Brunswick for the moment. The whole town was talking about it. Soon everyone would be going up in the air.

But they wouldn't want to, said the younger boy. They would be too afraid.

Shortly before leaving, he was introduced to the famous Georg Forster, a thin man with a cough and an unhealthy pallor. He had circumnavigated the globe with Cook and seen more than any German had ever seen; now he was a legend, his book was world-famous, and he worked as the librarian in Mainz. He told tales of dragons and the living dead, of supremely well-mannered cannibals, of days when the sea was so clear that one seemed to be rocking over an abyss, of storms so fierce that one didn't even dare pray. Melancholy enveloped him like a fine mist. He had seen too much, he said. That was the meaning of the simile about Odysseus and the Sirens. It was no good tying oneself to the mast; even when one escaped, one couldn't recover from the brush with the unknown. He could hardly sleep any more, he said, his memories were too strong. Recently he had had the news that his captain, the great saturnine Cook, had been boiled and eaten on Hawaii. He rubbed his forehead and looked at the buckles on his shoes. Boiled and eaten, he said again.