The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm Read online

  Traveling the Web

  Others apart sat on a hill retir’d,

  In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high

  Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,

  Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

  And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost, II:557–61

  The power of a metaphor can be assessed both by the degree to which it conjures up the idea at its source and by the degree to which it enriches or contaminates further ideas. The metaphor of the world as book appropriately confirms our impression that the space around us carries meaning and that every landscape tells a story, illuminating the act of reading with the sense of deciphering not only the words on the page but the world itself. World and text, travel and reading, are concomitant images, easily evoked in the imagination. Both travel and reading unfold in time, both world and text define a space. Life as a journey is, as we have seen, one of our most ancient metaphors; because to read is to journey through a book, the image links all three activities, so that each one— reading, living, traveling—borrows from and enriches the others. The reader is therefore both the traveler through the world and the traveler through life, except, as Orhan Pamuk concluded in his novel Silent House:“You can’t start out again in life, that’s a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you’ve finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn’t understand before, in order to understand life.”⁵⁸

  Codex or computer? Photographs by John Hubbard.

  In the introduction to his collected travel essays, Nomad’s Hotel, Cees Nooteboom quotes the twelfth-century Arab traveler Ibn al-Arabi: “The origin of existence is movement. Immobility can have no part in it, for if existence was immobile it would return to its source, which is the Void. That is why the voyaging never stops, in this world or in the hereafter.”⁵⁹ As Nooteboom understands it, Ibn al-Arabi equates living with traveling, aware of the meaning of coming to a halt.

  Nooteboom is a fair example of the twenty-first-century traveler. On the one hand, a resigned adventurer for whom the practical experience of crossing space and time is charged with the bewilderment of speed and the dreariness of delays and waiting, a sort of unholy mingling of promptness and procrastination. On the other, a traditional seeker for what is in essence an intellectual and affective experience, a preconceived literary notion of what travel in the abstract is, a sense of transition tinged with a willingness to be surprised, comforted, and challenged. “It is impossible to prove and yet I believe it,” Nooteboom writes at the beginning of his travel book about the roads to Santiago, “there are some places in the world where one is mysteriously magnified on arrival or departure by the emotions of all those who have arrived and departed before. Anyone possessed of a soul so light feels a gentle tug in the air around the Schreierstoren, the Sorrower’s Tower in Amsterdam, which has to do with the accumulated sadness of those left behind. It is a sadness,” Nooteboom adds, “we do not experience today: our journeys no longer take years to complete, we know exactly where it is we are going, and our chances of coming back are so much greater.”⁶⁰

  It is perhaps because of this, that the image of the reader-traveler is no longer as resonant today as it was in the past. What has changed, as Nooteboom makes clear, is not the idea of reading as travel but the meaning of travel itself. For Dante’s contemporaries, travel mirrored precisely the essential act of living, of unknown duration, perilous and many times bitter, fraught with deadly temptations. “I am a stranger on earth, a passerby, like all my ancestors, an exile, an uneasy traveler in this brief life,” wrote Petrarch in one of his letters,⁶¹ barely half a century after Dante’s journey. We, however, no longer carry a constant sense of transience within us, at least not in the essential way in which Petrarch and Dante felt it. Everything in our societies today incites us to believe that we are quasi-immortal beings, preserved in an eternal present, and that all our activities (reading included) must be conclusive in an absolute sense. We believe only in certainties. Change for us is not a passage that builds up the province of our memory while reducing that of our expectation, as Augustine understood it, but a leap from one moment to another on which the previous moments cast no shadow, while the ones to come are never brought to mind. This persistent instantaneity convinces us that we exist only here and now, in whatever circle we happen to find ourselves, with no sense of debt to the past or of the overlapping of experience, except as conceited outposts of progress. It creates for us the illusion of a constant present, seized in the emblem of the flickering screen always open before us, suggesting that, since we have entrusted our memory to a machine, we can disregard the past in all its manifestations (libraries, archives, the recollection of our elders, our own ability to recall) and so dismiss the consequences of our actions. If today reading is a form of travel, it is only in the sense of passing timelessly from place to place, ignoring differences of latitude and longitude, pretending that everything occurs for us and under our gaze, and that we can always be informed of all that happens, wherever we might find ourselves. Nooteboom remarks that “anyone who is constantly travelling is always somewhere else, and therefore always absent,” and he disapprovingly quotes Pascal’s dictum that “the root of the world’s misfortune lies in the fact that human beings are unable to remain in one room for twenty-four hours.”⁶² Today’s travel partakes of both sides: a constant absence (for most of our nomadic race) through physical displacement, and a constant claustrophobic presence in workplaces and shopping malls, planes and trains, airport lobbies and tourist sites.

  Nooteboom attempts to escape this paradox by declaring that his travel is in fact another, richer way of being at home, “namely with myself.”⁶³ Four centuries earlier, Michel de Montaigne agreed with him. His physical travels, he wrote, could be interrupted at any point; “they are not founded on great hopes, each day is in fact its own goal. And the voyage of my life is conducted in the same way.” Therefore, he added: “I most often travel alone, and take pleasure in entertaining myself. It happens as in my dreams: by dreaming them, I entrust them to my memory.” The experience of travel, for Montaigne as for Nooteboom, is like the experience of reading, an exercise in self-reflection.

  But for most travelers today, an essential part of the experience is to avoid being with themselves. E. M. Forster’s too-famous advice “only connect”⁶⁴ has taken the shape of a mindless interconnectedness, the feeling that by means of the World Wide Web we are never alone, never required to account for ourselves, never obliged to reveal our true identity. We travel in herds, we chat in groups, we acquire friends on Facebook, we dread an empty room and the sight of a single shadow on our wall. We feel uncomfortable reading alone; we want our reading too to be “interconnected,” sharing comments onscreen, being directed by best- seller lists that tell us what others are reading, and by reader’s guides added by the publisher to the original text, suggesting questions to ask and answers to give. Nooteboom says that when he was young and inexperienced, he “chose movement”; only later on, “when I understood more, I realised I would be able, within this movement, to find the silence necessary in order to write.”⁶⁵ Most of us, however, dread silence because in silence we might be forced to observe, to reflect on past experience, to think.

  The act of reading a single line, deeply and comprehensively, carried for Saint Augustine the echo of all our libraries, past, present, and future, each word harking back to Babel and forward to the last trumpet. It meant a constant displacement from one acquired experience to the next, a nomadic reading through memory toward desire, conscious of the road traveled and of the road still ahead. Our worldwide reading, precisely because it assumes itself to be worldwide, seems to require no such displacement: everything, we are told, is here always, at the touch of a finger. We don’
t need to travel toward it because it appears all of a sudden, we don’t need to commit it to memory because our electronic memories perform that duty in our name, we don’t need to explore and sift through endless volumes because search engines will find our quarries for us. Nor do we need to claim a traveler’s freedom and responsibility in the act of reading: the rules and regulations of our technological apparatuses set strict parameters for us to follow and assume the praise or blame. Reading an electronic book, Dante’s Commedia in its digital edition for instance,⁶⁶ while possessing a uniform worldwide quality and proclaiming the possibilities of unlimited navigation, is in fact far more restricted and controlled than Dante’s own codex reading. This is partly because Dante and his contemporaries were conscious that, as readers, they were with the author on a journey that they would enrich with their own experience, with no other limitations than those established by the text itself and by their own capabilities. We instead, readers of an electronic text, set off through scrolling panels that lay before us enclosures of writing all identical to each other. We skim down an always present page surrounded not by space left for commentary but, in many cases, by preordained links to other pages, as well as distracting advertising. On the screen, we lack the material sense of physically following the story, unlike that the experience of holding a codex in our hands. Useful it is, of course, but it is limiting as well. As travelers in cyberspace we need to be more aware of these limitations and to find ways of reclaiming our traveler’s freedom.

  In a recent online publication analyzing the evolution of Google and its effects on the common reader, the French electronics analyst Jean Sarzana, together with his colleague Alain Pierrot, compared traditional book reading and electronic reading to different forms of travel. “With the book,” the authors wrote, “we sail like the Greeks did, with the coast always in sight. The electronic text allows us to pass on to satellite travel, and to see the Earth from far, far away.”⁶⁷ I would say that the contrary is true. Reading a codex held in our hands, conscious of its physical characteristics and material presence, we associate freely the page we are reading with other parts of the book, and also with other books; we reconstruct arguments and characters in our mind; we connect ideas and theories in a vast horizonless mental space. Reading electronically, we are, for the most part, “in wand’ring mazes lost.”

  The solid book of paper and ink is the ground we journey through, a starting point for commentary and conjecture. Its double, the book developed in our mind, is, as Augustine noted, a journal map of the original, a mental text made of past, present, and future reading, of recollection and anticipation. The electronic book, however, is not grounded; it is, by definition, virtual, and this apparent lack of solidity, this ghostly presence, accomplishes only up to a point our traditional mnemonic function, and though it performs the mental traveling we seek, it does it for its own sake, as it were, scrolling on without us needing to become conscious of the progress or take responsibility for it. These are not comparisons of value; they are comparisons of nature, of methods not better or worse but merely different from one another. Dante’s reading was like Ulysses’s sailing, far into the main, “to experience the unpeopled world behind the Sun.”⁶⁸ Except that, unlike Ulysses, Dante knew that there was always a first page to which he could unceasingly return. If we are to follow the expectations of our mercantile society, to perform first and foremost a technological task of which one of the byproducts is reading, today we must hug the electronic shore.

  It may be that, in our increasingly gadget-driven society, we have lost a certain sense of why we read, as we may have lost a certain sense of why we travel. Robert Louis Stevenson famously declared, “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”⁶⁹ He was speaking to an audience for whom travel had a destination, and also a home to which the traveler might safely return to profit from the experience. Today’s travel has no destination. Its purpose is not to move but to stand still, to remain in the here and now or, what amounts to the same thing, to move almost instantaneously from site to site, so that there is no passage from one point to another, either in space or in time, much as in our new reading habits. Unfortunately, such methods affect not only travel and reading. They affect our thoughts as well, our reflective capacities, our intellectual muscles. Our thinking functions require not only awareness of ourselves but also awareness of our passage through the world, and awareness of our passage through the pages of a book. This was an ability which we developed after the age of Gilgamesh’s tablets, and which we have relinquished in the age of the screen. Now we must once more learn to read slowly, profoundly, comprehensively, whether on paper or on the screen: to travel in order to return with what we’ve read. Only then will we, in the deepest sense, be able to call ourselves readers.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE READER IN THE IVORY TOWER

  Reading as Alienation from the World

  What tranquil life

  Leads he who escapes the worldly din

  And seeks the hidden path wherein

  Are found the few who in this world were wise.

  —Fray Luis de León,

  Song of the Solitary Life

  The Melancholy Tower

  It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

  —George Eliot, Middlemarch

  In front of a cosy fire, a curled-up dog at his feet, a man in a green dressing gown sits in his reading chair, but he isn’t reading. His book lies closed on an adjacent wooden chest. His head, wrapped in a pink scarf for warmth and comfort, leans against a white pillow. His right hand holds his robe, his left hand is tucked inside, as if to keep warm or to feel the beatings of his heart. His eyes are shut, so that he does not see (or does not choose to see) the nun approaching him with a prayer book and a rosary. The nun is perhaps an allegory of faith, summoning the man to his spiritual duties. A large side window shows a couple strolling through a bucolic landscape in the world of worldly pleasures. The shape of the picture is a sort of curved trapezoid and it lends the setting the appearance of a room in a tower. Stenciled on the patterned floor in Gothic letters is a single word: Accidia.

  The image is part of a table top painted by Hieronymus Bosch in the first decades of the sixteenth century, and now in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The entire composition depicts, in a circle, the seven deadly sins, with a vigilant Christ in the center, rising over the warning: “Cave, cave, deus videt” (“Beware, beware, God sees”). Four medallions, one in each corner of the table top, illustrate, clockwise, the death of a sinner, the Last Judgment, the reception in Paradise, and the punishments in Hell. Our sleeper illustrates sloth, the sin known in the Middle Ages as that of the midday demon.

  A second Bosch painting, known as The Peddler or The Prodigal Son, does not seem, at first instance, to deal with the same subject. The traditional titles of this work are misleading: the protagonist is less a peddler than a pilgrim, less one of the shady tramps of Flemish folklore than a man on a spiritual quest. The story of the Prodigal Son coming back to his father is perhaps a more fitting interpretation, since the allegorical reading speaks of the sinner repenting and returning to his Father in Heaven. Two versions exist of this work: one in the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, another on one of the covering panels of the Hay-Wagon triptych in the Prado (a copy also hangs in El Escorial). In both versions, a middle-aged man advances through an everyday landscape of delights and threats. In the Boymans version, he is coming through a village; in the Prado version, he is out in the countryside, about to cross a stream. He is lean and shabbily
dressed. One of his legs (an echo perhaps of the difference between “intellectual foot” and “affect foot,” mentioned in Chapter 1) is bandaged and slippered. He carries a basket on his back and a stick in his hands. He looks back toward a menacing dog wearing a spiked collar. In the background of the Boymans version is a tower, looming on the horizon above the pilgrim’s right shoulder. In the Prado painting, the tower is replaced by a gallows rising ominously on the hill above the pilgrim’s head. Gallows and tower share the same ignominious position.