The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [31]
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