Those Magificent Men

The next time you find yourself cursing air traffic control for a 30-minute delay in take-off or the airline for serving red wine straight out of the fridge, take a moment to think about Louis Blériot – who, in an improbable assemblage of wire, wood and canvas, with a sliver of polished wood for a seat, no cockpit or seat belts, and a 25 hp engine like that of a small powerboat, carried out the world’s first international and over-water flight, just over 100 years ago.

Barely five years after the Wright Brothers, Blériot was already taking air travel to its next stage, and literally into untested waters – his was a monoplane with a much smaller engine that the Wrights’, and of course he was exposing himself to an immense risk by flying over the sea, especially one as notoriously choppy and windy as the English Channel.

His plane can still be seen today, suspended by hooks and wires high above the ground in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris; this seems like its best chance of either getting into the air or staying there, so unlikely and fragile a craft does it seem to our Airbus and Boeing-accustomed eyes. One can no more imagine taking to the air in it than crossing the Atlantic in a 100-foot sailing ship or riding in a covered wagon from Philadelphia to Utah under constant threat of attack from Indians – the world has changed too much, and the men and women who made those fantastically hazardous journeys were pioneers whose courage and vision we may ritually salute, but which we can’t conceive of exhibiting in our own lives.

When one looks into Bleriot’s life he turns out to have been less of a wild-eyed dreamer than one might imagine – an early and successful entrepreneur in portable flashlights, he turned to airplanes primarily as a business opportunity, and the #9 model with which he made his famous crossing was intended to be sold as a self-assembly kit. Blériot undertook the Channel flight not primarily for the prize of £1000 (equivalent to over $100,000 in today’s money) but by way of publicity for what he was convinced would become a huge money-spinner. (It wasn’t, of course – though Blériot went on to become a successful constructor of military aircraft in World War I.)

He could of course no more have foreseen or imagined the commoditization of air travel than its deleterious environmental effects. It would take 20 years before regular commercial flights between London and Paris started to convey the élite of the inter-war years, and a further 30 till the arrival of the jet plane made it the preferred means of travel for the middle classes, and if anyone – impossibly in 1909 – had raised the issue of CO2 emissions, Blériot could very reasonably have pointed at the massive clouds of toxic fumes belched out by the steam trains and boats which were the only other form of travel in those days. And while we’re about it, the huge and heavy high-speed trains which take us under the Channel today, though emission-free in themselves, consume prodigious amounts of electricity, much of it generated from burning fossil fuels.

It’s generally quite impossible for anyone to predict in detail the long-term consequences of their inventions and discoveries – Einstein in 1905 couldn’t foresee the H-bomb, nor Henry Ford the profound transformation of cities and communities which mass motorization would bring about. But that doesn’t mean that the direction in which social and technological innovations will take us can’t be glimpsed – at least by a few visionaries capable of looking beyond the immediate and everyday world which most of us inhabit.

While Blériot was experimenting with his different designs for planes, 2000 miles away in Russia the great writer Tolstoy was still leading his anarcho-Christian commune, based on the principles of self-sufficiency and equality. And of course the early Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth had warned about the effects of industrialization a full 100 years earlier, arguing that men were sacrificing their authentic selves, trading their souls for wealth and comfort – and blighting the landscape in the process with their factories, railways and industrial cities.

Going back still further in the history of Western culture, this idea links up with some of our deepest-rooted and most powerful myths: Dr. Faustus, who traded his immortal soul for knowledge and power, or Prometheus, who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to men, and was punished with eternal torment. Or, of course, the myth that the story of Blériot most directly recalls, namely that of Icarus, whose reckless and fatal flight on the wings his father had made for him took him too close to the sun – a warning against overreaching and over-reliance on technology which has served as a metaphor for innumerable vainglorious and unsuccessful ventures over the ages.

Yet how could Icarus not have wanted to experience the glory of those eagle-feathered wings – did he maybe even regard falling into the sea and drowning as a price worth paying for that incomparable soaring? How could Blériot not have wanted to fly across the Channel, knowing that it was within his grasp? – because of deep doubts about the soul-eroding effect of technology? Men like Blériot are hardly subject to such anxieties.

Faust, Prometheus and Icarus – and Blériot, Ford and Edison, Tolstoy, Blake and Wordsworth – remind us that we have choices, and that these choice are freighted with consequences, some of them very profound. Only small children believe that one can enjoy the one without the other; as adults we are obliged to keep the bargains that we have made – and if this means returning to Mephistopheles what’s due to him, or falling to our deaths in the limitless blue ocean, so be it.

Leaving the body behind

Another dispatch from a noted holiday spot: this is Annecy, Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps, with its steep green-clad mountains and immaculately clean deep blue lake – warm enough thanks to a constant Southern sun through spring and summer for the fussiest of urbanites to swim in. And in the winter there’s snow for skiing: from October through April, year in and year out – making this region a prime holiday destination for six months or more of the year.

It’s curious to reflect that the high Alps as little as 200 years ago were regarded with horror as quite beyond the pale by the cultivated upper classes of Paris, Lyons or Geneva.

The simple log houses, which nowadays have turned into million-dollar second homes, were in those days the dens of near-savages who masticated incomprehensible dialects, slept with their animals, and eked out the most pitifully basic of existences on the most inhospitable of territories.

To gain some perspective and stretch my legs I decided to hike up the steep but well-marked trail that leads from the village on the lake where I was staying to the mountain above – a fitness-challenging ascent of over 2000 feet in about two miles. I noted that none of the holiday-makers in the countless hotels, camping-sites and holiday villas were venturing the same trail – there were just a handful at the viewpoint itself who had driven up to a nearby parking lot from where it’s an easy 15-minute ramble.

And why should they? Ascending 2000 feet in two miles on a day when the temperature is in the 80s (high 20s °C) is seriously hard work, and in this respect perhaps we do have something in common with the pre-industrial Savoyards. They surely avoided expending unnecessary physical effort; no one would have climbed that peak except for the pressing reason that its name suggests: Col des Contrebandiers (Smugglers’ Pass).

It must once have been the most convenient (or least inconvenient) way to convey brandy, tobacco, or gold around the customs barriers that used to separate every small European province from its neighbours.

But of course, those (few) of us who walk those trails today, quite unlike the smugglers of 200-300 years ago, do so simply for pleasure and for exercise. We live in a world where the movement of people and goods is almost totally disconnected from physical effort: looking down on the lake I saw a water-skier, her movement sustained entirely by the rapid burning of large quantities of diesel fuel. In the days when most movements around the lake were by rowing boat, people would have had a healthy respect for its 20 km length and 3 km width; today a couple of liters of diesel will get you across it in barely five minutes.

Fossil fuels and the internal combustion and jet engines have “virtualized” distance and location; in a world where you can fly overnight from Hong Kong to New York with no more inconvenience than a sub-optimal choice of movies, the ten thousand miles that separate China from the United States have become almost meaningless. (In the days when you had to travel by ship, though there was no effort and little risk involved, you would at least have been aware of the distance.)

The disconnection from the physical body – considerably accentuated by the increasing amount of time we spend online – has many well-documented effects on people’s physical and psychological health and on their relationship with the natural world, and the comparison with our pre-industrial ancestors points to yet another effect. They could rely on the signals from their own bodies and from the world around them to assess any possible action or movement in terms of the effort or resources required. To survive the winter, snowbound in those high mountains, they gathered wood in the autumn, and they knew exactly how much was needed.
They didn’t stay up till 3:00 am to play cards, burning precious wood (and expensive candles), but rose and went in with the sun, to make the most of its warming rays before the long dark freezing nights set in. No one walked up and down those precipitate trails, or rowed a heavy wooden boat across the lake, without measuring very precisely (and almost instinctively) whether the eventual payoff justified the necessary physical effort.

The absence of that sort of immediate and natural feedback is surely one of the reasons why we don’t seem to be able to deal with the causes and consequences of global warming: why not water-ski across a lake if you can afford the fuel? Why not fly 2000 miles on a whim if you can pay the airfare; why not burn a few more liters of gas to drive up a mountain on a hot day, rather than expend the effort of walking up it? The signals of what this is doing to our planet are there, but they’re not immediate, not part of an instinctual and familiar response system like tired legs and arms, or a prematurely depleted woodpile.

Meanwhile and for now, Annecy and other places like it around the world are still there and still lovely – and for that let’s all give thanks. But I wonder what of all this my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to enjoy? Perhaps if they have no choice but legs and rowing-boats it might actually be the best outcome.

The solitary violinist in the Place des Vosges

Place des Vosges, Paris – in the last 20 years or so this ancient and once-neglected part of the city has become one of its most chic quartiers, and firmly on the map for every visiting tourist. And on this hot Sunday in early August there are thousands of them: sprawling on the grass in the square, thronging the surrounding boutiques and trendy cafés, and swarming up and down the stairs of the Victor Hugo house overlooking the gardens, admiring the great man’s taste in home furnishings. A randomly multinational and multilingual multitude, an invading army with no leaders, no strategy, no battle plan and no flag.

And there, under the arches by one of the four entrances to the square, is a busking violinist. In his 40s I’d guess, he’s wearing full-length cargo pants and a fashionable linen jacket – he certainly doesn’t look like any kind of a street person – and, apart from the violin case open to receive coins, he’s curiously detached from what he’s doing. He makes no eye contact with anyone and he doesn’t wish to be photographed, nor does he acknowledge me when I drop a euro into his case, or even when I mime applause before walking away. Because he plays sublimely – if one was paying 50€ to hear him at a recital rather than hearing him for free in the open air one wouldn’t be disappointed.

The piece is Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin (you can see and hear it on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waxat-_tRH8), one of the pinnacles of the repertory, a piece which only top virtuosi can even attempt. As I stand there, transfixed by this incredible music which is being produced a couple of yards away from me, I observe that I seem to be almost the only person who’s even noticed the musician. Everyone else is bustling around and treating him with less attention than if he was an ice cream vendor – as if he was a piece of street furniture.

Not surprising perhaps – I was reminded of the incident a few years ago when the world-famous violinist Joshua Bell busked during the rush hour at a subway station in Washington DC, and only seven people stopped to watch him (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html). And of course the same point applies, about the desensitization effected by modern media, the endless and pointless busyness which prevents us from noticing what’s around us even when we’re on holiday.

But there’s more to it than that – why, I wondered, was the violinist so unwilling to engage with his “audience”? No doubt he’s not a habitual busker – and I noticed that there were few coins in his case, and those mostly low-value ones. Could he have felt ashamed in some way of what he was doing – and if so, then why? What could be a more generous and selfless act than to share his great gift with the crowds of visitors drawn on this glorious day to one of Paris’s most architecturally perfect monuments – and why should he not receive something from them in return?

But there’s a problem: we’re not living any more in a world where the exercise of an artistic talent might have been an end in itself, or where the artist’s income might be independent of any particular services rendered. In today’s world all commercial transactions are precisely delineated and fenced around by complex legal agreements; a brilliant violinist playing in a public square is stepping outside the commercial framework that we all live in and know so well, violating the pricing structure that governs all legitimate professional activity. (Imagine a ‘busking lawyer’ drawing up contracts in a public park for a few dollars flung into his hat.)

So the beauty goes by us, and we go by it – the spontaneity that might make someone just simply want to play Bach in the Place des Vosges on a sunny Sunday in August, for sheer joy, a thing of the remote past.

Except that it needn’t be. Need it?