Apr 15 2009
Gone troppo
Today I’m reading interviews with English biographer Richard Holmes, who revolutionized the practice of biographical writing by precisely tracing the travels of his subjects. His book, Footsteps, made him seem at first like a twat to me, traipsing about in his 19-year-old rich ex-boarding-school Bohemian rags, speaking bad French in conversations with country folk about Robert Louis Stevenson. But then I thought of my friend Christy and I traveling together in Rome when I was 22, and wondered about privilege. Going to Europe and sleeping on trains because you can’t afford a sleep-car ticket: is this the very epitome of privilege? I simply bought my way into adventurous poverty. It was very exciting. One night Christy and I tried to sleep in Termini station but were ousted at 5 am by officious carabinieri, poking us with their boots, demanding identification. I suppose this is akin what Sir Joseph Banks felt when he saw the Tahitian natives surfing and thought about his boring office back home at Oxford. A new sensory economy of modernity.
