The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How the Bicycle Was Born: Mount Tambora, the Year Without a Summer, and the Stubborn Courage to Reimagine the Possible

By Maria Popova

This essay is adapted from Traversal.

On April 5, 1815, as Napoleon is assembling his troops for the Battle of Waterloo, where he would meet his final defeat, the lieutenant-governor of Java leaps to his feet upon hearing the unmistakable roar of cannons in the distance while the setting sun is honeying the marble of his colonial mansion. Having taken advantage of the Napoleonic Wars to claim the island for the British crown from the Dutch and the French, he is all too aware that enemies might return for what we now call Indonesia — Earth’s largest archipelago, a geological treasure lush with ecosystems and betempled with human reverence, turned into a political trophy.

On Sumatra, chieftains hear the explosions and attribute them to a combat between spirits — the local version of the Devil endeavoring to keep their dead ancestors from reaching the local version of Paradise.

A thousand miles away, off the coast of another Indonesian island, a cruiser belonging to the British East India Company — the mercantile mutation of colonialism that metastasized into capitalism — hears the cannons from the south and assumes pirates are after its wares. For days, the ship patrols the horizon and neighboring islands. The sailors keep hearing the cannons, which seem to be drawing nearer and firing in quicker succession, but they find no enemies. Instead, they are plunged deeper and deeper into a sensescape that grows more and more surreal.

Morning comes, bringing not daybreak but nightfall. At eight o’clock, the ship’s captain anxiously observes that “some extraordinary occurrence” is clearly taking place.

The face of the heavens to the southward and westward had assumed the most dismal and lowering aspect, and it was much darker than when the sun rose.

What has at first appeared as a curtain of thunderclouds hanging low and heavy over the horizon now begins radiating an eerie dark-crimson glow, slowly charring the whole sky. By ten, the ship is hardly visible across the mere mile from the shore; by noon, the dark hemorrhage has spilled across the entire firmament. “I never saw any thing equal to it in the darkest night,” the captain recounted; “it was impossible to see your hand when held up close to the eye.” Being sufficiently versed in astronomy, as all ship commanders had to be, and in possession of reliable lunar tables, he knows that the next predicted solar eclipse is months and hemispheres away. No — this is something entirely unpredicted and entirely strange, constricting comprehension in the narrow neck of an hourglass of unreality, suddenly inverted to make every known and trusted thing — time, space, light, color — drip into its opposite.

And then, black rain begins showering the deck. Dry rain. The sailors, awestruck, dip their fingers into the strange substance and lick. (We are always children in the most cataclysmic moments.) It has no taste at all, only a faint burnt odor. It comes down so fast, and in such vast quantities, that within hours it has piled a foot in many places; the crew set about tossing it overboard with buckets — several tons, in one officer’s estimate, by the time the first sunbeams finally puncture the blackness a week later, revealing the colossal floating pumice stone that was once a ship.

An Erupting Volcano by Night by David Humbert de Superville. (Available as a print, a blanket, and more.)

Eons before humans began slicing Earth’s surface along artificial lines, trading and translating across them, warring over their subtlest curve, staking personal identities and nationalist ideologies relative to them, Earth itself divided the lithosphere below into enormous, drifting jigsaw pieces — the product of processes that began in the planet’s adolescence, long before we descended from the trees to invent the consensual reality of countries and currency and the writing systems in which to encode those ever-contested consensuses. Friction along the boundaries of these restless plates would cause the roiling open mouth of an Indonesian mountain to exhale one million tons of ash eighteen miles skyward in an era when the geological reality of tectonic plates was less real to the human imagination than the religious mythology of a punitive underworld for imperfect souls.

Climaxing on April 10, 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora was the deadliest in recorded history, a hundred times more violent than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Two billion years after colossal volcanic eruptions melted Earth’s ice-entombed earliest life-forms from out of the planet’s first global winter, nine thousand years after a cave artist drew the first surviving map of spatial relations to depict her location relative to a nearby volcano, the people who had built their lives and mapped their loves at Tambora’s foot had no chance to escape. An artillery of magma fired in every direction as the volcano heated the air above to thousands of degrees and filled the sky with twice as much pumice and ash as there is water in Lake Geneva — enough to bury all of Great Britain to the knee. Lava poured from the lip of the mountain toward the sea, leveling every mortared illusion of security, every spell cast against uncertainty in stone and wood, until no houses were left. It decimated every tree, flower, and animal on all sides of the peninsula, scorching the ocean itself as the rivers of molten rock vanquished all marine life in their path. The ocean lashed back fifteen-foot tsunamis loaded with the trunks of trees, destroying everything that had escaped the lava’s path ashore. The explosive collision of hot lava and cool salt water blasted even more ash into the air and blackened the white sand beaches with endless fields of pumice stones, fields soon drawn adrift onto the ocean to remain there as surreal antimatter icebergs, menacing ships for years to come.

Two centuries after Johannes Kepler was ridiculed for conceiving of Earth as a living organism with a circulation, a metabolism, and a breath, Tambora exhaled so forcefully that its 55 million tons of sulfur dioxide shot up twenty miles, filling the troposphere — the moist lowest layer of the atmosphere, curled with clouds. It then punctured the dry, stable stratosphere — a region of the sky that would be discovered some seventy years later, nesting the planet’s natural thermostat: the ozone layer, its discovery a century away from Tambora, fundamental to the understanding of what makes our planet a habitable world.

The sulfur dioxide clung immediately to the hydrogen gas permeating the stratosphere, bonding into more than 100 million tons of sulfuric acid — a herd of 25 million deadly elephants suspended in the sky, made of droplets each a fraction of a flea in size, turning Earth into a temporary Venus, whose thick cloudscape is composed primarily of sulfuric acid droplets. Powerful jet streams accelerated this aerosol cloud to sixty miles per hour and hurled it toward the other side of the globe. Injected into the bloodstream of the stratosphere, Tambora’s aerosol cloud circumnavigated the globe eighty times faster than Captain Cook, shape-shifting as it traversed the skies, pulled apart by varying wind speeds and gravity acting on differently sized particles.

By the time winter came, a thin film of ash had enveloped the entire planet, returning sunlight to its sender. Temperatures began dropping, weather patterns grew wild, and the seasons — those handrails of stability in a war-torn and uncertain world — came unbolted.’

Painting by 19th-century Norwegian artist Knud Baade. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

By the spring of 1816, entire chunks of landmass seemed to have been torn off from their time and place and hurled back into some otherworldly winter by a strange seasonal time machine. Across Europe and America, across farmsteads and newspaper pages, people inveighed disbelievingly against the “backward” season that rendered the young Mary Shelley so bored in her indoor captivity amid the downpours that she wrote Frankenstein. Summer sleet came down on English towns. Hail pummeled Scotland. Snow blanketed Pennsylvania and New York in the last week of June. An inch of ice crusted ponds and rivulets from Ithaca to Maine, blocks of it drifting down the St. Lawrence River. Heavy black frost sank its teeth half an inch into the Trenton soil. Enormous snowflakes covered the ground in Bangor. The hopeful embryonic life budding on New England branches was frozen dead, leaving entire hillsides of trees looking scorched. June blanketed Boston in snow, never recorded before or since, and covered the hills that Emily Dickinson’s father was then wandering as an adolescent. The icy apocalypse drove flocks of wild birds out of the forest and into barns and cities, seeking warmth. Many froze, their small lifeless bodies dropping from the sky onto the streets. Farmers picked up handfuls of dead hummingbirds from their fields. Unsweatered for human backs, shorn sheep perished. In town after town, elders could remember nothing like this.

No one connected this uncanny weather to the Tambora eruption. News of it didn’t even reach Europe and America for months. In Ireland, the first mention of Tambora appeared nine months after the eruption, which had savaged the island’s harvest and unleashed a famine-fomented typhoid epidemic that killed sixty thousand people. Meteorology was an unborn science. These were calamities without causal link. An enormous hand seemed to have shaken the snow globe of spacetime until the parts came loose and fell in all the wrong places across the miniature of life.

Pattern-seeking animals that we are, often blind to causality, often seduced by correlation, the surreal weather following Tambora’s draconic exhale was blamed on everything from the devil that always hovered on the shoulders of the pious to the sudden appearance of sunspots that so transfixed the era’s astronomers before it was understood that these temporary flecks of darkness are a function of our star’s magnetic field. No event in recorded history, save perhaps a total solar eclipse, would stir superstition and science with equal vigor. As the Seine rose to alarming heights, Parisian priests instructed parishioners to pray for better weather, and a candlelit procession of young women unspooled onto the streets, praying to the city’s patron saint for clear skies. In England, churches began offering public prayers for sunshine. In France, a physician claimed to have diagnosed the Sun as diseased and the Moon as terminally ill. Throughout the continent, cathedrals began filling with the terrified. From the elevated lookout of his scientific orientation and his opium delirium, Coleridge smirked that his chief complaint about the apocalyptic weather was that it kept him from exercise.

Art by Ryōji Arai from Every Color of Light by Hiroshi Osada

As the downpours continued in Europe through what would have been summer — 1816 would come to be known as the Year Without a Summer — the shoreside vineyards from which harvest songs had risen the previous summer were now swallowed by the river, silent under the leaden skies, the flooded fields afloat with the fetuses of grapes that had failed to ripen. Entire villages were submerged, entire crops devastated. Eight continuous weeks of rain. Storms, hail, and torrential downpours never before seen in the land. Threefold the seasonal rainfall in many regions of England, Ireland, France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. Ice stilling the Thames in September — an anomaly never recorded before or since.

Famine was rising over this uncanny horizon stretching between continents and warring nations. The price of hay doubled. The invisible hand of exploitation began wringing the wrist of need as merchants started buying up all the high-quality grain they could get their hands on in anticipation of the poor harvest, then bidding up the price. Crops in the rice-growing region of China were devastated, sweeping mass deaths across the land as the Chinese Empire bent under its own scale in the face of towering subsistence needs; when the weather finally improved, the surviving peasants replanted the rice fields not with rice but with a far more valuable cash crop, one with a growing global market in an increasingly ailing, increasingly interconnected world: opium. Southwestern China thus became the dominant opium-growing region of the nineteenth century, fueling the visions of the Romantics and the living nightmare of the opioid crisis that would savage the world two hundred years later.

While Great Britain, with its developed maritime trade and ample ports, was less impacted by the famine, landlocked central European countries struggled for survival. In the frozen ground of central Italy, farmers had been unable to sow their wheat at all. Governments began bribing key geopolitical fulcrums with food — the city of Mainz, on the banks of the Rhine, a vital defense point against French invasion, received 300,000 pounds of flour from Austria; Prussia promised the same weight of wheat come harvest time.

Storm Cloud by Georgia O’Keeffe. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Karl von Drais watched menacing clouds steel the sky on his thirty-first birthday in Germany; he watched the specter of famine rise over his homeland as spring refused to bloom into summer, withering into winter instead. The young man — a radical nobleman and forester who would later recant his inherited title of Baron and drop the von from his name in solidarity with the revolutions that swept Europe in the middle of the century in defense of liberal principles and working-class rights — was moved to allay the suffering in some way. Observing the vicious cycle — failing crops causing shortages of fodder causing horses to die of starvation causing humans to starve, unable to travel in search of food and carry their paltry provisions back home — he set about devising a mechanical substitute for the horse, one that would require no feed or fuel, only human will and light exertion. Having lived through the French Revolution, he understood how widespread famine on the heels of a bitterly cold winter could rouse people to bloodshed.

By his thirty-second birthday, Karl had perfected his Laufmaschine — the “running machine,” first progenitor of the modern bicycle, christened vélocipède in France and derided as “dandy horse” in England. No gears, no chain, no tires or pedals even — just a seat atop two in-line metal wheels, to be straddled and propelled with strides pushing off the ground — a precarious high-speed waltz between footfall and wheelroll.

Karl Drais with his vélocipède

On June 12, 1817, Karl tested his creation up and down Baden’s best road, traversing the round trip of seven miles in a little more than an hour.

His proto-bicycle was soon banned in Germany, England, and America as a public hazard when riders struggling to balance the contraption migrated from the carriage-rutted streets to the smoother sidewalks, bolting past startled pedestrians. But once a culture developed around the novelty, once reason and regulation enveloped that culture, the bicycle did for the human foot what the telescope had done for the eye. A new era of traversal began. More than five thousand years after a forgotten sapiens invented the wheel, another ignited the Promethean fire of mechanized personal transport by inventing self-propulsion on two wheels. For the first time in the history of our species, human beings could traverse land faster than on foot, beholden to no other creature and relying only on the internal combustion of their own metabolism, propelled only by where they wanted to go and how hard they were willing to push to get there — in this glorious prosthetic stride, an allegory for life itself.

Art from Bicycling for Ladies, 1896. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Had Tambora erupted in a world less vulnerable, less riven by conflict and less razed of resilience by the Napoleonic Wars, the global impact might have been different; the biological, ecological, social, and cultural costs — as well as the gains — might have been different; so many lives, millions, might have been spared; among them might have been another Mary Shelley, another Albert Einstein; the bicycle might not exist, Frankenstein might not exist, the opioid crisis might not exist. Over and over chance reaches into the loom of the possible to unspool the events of our lives, lives livable only if we never think about how unrecognizable the tapestry would be had any one thread been different. To be a thinking creature is to slip the tendrils of thought into every if that fissures the monolith of is; to be a feeling creature is to pulsate with the thrill and terror of every might bridging the two.

BP

An Irishwoman’s Fierce and Poetic Record of Traversing the World on a Bicycle in the Middle of the Cold War

By Maria Popova

An Irishwoman’s Fierce and Poetic Record of Traversing the World on a Bicycle in the Middle of the Cold War

In the early nineteenth century, the teenage Mary Godwin and her not-yet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley left England for the Continent, traveling by foot and by mule, on the wings of love and youth. Through their constant poverty and hunger, through the frequent accidents and illnesses, they slaked their souls on beauty — on the shimmering grandeur of mountains and rivers, fiery sunsets and moonlit nights. It was on those dirt roads, under those open skies, that they became Romantics.

A century and a half later, another indomitable spirit of uncommon sensitivity to beauty, in nature and in human nature, took those dirt roads and wound them halfway around the world, discovering the romance of reality along the way.

In January 1963, as Central Europe was entering its harshest winter in eighty years, Dervla Murphy (November 28, 1931–May 22, 2022) mounted her bicycle named Roz and left Ireland for India, by way of France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Along the way, narrowly escaping death by landslide and wolf pack, by Taliban and six-foot icicle, she encountered people from wildly different cultures, whose boundless hospitality affirmed what she had to have already known in her bones to endeavor on so dangerous a journey at all: “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.”

Dervla Murphy as a young woman, Barcelona.

Her unassumingly titled account of the experience, drawn from her itinerant diaries — Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (public library) — is one of the most dazzlingly, unsummarizably wonderful books I have read in a lifetime of passionate reading: the kind that rekindles your faith in the human spirit and reenchants you with the staggering beauty of this world.

A typical entry reads:

I slept very well last night in my roadside tea-house, curled up in a corner of the one-roomed building, with moonlight streaming through the doorway that had no door.

To her, a ferocious storm is but a mirror for the poetry of reality:

By now the thunder had ceased and when the wind dropped the overwhelming silence of the mountains reminded me of the hush felt in a great empty Gothic cathedral at dusk — a silence which is beautiful in itself.

She departs with only a saddlebag of luggage, containing her passport and camera, a map, one spare pair of nylon pants and nylon shirt, toothbrush, comb, writing paper, two pens, and a copy of Blake’s poems.

The very outset of her journey is emblematic of the spirit of the whole: When her planned departure date arrives with temperatures far below any she has lived through, Murphy decides to wait a week, hoping the cold would remit. When it does not and each grocery outing becomes “a scaled-down Expedition to the Antarctic,” she presses forth and departs anyway — the first bout of the touchingly stubborn persistence that would mark her entire endeavor.

Dervla Murphy

With an icicle firmly attached to her nose, she makes her way to a Yugoslavian youth hostel, gets blown off her saddle by the most ferocious wind she has ever experienced, tumbles down a fifteen-foot sloping ditch and into a stream frozen so solid that her impact produces not even a crack on the ice, crawls back onto the bicycle, eventually accepts a nightmarish ride in a rickety truck across “250 miles of frozen plain which stretched with relentless white anonymity,” and resumes on two wheels after the truck crashes into a tree. All along, she slakes her soul on the austere beauty of the landscape:

At the valley’s end my road started to climb the mountains, sweeping up and up and again up, in a series of hairpin bends that each revealed a view more wild and splendid than the last.

[…]

On the morning of my third day in Belgrade, there came a rise in temperature that not merely eased the body but relaxed the nerves. Never shall I forget the joy of standing bareheaded in my host’s front garden, watching tenuous, milky clouds drifting across the blue sky.

Art by Leonard Wisegard from The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown, published in Dervla Murphy’s childhood

Immediately after fighting off a pack of wolves, one of which had attached itself by its teeth to the shoulder of her windbreaker, she again orients to beauty:

All around me the mountains, valleys and forests lay white and lifeless under a low, grey sky, in the profound stillness of a landscape where no breeze stirred, there was neither house nor bird to be seen and the streams were silent under their covering of ice. I stopped often to look around me, and savour the uncanny sensation of being the only living, moving thing in the midst of this hushed desolation, where my own breathing sounded loud.

Sometimes the enchantment of nature almost blinds her to the menacing brutalities of its forces. In one of myriad passages that radiate both her felicitous spirit and her tender relationship with her bicycle as an anthropomorphized companion — relatable relations for those of us who live on two wheels — she writes:

From the near distance came a dull, booming sound, as soldiers blew up the gigantic accumulations of rock-hard snow which, unless artificially loosened, would have dammed the river and sent its overflow rushing through the nearby town of Cuprija. It was awe-inspiring to see the wide, angry Morava swiftly sweeping its tremendous burden of ice and snow-chunks through the vast wilderness of sullen, brown flood-waters, and my awe was soon justified when a massive wave came crashing across the road, swept me off Roz and rolled me over and over, choking as I swallowed the muddy water and gasping as its iciness penetrated my clothes. Next a branch of a little roadside tree appeared above me and pulling myself up by it I found that the water, though still flowing strongly, was now no more than three feet deep. I looked for Roz and, during one appalling moment, thought that she had disappeared. Then I saw a yellow handlebar grip in a ditch, and hurried to rescue her.

By February, she has made her way to the barely discernible border of communist Bulgaria, on the other side of which lay my mother in her crib, about to turn one. Murphy enters the “the insignificant little house which is Bulgaria’s Northern Frontier Fortress” and knocks on one of the doors. When no one answers, she knocks again. A delightful scene ensues:

Again my knock remained unanswered, but this time, when I opened a door leading out of the hall, I found a policeman happily dozing by the stove, with a cat and two kittens on his lap. I immediately diagnosed that he was a nice policeman, and when I had gently roused him, and he had recovered from the shock of being required to function officially, I had my diagnosis confirmed.

In December, the Bulgarian Embassy in London had issued me with a visa valid for only four days. Now this genial policeman, who spoke fluent English, took one look at the card, said that it was ridiculous, and issued me with a new visa entitling me to stay in Bulgaria as long as I wished! After which we sat by the stove and amiably discussed our two countries over glasses of brandy.

She proceeds to cycle almost all the way to Istanbul, save a few short lifts from busses and trucks between blizzards in the Turkish highlands. On one of them, she barely escapes “being entombed in snow” when the bus tumbles into a ditch on the side of the mountain road and the snowplough dispatched to rescue it careens off the cliff, killing both men onboard. Even in such proximity to death, her buoyant spirit and largehearted humanity shine through:

As we waited the snow piled higher and higher around us, its silent softness contrasting eerily with the whine of the gale through the pass. It is on occasions such as these that I thank God for my sanguine temperament, which refuses to allow me to believe in disaster until it is finally manifest, and I noticed that my comrades in distress were equally well fortified against panic by their fatalistic acceptance of Allah’s Will. Yet perhaps we were all more apprehensive than we had allowed ourselves to recognise, for we cheered very loudly when the second snowplough eventually appeared.

(You can tell by now that I have fallen wholeheartedly in love with this bygone stranger.)

When she crosses over to Persia, presently the Islamic Republic of Iran, she shares a squalid bed with “a host of energetic fleas” in a box of a room at a roadside dosshouse, where she is awakened in the middle of the night by “a six-foot, scantily-clad Kurd” who has peeled her bedding from her and is leaning over in the moonlight. Without hesitation she pulls the pistol from under her pillow, fires it at the ceiling, and closes the scene. The next thing she writes is another exultation in beauty:

On the following morning came one of the most glorious experiences of the entire journey — a fifteen-mile cycle-run in perfect weather around the base of Mount Ararat. This extraordinary mountain, which inspires the most complex emotions in the least imaginative traveller, affected me so deeply that I have thought of it ever since as a personality encountered, rather than a landscape observed… Cycling day after day beneath a sky of intense blue, through wild mountains whose solitude and beauty surpassed anything I had been able to imagine during my day-dreams about this journey.

“View of Nature in Ascending Regions” from Yaggi’s Geographical Portfolio, 1893. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In a sentiment that embodies the entwined history of light and consciousness, she adds:

Particularly I remember the unique purity of the light, which gave to every variation of every colour an individual vitality and which lucidly emphasised every line, curve and angle. Here, for the first time, I became fully aware of light as something positive, rather than as a taken-for-granted aid to perceiving objects.

Punctuating all this natural beauty are the most unhandsome manifestations of human nature: amateur bandits seize Roz, but a pistol shot Murphy fires into the air makes the scatter “like rabbits”; a “gorgeously uniformed and braided” young police officer summons her to his quarters in the police barracks on the pretext of some bureaucratic business and attempts to force himself on her, which she escapes by grabbing at his trousers and deploying “unprintable tactics to reduce him to a state of temporary agony.” Elsewhere, turbaned youths stone her within moments of her arrival in their village, further maiming her already ailing right arm, blistered with sunburn from all the long hours cycling steadily eastward.

“Today a deep depression has moved over Dervla,” she writes with third-person remove in one of the handful of entries in which she allows herself anything other than absolute buoyancy of spirit. Upon arrival in Teheran, she is told at the embassy that “under no circumstances whatever would they grant a visa to a woman who intended cycling alone through Afghanistan” — six years earlier, a Swedish woman motorist had been found chopped up to pieces, prompting the government to ban all lone woman travelers. With her usual wry rationalism, she points out that “women get murdered in Europe with monotonous regularity and that the hazards of travelling alone through [Afghanistan] were probably no greater than the hazards of doing likewise in Britain or France.” Her unassuming persistence grants her an audience with “a sufficiently senior man,” to whom she declares herself solely responsible for her fate, waiving all governmental responsibility. Her account of the exchange is one of the most multiply charming in the book:

Fortunately, the victim of my machinations was an upholder of Free Enterprise and the Liberty of the Individual. He looked at me in silence for a moment, then said, “Well, I suppose if visas had been required in 1492, the New World would not have been discovered. All right — I’ll play ball. But remember that all this is very unofficial and unbecoming to my position and I’m depending on you to come out alive at the other end, for my sake – which I somehow think you will do.”

And off she goes, into the hinterland, her heart heavy with the news that two women have just been killed in the Mullah-provoked riots against women’s emancipation. Once again she turns to the nonhuman consolations of nature in this uncommonly beautiful corner of the globe:

Every mile from Teheran was pure joy — as much the joy of space and silence as of visual loveliness… These extravagantly sweeping lines of plain and mountain are intoxicating to an islander and the blending of shades on the barren hillsides is a symphony of colour.

Over and over, it seems like Murphy’s bright spirit is her natural amulet against misfortune. Stopping by to rest at a local village, she reaches across the barrier of language, culture, and age to reduce the local children to giggles by pretending to be a sheepdog, before metamorphosing into a donkey to crawl around the sand on all fours with three toddlers or her back.

Dervla Murphy and Roz in one of the villages she stopped to rest in.

She takes a detour to Omar Khayyám’s hometown, “to pay homage,” where she is mobbed by eager local youths begging her help — which she gives eagerly — with their English, waving their dictionaries and their copies of Jane Eyre, and bombarding her with complex pronunciation problems as she relishes the town’s stunning gardens full of “smooth lawns, pale green cascades of weeping willow and brilliant beds of carnations, roses, pansies and geraniums.”

Everywhere she goes, she is a spectacle — some have never seen a bicycle, some have never seen a lone woman traveller, and none have never seen, nor could even conceive of, a woman traveling the world alone on a bicycle. In her baggy hand-me-down shirt and boots donated by the U.S. Army in the Middle East, she is often taken for a man — because, she speculates, “the idea of a woman travelling alone is so completely outside the experience and beyond the imagination of everyone.”

Art from Bicycling for Ladies, 1896. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Murphy observes these cultural peculiarities without the slightest bit of personal offense or judgment, only with largehearted curiosity, reserving her only instance of unconcealed contempt for an encounter with a member of a wholly different culture:

American: “What the hell are you doing on this goddam road?”

Me: (having taken an instant dislike to him) “Cycling.”

American: “I can see that — but what the hell for?”

Me: “For fun.”

American: “Are you a nut-case or what? Gimme that bike and I’ll stick it on behind and you get in here and we’ll get out of this goddam frying-pan as fast as we can. This track isn’t fit for a camel!”

Me: “When you’re on a cycle instead of in a jeep it doesn’t feel like a frying-pan. Moreover, if you look around you you’ll notice that the landscape compensates for the admittedly deplorable state of the road. In fact I enjoy cycling through this sort of country – but thank you for the kind offer. Goodbye.”

As I rode on he passed me and yelled: “You are a goddam nut-case!”

I regard this sort of life, with just Roz and me and the sky and the earth, as sheer bliss.

For all the levity Murphy brings to her challenges, she is also moving through the world — a world so very different from the one she knows — with the deep-thinking, deep-feeling person’s unassailable sensitivity to the underlying complexities of culture. Often, her natural generosity of spirit leads her to layers of nuance that evade even the most forward-thinking of persons, even today; always, she meets the unknown not with judgment but with curiosity — that hallmark of true grandeur of spirit. Finding herself “quite sorry to be leaving Persia,” she reflects:

Beneath all the physical dirt and moral corruption there is an elegance and dignity about life here which you can’t appreciate at first, while suffering under the impact of the more obvious and disagreeable national characteristics. The graciousness with which peasants greet each other and the effortless art with which a few beautiful rags and pieces of silver are made to furnish and decorate a whole house — in these and many other details Persia can still teach the West. I suppose it’s all a question of seeing one of the oldest and richest civilisations in the world long past its zenith.

Even through the slow and difficult climb to Herat — a city “as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem” — she drinks in the beauty that remains her most steadfast fuel along the grueling journey:

It took me four and a half hours to cover the thirty miles… but I enjoyed the wide silence of the desert in the cool of the morning. This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly.

So begins her love affair with Afghanistan, which casts a lifelong enchantment on her with its aura of unremitting beauty: the beauty of its nature, the beauty of its art, the beauty of its people — “by our standards, the best-looking people in the world,” endowed with a soft kindliness she has never encountered before:

I already love the country and the people and somehow language barriers don’t matter when one feels such a degree of sympathy with a race which responds so graciously and kindly to a smile or a gesture of friendship.

The country would soon emerge as her favorite leg of the journey by many orders of magnitude, beckoning her to return:

This is the part of Afghanistan I was most eager to see, but in my wildest imaginings I never thought any landscape could be so magnificent. If I am murdered en route it will have been well worth while!

In a splendid contribution to literature’s most exquisite meditations on the color blue, she writes from Herat:

This morning I went to the outskirts of the town just to wander among the green woods and sit on green grass beside a little stream in a beautifully kept public park. Many of the streets are lined with enormous pine trees and a glorious garden of lawns and lavishly blooming rose bushes stretches in front of the mosque… I sat on the shady side of the enormous courtyard for almost an hour, enjoying the mosaics and the gold of the brickwork glowing against the blue sky. It was very peaceful there with no sound or movement except for a myriad twittering martins swooping in and out of the cool, dim passages between the hundreds of pillared archways.

[…]

The predominant colour here is blue of all shades, with yellow, black, pink, brown, green and orange tiles blended so skilfully that from a certain distance a façade or minaret looks as though made of some magic precious metal for the colour of which there is no name.

Cycling through the most beautiful part of the Hindu Kush, she gasps once more at the otherworldly mesmerism of this world:

The glory of those mountains makes one feel that it must all be a dream. Every peak and slope and outcrop is different in shape, texture and colour, the rock and shale and clay shaded purple, rose, green, ochre, black, pale grey, dark grey, brown, navy and off-white. Then, below those arid, soaring cliffs… graceful with willows and poplars, and soft with new grass and filled with bird-song and the rush of the river.

But hers is no rosy enchantment with nature — she is equally attuned to its impartial brutality that comes even-handed with the beauty, ready to reduce human lives to trifling minutia in a matter of moments:

For about the first twenty of this afternoon’s forty miles we were going through a narrow gorge overhung by mountains eroded to many grotesquely beautiful shapes — some were like the ruins of colossal Gothic cathedrals, others had crags worn by wind and water into parodies of sculptured human faces and always there was that incredible display of colours. Then the valley widened slightly and we came to a region of devastation, a shattered wilderness where giant rocks, the size of cottages, lay strewn everywhere, and wide fissures in the mountains warned that at the next earth tremor — and they are frequent here — the whole appearance of the area would change.

Illustration from Bicycling for Ladies based on Alice Austen’s photographs. (Available as a print.)

And yet, through the flat tires, the broken rib, the “extreme hunger than extreme thirst, which almost drives one mad,” the food poisoning, the pain of “mental loneliness,” the storms of ice and dust, the fingers burned on the metal handlebars while cycling through unbearable heat at 7,000 feet elevation, “the terrifying dehydration of mouth and nostrils and eyes until… a sort of staring blindness came on,” she never loses sight of why she has endeavored to do this in the first place — why she has obeyed the clarion call of wakefulness to life. In an entry emblematic of the spirit in which she has undertaken her journey, she writes:

Another fabulous dust-storm is performing now and all electricity has gone off again, so I’m writing by oil-lamp in a bath of sweat.

Again and again she orients to beauty, writing from Pakistan:

Behind us, almost overhanging the mess buildings, rose a 9,000-foot mountain wall of stark, grey rock which was repeated on the other side of the narrow valley; it’s this confinement which keeps the temperature so high despite an altitude of nearly 5,000 feet. Down the valley snow-capped peaks of over 20,000 feet were sharply beautiful against the gentle evening sky and as the setting sun caught the valley walls they changed colour so that their pink and violet glow seemed to illuminate the whole scene.

While we were having dinner on the verandah a full moon rose and by the time the meal was over the valley looked so very lovely that I took myself off for a walk — to the unspoken disapproval of all those present! Having descended steeply for about half a mile my path turned west along the valley floor, leaving the shuttered stalls of the bazaar behind. Tall mulberry and apricot trees laid intricate shadows on the sandy path and the silence was broken only by the snow-enraged Gilgit River. The sky was a strange royal-blue with all but the brightest stars quenched, while on either side the mountains were transformed into silver barricades, as their quartz surfaces reflected the moonlight.

Two days later:

Today’s landscape was a series of dramatic contrasts. The valley floor around Gilgit Town showed the fragrant abundance of early summer – fields of trembling, silver-green wheat and richly golden barley, bushes of unfamiliar, lovely blossoms and, most beautiful of all, a rock-plant with tiny, golden-pink flowers, growing so lavishly in the crevices of the walls that it was like a sunset cloud draped over the grey stones. Then the valley narrowed to exclude the early sun until there was room only for the river between the opposing precipices and we were alone in a barren, rough, shadowy world, where nothing moved but the brown flood-waters.

Two weeks laters, from amid the glaciers of Pakistan’s challenging Babusar mountain pass:

I saw two magnificent eagles and the air was filled all day with lark-song… Scintillating snow-peaks and regal fir trees, brilliant green meadows right up to the snowline and glistening glaciers in the gullies, waterfalls tumbling and sparkling everywhere and jewel-like wild flowers, rippling bird-songs and the faint, clean aroma of some unfamiliar herb.

The overtone of the book, of the journey, of this uncommon consciousness moving through the common world, finds its distillation in a single line from the same entry:

What a wonderful place this world is!

I could go on — Full Tilt is one of those rare books, a handful in a lifetime if one is lucky, brimming with so many touching human moments and such astonishments of natural beauty that one cannot help but have more passages underlined than not. Read it — your life will thank you for it — then revisit composer Paola Prestini’s choral masterwork celebrating the history of the bicycle as an instrument of emancipation and Maria Ward’s nineteenth-century manifesto for bicycling, featuring photographs by her visionary friend and lover Alice Austen, who paved the way for women like Dervla Murphy.

BP

Annie Dillard on Unselfconsciousness

By Maria Popova

Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists’ lives to remind them that art, at its best, is “an occasion for unselfing”? And yet who could fault them: Not just their generation, but our entire culture seems to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of people — ripples on the surface of the ocean of the soul, shimmering but shallow, pervious to every windsweep, irrelevant to the depths.

I was suddenly reminded of an essay by Annie Dillard from her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (public library), which won her the Pulitzer Prize and which I revisit frequently as basic irrigation for the soul. Its subject is Dillard’s experience of “stalking” a muskrat at Tinker Creek. Its object — like that of every Annie Dillard essay, of any great essay — is what it means to be alive.

Muskrat (Photograph: Tom Koerner/USFWS)

An epoch before it was imaginable that any fragment of the self could instantly face a worldwide mirror of millions, that any experience could be photographed and instantly become not only “a commemoration of itself” (as Italo Calvino so presciently put it) but a commodification of an inner world traded for likes, Dillard writes:

In the forty minutes I watched [the muskrat], he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all.

[…]

I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired with electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly; it is second nature to me now. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.

After some passages bridging Heraclitus and Heisenberg in the virtuosic way that makes a piece of writing a symphony of thought and feeling, Dillard goes on to quote Martin Buber quoting an old Kabbalah teacher:

When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

A decade later, speaking at Portland’s wonderful Literary Arts, she would hold up this passage as her favorite in her entire book. But I find her own words just as clarifying, just as sanctifying:

It is astonishing how many people cannot, or will not, hold still. I could not, or would not, hold still for thirty minutes inside, but at the creek I slow down, center down, empty.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss

Long before neuroscience revealed how such moments quiet the activity of the brain’s Default Mode Network and put us in a salutary state termed “soft fascination,” Dillard describes that state from the inside:

I am not excited; my breathing is slow and regular. In my brain I am not saying, Muskrat! Muskrat! There! I am saying nothing. If I must hold a position, I do not “freeze.” If I freeze, locking my muscles, I will tire and break. Instead of going rigid, I go calm. I center down wherever I am; I find a balance and repose. I retreat — not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.

This, perhaps, is what Willa Cather meant in her perfect definition of happiness as being “dissolved into something complete and great” that “comes as naturally as sleep” — a dissolution of the self into the totality of Being, or what Transcendentalist queen Margaret Fuller called “the All” in her own exquisite account of one such experience a century and a half earlier. This, too, is the pulsating truth at the heart of Dillard’s own oft-quoted insight — an indictment, today — that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Couple this small fragment of the infinitely soul-slaking Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with Loren Eiseley — another of humanity’s greatest essayists — on the muskrat and the meaning of life, then revisit Hermann Hesse on discovering the soul beneath the self and Annie Dillard’s classic meditation on the meaning of life lensed through a total solar eclipse.

BP

Wander: Natascha McElhone Reads Hermann Hesse’s 100-Year-Old Love Letter to the Wisdom of Trees in a Cinematic Walk Through Kew Gardens

By Maria Popova

Wander: Natascha McElhone Reads Hermann Hesse’s 100-Year-Old Love Letter to the Wisdom of Trees in a Cinematic Walk Through Kew Gardens

In the final years of his life, the great neurologist Oliver Sacks reflected on the physiological and psychological healing power of nature, observing that in forty years of medical practice, he had found only two types of non-pharmaceutical therapy helpful to his patients: music and gardens. It was in a garden, too, that Virginia Woolf, bedeviled by lifelong mental illness, found the consciousness-electrifying epiphany that enabled her to make some of humanity’s most transcendent art despite her private suffering.

When my dear friend Natascha McElhone (who narrated Figuring and Traversal) was asked to choose a piece of literature with which to narrate a tour of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for an episode of Wander — a lovely series by filmmaker Beau Kerouac, benefiting Britain’s Mental Health Foundation and helping quarantined people virtually visit some of the world’s most beloved parks and cultural institutions, accompanied by some of the world’s most beloved literary and artistic voices — Natascha chose a wondrous 100-year-old love letter to trees by Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962), which she had saved from The Marginalian nearly a decade ago. Originally published in Hesse’s 1920 collection of fragments, Wandering: Notes and Sketches (public library), it comes newly alive in this transportive, transcendent journey through the screen and past it, into a lush wonderland of nature’s aliveness, with two uncommonly beautiful voices as the sherpas.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts… Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Perspective by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

For a lyrical kindred-spirited counterpart, visit one of Earth’s greatest forests with Pablo Neruda and astronaut Leland Melvin, then savor Amanda Palmer’s reading of Mary Oliver’s spare and splendid poem “When I Am Among the Trees” and this cinematic love letter to the wilderness, inspired by the great naturalist John Muir, who saw the universe as “an infinite storm of beauty.”

BP

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