by Selva. 27 Dec, 2007.
Measuring the world is a novel by the young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann who has been hailed as one of the most promising new generation of writers. This novel is the first of his to be translated into english (by Carol Brown Janeway) and has become an international sensation.
The novel examines the themes of Genius and Freedom through the extraordinary lives of two great Enlightenment era scientists: Gauss and Humboldt. Gauss is a consummate genius who is considered to be the greatest mathematician since Newton. Humboldt is one of the greatest naturalist and explorer the world has ever seen.
"The comedy of being a genius lies in not being able to understand the people close to you. What is the nature of Freedom? Who is more free, the person who sits at home and thinks or the person who goes out and travels widely?" Thus Daniel Kehlmann describes his novel.[in this video]
The novel is set in Germany at the time of Enlightenment, the period in recent history that rebuilt the very foundations of western world. Goethe, the towering colossus of modern german literature and a contemporary of Gauss and Humboldt remarked of this time: "I had the great advantage of being born at a time when the greatest events that shook the world occurred, events that have continued to occur during my long life; I am a living witness of the Seven Years' War, of the separation of America from England, of the French Revolution, and of the whole Napoleon era, with the downfall of that hero, and the events that followed".
Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt, a naturalist and one of the world's greatest scientific explorers, lived between 1769 and 1859. Humboldt was the first earth scientist, the first to see earth as a connected whole in the scientific sense, he was the first to conceive and use isolines in maps (Isolines are the lines that connect places with same pressure or temperature, an innovation we encounter everyday while watching or reading weather reports). His five year expedition through South American jungle is legendary and inspired many young men who read his accounts. One such young men inspired by Humboldt was Charles Darwin, the great biologist who along with Russell Wallace gave us the scientific theory of Biological Evolution. Darwin on reading Humboldt's books said, "[they] stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two".[The two books Darwin mentions are: "Personal narrative" and the "Preliminary discourse". See Darwin's Correspondence Project] Later during his Beagle voyage Darwin would correspond with his hero Humboldt, exchanging notes, observations and measurements.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Carl Friedrich Gauss was a extraordinary genius who is considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians that ever lived. Gauss completed "Disquisitiones arithmeticae", his masterpiece that laid the foundations for number theory at the age of twenty two. He was the first to work out accurate methods to calculate orbits of planetoids (thus enabling the rediscovery of Ceres which was sighted and lost during his time). His contributions to statistical methods laid the foundation for modern actuary (insurance) calculations. Later in his life, he developed a theory of magnetism and with Wilhelm Weber constructed the first electromagnetic telegraph. Without leaving home, by thought alone, Gauss worked out that space is curved and parallel lines meet. Gauss lived between 1777 and 1855.
Promises of rich possibilities
The events in the story more or less follow the actual events that occurred in the lives of the two men. The story begins with a irate Gauss who was to travel to Berlin on Humboldt's invitation refusing to budge from his bed while his wife and son await downstairs. Humboldt, a man of boundless energy and unceasing action, had organized a scientific conference. Gauss by then was the preeminent mathematician of Germany and perhaps of the whole world. Gauss had barely left his home in years while Humboldt had travelled to places that many had not even dreamt of. These two vastly different men - Gauss was 51 and Humboldt 59 at this time - meet in Humboldt's home in Berlin. The novel then goes back in time and charts their lives leading to their meeting.
The novel weaves the lives of these two men in a series of exquisite events that are delightful, melancholic, outrageous and most of all hilarious. Kehlmann is a supreme storyteller with a sure hand and his humor is exquisite.
On the birth of Humboldt and his brother their mother approaches Goethe and asks him how her two boys should be educated. Goethe launches into a philosophical lecture about "a pair of brothers in whom the whole panoply of human aspirations so manifested itself, thus promising that the richest possibilities both of action and aesthetic appreciation might become exemplary reality, presented as it were a drama capable of filling the mind with hope and feeding the spirit with much to reflect upon". This, the author mocks as a pronouncement that, "nobody could make head or tail of". This pun is more meaningful when we realize that Goethe aimed at making his own life an example of the expression of the full human potential, in line with the Enlightenment ideals.
As the story unfolds, Geothe's pronouncements come true. In the pair of brothers, the whole panoply of human aspirations indeed so manifests itself. Humboldt becomes a world renowned scientific explorer while his brother matures into a famous linguistic scholar, a minister, and eventually the founder of Humboldt University.
Gauss in an act of charming clairvoyance chides the novel's author for being presumptuous; while traveling to Berlin with his son he quips : " even a mind like his [Gauss] own would have been incapable of achieving anything in early human history... whereas in another two hundred years each and every idiot would be able to make fun of him and invent the most complete nonsense about his character." This is Kehlmann's charming conversation with us - the readers - about the limitations of portraying genius.
Freedom
When Humboldt is in his early twenties, his mother dies and he inherits great wealth. This was the moment he had been waiting for, the death of his loveless mother brings him freedom, "he has never been so happy..because at last he was free to go", free to go and measure the world, nothing less. This, Humboldt sets out to do in earnest.
Video: An uproarious recreation of Humboldt's experiments with frog's legs to test if they twitch due to electric currents caused by potential difference between two different metals.
He prepares himself for a year, goes down mines to acclimatize for darkness and claustrophobia, climbs hills, experiments with galvanic currents by electrocuting himself, and obsessively practices measuring with his instruments. The number and variety of instruments he bought and practiced with would shame a modern day scientific laboratory: "Two barometers for air pressure, a hypsometer to measure the boiling point of water, a theodolite for measuring land, a sextant with an artificial horizon, a foldable pocket sextant, a dipping magnetic needle to establish the force of earth's magnetism, a hydrometer for the relative dampness in the air, a eudiometer for measuring the oxygen levels in the air, a leyden jar to capture electrical charges, and a cynometer to measure the blue of the sky. Plus two of these pricelessly costly clocks which recently had started to be produced in Paris." This was not a man who just wanted to travel and measure the odd hillock and the hole in the ground, this was a man who wanted to measure the world; the height, the depth, and everything in between; and measure he did. When asked by Bonpland why he had to measure everything Humboldt replies, "A hill whose height remained unknown was an insult to the intelligence and made him uneasy". Aimé Bonpland, a french explorer and botanist, is Humboldt's travel companion. Humboldt meets him on a stairs of a house and persuades him to travel along.
Kehlmann's writing flows as naturally as the Orinoco river. The form and structure of the novel is a measured study of concise and penetrating prose. Dialogues appear without the encumbrance of punctuational aids, they are spoken directly into our minds, suggesting the reader into having certain thoughts - thoughts that the author himself had and transcribed to a page.
The land of Electric Eels and José Arcadio Buendía
As a strong-willed teenager, Humboldt begins to systematically educate himself to become one of the greatest scientific explorers ever to set foot on South American continent. He attributes this determination to Georg Forster,["Georg Forster, who was lucky enough to travel with Captain Cook on his second world tour, helped determine the travel plans I had been hatching since I was eighteen years old", writes Humboldt in 'Personal Narrative', the last of the books he published chronicling his travels. 'Jaguars & Electric Eels' by Humboldt, Penguin Books Great Journeys series.] an English explorer who travelled with Captain Cook on a World tour.
Humboldt's travel is the extraordinary tale of a man possessed by Earth. Stories about him embellished with improbable events still echo in the South American continent. Readers of Gabriel García Márquez may recall Melquíades, the supernatural gypsy in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'[the breathtakingly original novel that established the literary form of magical realism. It begins with the most riveting opening ever written for a novel: "Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice"], die with the words "Equinox" and "Alexander von Humboldt" on his lips.
The echoes of literary and historical influences complete a delightful circle with Humboldt influencing Márquez and Márquez influencing Kehlmann. Fittingly, and perhaps as a homage to Márquez (and to Jorge Luis Borges, the other great South American connaisseur of magic realism), Kehlmann often uses magic realism while narrating Humboldt's travel in the South American continent. In one instance, Humboldt meets a man in the depths of South American jungle who declares "Space as such was elsewhere". The surreal landscape of Orinoco and Amazon pulsates to a rhythm that is beyond human comprehension. Time, Space, Reality, and human memory lose their meaning in this terrain, and mix with each other freely without restraint. "Day after day the hours blended into one another; the sun hung low and fiery over the river; it hurt to look at it, the mosquitoes attacked from every side, even the oarsmen were too exhausted to talk. For a time they were followed by a metal disc that flew ahead of them and then behind them again, glided silently through the sky, disappeared, reappeared, came so close for minutes at a time that Humboldt with his telescope could see the curved reflection of the river, their boat, and even himself in its glistening surface. Then it raced away and never came back."
Genius
While Humboldt prepares for travel, Gauss is well on his way to become the Prince of Mathematics. He unmindfully wrecks the mediocre world of his school teacher - as genius is wont to do. When he is in school, his teacher asks the students to add the numbers from 1 to 100, a summation problem he assumes would keep them occupied and away from him for a while. All the students add each successive number one by one while Gauss comes up with the summation formula on the spur - he was seven then - and takes it to his teacher. The genius of Gauss strikes the teacher like a thunderbolt. Kehlmann deftly captures the melancholy of this moment when the teacher reacts in the only way he is able to relate to his prodigal student: he reaches for his stick and gives Gauss one last beating, out of awe, out of appreciation. The teacher, Mr Büttner, realizes how improbable an opportunity has appeared in this prodigy of a student for his own emancipation as a teacher. "He knew he wasn't a good teacher. He had neither the vocation nor any particular abilities. But this much was clear: if Gauss didn't go to high school, he, Büttner, would have lived in vain. He looked at him up and down, eyes swimming, then presumably to control his emotions, grabbed the stick and Gauss received the last beating of his life."
This would not be the last instance when people are overwhelmed by Gauss's genius. Young Gauss believes for a long time that "people were acting or following some ritual that always obliged them to pause before they spoke or did something. Sometimes he managed to accommodate himself to them, but then it became unendurable again. Only gradually did he come to understand that they needed these pauses. Why did they think so slowly, so laboriously and hard?"
The Men
The difference between Gauss and Humboldt is as vast as their passion for understanding the world. Humboldt goes out to measure everything he could on the earth. Gauss sits at home and deduces the structure of Space and measures the frequency of prime numbers. Humboldt is always conscious of his legacy, presenting himself in good light and making sure history would judge him well. Gauss has scant regard for others and cares about them even less; he doesn't care when his own son Eugen is in peril after having been arrested for treason during a student meeting.
These shortcomings are the redeeming qualities in these two men. It is this comedy of genius that makes them human. Their remarkably rich lives - Gauss with his soaring mathematics and Humboldt with his relentless march into the deepest jungle - are two contrasting accounts of the meaning of Freedom.
When the mundane is out of their way, both men are moved by their genius to give everything in their power to know the world. In Gauss's case, it is to be able to see beyond "the pitiful arbitrariness of existence... born into a particilar time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not", to be able to dig deep.
Gauss is twenty two when he completes "Disquisitiones arithmeticae", a mathematical work comparable to Newton's Principia. On one occasion while working on the mathematics of the book Gauss wonders "whether there was a proscription against what he was doing. Was he digging too deep? At the base of physics were rules, at the base of rules there were laws, at the base of laws there were numbers; if one looked at them intently, one could recognize relationships between them, repulsions or attractions. Some aspects of their construction seemed incomplete, occasionally hastily thought out, and more than once he thought he recognized roughly concealed mistakes - as if god has permitted Himself to be negligent and hoped nobody would notice".
Humboldt meanwhile would climb the highest peak in the known world: Mount Chimborazo[ Mount Chimborazo is now in modern Ecuador. Humboldt's painting of Chimborazo is breathtakingly beautiful and shows his artistry as much as his scientific rigor, the painting contains great many details on the flora as one moves up the elevation], he would travel down the Orinoco river beyond the final outposts of civilization, descend down caves full of bats, brave the mosquitos and electric eels, and measure every bit of earth. He would leave nothing out - not even the count of lice on women's head in South America.
Within the rigid confines of the 'pitiful arbitrariness of existence', these two men born in Germany when the cultural and political ground was shifting beneath their feet set out to realize their calling. In their passionate quest to understand the underlying laws of the world they were one and the the same person: an embodiment of humanity's aspiration, genius and folly.
In the concluding chapter, Kehlmann merges the two men into a single character with the narration treating both men as one, an abstract person made of memories. Reflections fill our mind and feed the spirit, as Goethe pronounces in the very beginning of the story. Diffused all through the story is delightful humor, the kind of humor that lingers and makes you smile often and at odd moments. I haven't enjoyed a book this much in recent years.
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