Wildest Regions

When I found Goethe I didn't know there was a Humboldt – his mention in Elective Affinities escaped me – so I paired G with Attenborough, had the two meet and converse in my head on nature; and now I realise, some time later, Goethe found a like-minded soul in Humboldt. The age difference no obstacle, one sparked the other, whether together or apart. They regularly corresponded and Humboldt sent Goethe his publications, plunging both into the wildest regions.

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And now I too have plunged into them – these wildest regions – and crossed, like Humboldt, all disciplines and barriers. I have caught Richard Holmes' bug: fallen completely for certain periods of time and all its notable characters, of which there are many. My reading net cast ever wider, to read of men – and it usually is men – who shaped minds, and whose minds were shaped by other men's minds.
Alexander von Humboldt shaped many: fellow science enthusiasts, thinkers, writers, poets, artists, musicians, politicians, leaders of countries and revolutionary parties. He gathered to himself people – the established, the up-and-coming – determining or helping them advance their careers. For, throughout his life, Humboldt preferred to collaborate rather than protect his own line of thought or work. (Professional science, I think, has lost some of this generous, collaborative approach; each science staying within its distinct discipline, and stalling, therefore, its own progress.) And yet he fails to enter into our head or vocabulary as Darwin does. We learn of him through Darwin, through Lyell, through Emerson, through Thoreau, through Poe, through Goethe, through Jefferson, through Bolívar, when Humboldt's hugely influential figure should instead lead us to these men.
One great mind, it seems, is replaced by another succeeding it, perhaps by its protégé, until in a more distant day it is revived.

Picture credit: Schiller, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt with Goethe in Jena (source: Wikipedia).

Adapted from journal, January 2022.

See The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf.