All the Time in the World

by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

  Dear Madam, did you never gaze,

  Thro’ Optic-glass, on rotten Cheese?

  There, Madam, did you ne’er perceive

  A crowd of dwarfish Creatures live?

  The little Things, elate with Pride,

  Strut to and fro, from Side to Side

  In tiny Pomp, and pertly vain,

  Lords of their pleasing Orb, they reign

  And, fill’d with harden’d Curds and Cream

  Think the whole Dairy made for them.

  Over the next century, microscopes were built to suit a range of budgets. Some were done in gilt and mahogany. Some were made from cardboard and sold for a penny. Nineteenth-century enthusiasts came together in well-appointed drawing rooms to pass their evenings examining peculiar insects and interesting plants. Like the aquarium, the microscope offered a whole new perspective. It “opened up new regions for observation and has given an entirely new direction to our thoughts,” wrote one Cambridge professor. “We are probing more into the very deepest recesses of nature, and enquiring into her closest secrets.”

  Popular books, such as Evenings with the Microscope and Half-Hours with the Microscope, guided initiates through a series of micro-revelations. “Like the work of some mighty genie of Oriental fable,” wrote the author of the former, “the brazen tube is the key that unlocks a world of wonder and beauty before invisible, which one who has once gazed upon it can never forget, and never cease to admire.” Focusing the eyepiece and using a candle or oil lamp for illumination, microscopists could explore the intricacies of a bee’s stinger, a drop of blood, the ravines and gullies of a strand of human hair, or the scales of a flounder, without ever leaving home.

  The specimens that most amazed amateurs were the darting “animalcules” found in a droplet of water taken from a vase in which flowers had been left to molder. There was beauty hidden in the decay. “These little creatures prove quite fascinating; and hour after hour will be spent in watching their habits and movements, till the powers of the student are exhausted,” chirped the author of Drops of Water. “It is a wonderful fact, that a drop of water, exhibiting to the eye only a few particles of vegetation and sand, may, by the aid of a glass, be found to contain a crowd of animated beings, all beautifully and curiously constructed, all enjoying life, and providing for their various wants—their beauty so great, that we can scarcely bear to lose sight of them by withdrawing the eye from the microscope.”

  Even for a serious scientist like Hooke, the device was no mere tool, but a portal to another plane. “I have often, with wonder and pleasure, in Spring and Summer-time, look’d close to, and diligently on, common Garden mould,” he wrote, “and in a very small parcel of it, found such multitudes and diversities of little reptiles, some in husks, others only creepers, many wing’d, and ready for the Air.”

  In striking contrast to the Western cult of bright lights and shining baubles, Japanese aesthetes have, over the centuries, honored the mystery, subtlety, and beauty of the shadows. In 1933, the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) contemplated this contrast in his fantastically meandering essay “In Praise of Shadows,” which ultimately defended Japan’s old ways.

  He began by pondering the architectural divide. Western-style glass windows were a world away from the traditional Japanese home, where “the light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room.” “We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose,” he wrote, whereas light-loving Westerners “paint their ceilings and walls in pale colors to drive out as many of the shadows as they can.” And outdoors, “We fill our gardens with dense plantings,” while “they spread out a flat expanse of grass.” A champion of dim lighting, Tanizaki was once dismayed to find that an esteemed Kyoto restaurant had abandoned candlelight dining in favor of electric lighting, and he requested a candle at his table instead.

  Tanizaki wasn’t always such a traditionalist. Though born and raised in Tokyo, as an aspiring writer he fell under the influence of Baudelaire and Poe, and his first stories flaunted a peculiar form of decadence—a predilection for beautiful but cruel women and a deeply rooted foot fetish. He was infatuated with the West in those days, happily anticipating a new wave of Western modernity that would rise in Tokyo after the big 1923 earthquake, one that would bring “orderly thoroughfares, shining, newly-paved streets, a flood of cars, blocks of flats rising floor on floor, level on level in geometrical beauty, and threading through the city elevated lines, subways, streetcars. Western clothes, Western lifestyles.”

  But when his vision became reality, instead of embracing aesthetic revolution, Tanizaki fled into the past. “Now that Tokyo has at last become Westernized, I have bit by bit come to dislike the West,” he said in 1934. “Instead of pinning my hopes on the future, I think nostalgically of the Tokyo of my childhood.” Delving into old Japan, he found an exoticism of the sort he used to seek elsewhere. He visited the ancient sights around Nara and Tokyo like a tourist. He moved to old-fashioned Osaka, and he dressed in a kimono. He scoured the antique shops for dusty artifacts. “As a general matter we find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter,” Tanizaki wrote. “On the contrary, we begin to enjoy [a thing] only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina.” Treasured objects in old Japan were those with a “sheen of antiquity” or a “glow of grime” that demonstrated longevity and the nostalgic touch of many hands.

  He lived out his later years in the past and made his home in the shadows, cherishing the bygone manners, the half-light, and all that had been lost. “We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall,” Tanizaki wrote, “there to live out what little life remains to them.”

  Sixteenth-century amateur writers tried their hands at travel diaries and modest memoirs, but no one got too personal. That sort of soul-baring journaling wouldn’t occur until two hundred years later, as the culture of religious reflection and self-scrutiny encouraged diarists to dig deeper. Over time, the diary became increasingly intimate: a place to reminisce, a record of precious memories and treasured secrets.

  Yet well into the nineteenth century, keeping a diary remained a matter of taste and decorum, and experts consistently advised against getting too carried away. “One must not attempt too much,” an American journalist counseled budding diarists in 1883. “A country school-teacher, leading a humdrum life in a little village, does not need a diary large enough to set down the doings of court and king.” Instead, one was meant to keep a modest record of payments made, visitors received, books read, letters written, and any change in health. It was all recorded for posterity. “Most people take an interest in the weather,” the article went on, and so “it may be well therefore to note first the extreme of temperature.” The best time to write in a bedside diary, experts agreed, was in the evening.

  And yet, while a mountain of minutiae could be expected of most amateurs, on the contrary, keeping a diary helped novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) cut loose. On the pages of her diary, she set off writing in a “rapid haphazard gallop … jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.” Her hand moved over the page faster than her mind could censor it, sweeping up “several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated,” she wrote, “but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.” Most days, after her real day’s work, and while taking her tea, Woolf sat down with her diary, sometimes stalling for a few weeks between sessions, only to return again. Over the course of twenty-seven years, she eventually filled twenty-six volumes, with the last entry recorded only several days before her death.

  “What sort of diary should I like mine to be?” she mused in 1919. “Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all
, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.”

  The austere gondola, with its low-slung body and curving prow, has enthralled visitors to Venice since the days when George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), glided about on the city’s canals. Though taking a gondola ride was already a touristy cliché by the 1890s, few could resist it. “There are, of course, many sights in Venice, but I am happy to say we attempted but very few of them, preferring rather to loll on the gondola cushions, and be rowed promiscuously about,” an American traveler wrote, “landing where and when the whim took us, and defying the most urgent persuasions of the guide-book or our gondolier to see such and such a palace.” As sightseers passed beneath the bridges and under the balconies of Venice’s glorious palazzi, the boat’s gentle rhythm lulled them into a stupor. “Reclining luxuriously on the soft, dark-fringed cushions of the night-hued gondola, life and sight-seeing take an altogether different aspect from any other point of view elsewhere,” another nineteenth-century visitor wrote. “The feeling that ‘it is good to be here’ steals over the senses as deliciously as by a magician’s enchantment. Existence becomes a never-ceasing, varying dream of dissolving and reshaping views that come and go like beauteous phantoms in the borderland of the material and spiritual worlds.”

  Around the turn of the century, artists such as John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), who painted hundreds of watercolors reflecting the city’s every nook, hired gondoliers to row them to spots where they could best capture the spectral light cast over its waters. One guidebook claimed that any diligent boatman would “wash brushes, clean palettes, and set up the easel in the floating studio which, but for the occasional oscillation, is the most charming form of out-of-door work. He will fetch and carry water for your bath, hunt up models, clean boots and run messages all day long.”

  It was too good to last. The city’s canals thronged with an estimated ten thousand gondolas during the sixteenth century, but by the early 1900s the gondola’s days were numbered. Speedy motorboats sputtered and sloshed along the Grand Canal, competing for fares, and by the 1960s the boatyards were building just a dozen new gondolas each year, leaving only around five hundred on the water.

  One of these was more famous than any other of its era—ex-pat American art collector Peggy Guggenheim’s sleek black gondola, with seats flanked by a pair of carved golden lions, each holding a trident in its tail. Besides a jaw-dropping collection of Picassos, Mirós, Man Rays, and works by Max Ernst, one of her husbands, the gondola was Guggenheim’s great love. “I adore floating to such an extent I can’t think of anything as nice since I gave up sex, or rather, since it gave me up,” she wrote in 1956 to her old friend Djuna Barnes.

  Everyone in town knew Guggenheim (1898–1979), whom Venetians nicknamed “the last duchess.” Most evenings at the “irresistible hour,” as she called it, just as the sun went down, she would set out from her art-filled eighteenth-century palazzo on the Grand Canal to see the city at its best. “She knew every foot of every back canal,” a friend remembered. “She would sit in her little chair with her Lhasa apsos lounging underneath and her gondolier standing behind her on the stern deck, rowing. She’d give him directions with hand signals, as if she were driving a car, without so much as saying a word or looking back at him.” The boatman, Bruno, also happened to be the city’s corpse collector, and as they rode he serenaded her with funereal dirges.

  For Guggenheim, who moved to Venice in 1947, there was nothing like a cruise at sunset. “This is the moment to be on the water. It is imperative. The canals lure you, call you, cry to you to come and embrace them on a gondola,” she wrote. “More pity to those who cannot afford this poetic luxury. In this brief hour all of Venice’s intoxicating charm is poured forth on its waters. It is an experience never to be forgotten.”

  Guggenheim died at age eighty-one and was buried in the garden of her palazzo, alongside her series of beloved small dogs. Hers was the city’s last privately owned gondola.

  SUMMER KICKS OFF THE JAM-MAKING SEASON, first with rhubarb and strawberry preserves, then cherry jam, elderberry conserves, and, finally, quince paste. Now it’s the stuff found in any grocery store, but in centuries past, as honey slowly gave way to pricy, imported sugar, which in 1353 Paris could be sold only to aristocrats by law, preserves took on an haute tone. It was said that France’s King François I (1494–1547) loved quince paste so much that it brought tears to his eyes. Once, he’d brought some to share with his mistress Madame d’Étampes, when he realized that she had another lover hidden under her bed. Instead of losing it, the king simply slid the sweet dish to his rival as he left, saying, “Here you are, Brissac, everyone has to live!” Clearly, his generosity knew no bounds.

  The great Provençal apothecary and mystic Michel de Notredame, aka Nostradamus (1503–1566), loved preserves almost as much. He put out a small book of jam recipes—as well as his book of predictions—in 1555, offering his variations on Middle Eastern recipes that came via Italy and Moorish Spain to France. His own black cherry jelly was “as clear a vermillion as a fine ruby,” he bragged, declaring his candied orange peel “excellently tasty.” He also offered a Love Jam recipe, which he claimed was so potent that “if a man were to have a little of it in his mouth, and while having it in his mouth kissed a woman, or a woman him, and [he] expelled it with his saliva, putting some of it in the other’s mouth, it would suddenly cause … a burning of her heart to perform the love-act.” (For those inclined to try, the ingredients may prove a hurdle: mandrake apples picked at dawn, the blood of seven male sparrows, and octopus tentacles, combined with honey and various herbs and spices.)

  Nostradamus wasn’t the only one who believed in the aphrodisiac power of jam, however. One writer of the day referred to a beauty’s “marmalade lips,” while the term “marmalade-madams” took on a more salacious connotation. English cookbooks offered sensuous jam formulas—which, for the most part, sound more appetizing than the one Nostradamus crafted—including a love potion that called for sugar, quinces, and orange peel scented with musk, ambergris, and spices.

  In England, aristocratic devotion to jams and jellies in the seventeenth century brought noblewomen into the garden and kitchen. At a garden banquet, a lucky diner might find “tarts of divers hues and sundry denominations, conserves of old fruits, foreign and home-bred suckets [citrus peels in syrup], codinacs, marmalades, marchpane [marzipan], sugar-breads, gingerbread, florentines … and sundry outlandish confections altogether seasoned with sugar,” one connoisseur noted with glee. The most talented dilettantes allowed their recipes to be published: Lady Fettiplace was known for her rose petal jam. Lady Hoby distilled cordials and put up damson preserves. Elizabeth Gray, Countess of Kent, shared a recipe for candied flowers dotted with gold leaf. Lady Leicester did gumballs filled with lemon fondant. For his part, Sir Hugh Plat (1552–1608) compiled a cookbook brimming with confectionary recipes to please his genteel readers, dedicating his work to these “saints to whom I sacrifice perfumes and conserves both plum and pear.” Another writer explained: “For country Ladies it is a delightful amusement, both to make the sweetmeats and dress out a dessert, as it depends wholly on fancy, and is attended with but little expense.”

  Meanwhile, in France, where violet marmalade and candied ribs of lettuce were popular, a Madame Héroard whipped up an excellent apricot syrup, while the Baronne de Montglat became known for her quince jelly. In that country, jam making had reached such heights by the 1640s that King Louis XIII (1601–1643) could often be found in the kitchen making fruity sweets for the royal party. According to legend, he candied a plate of sweetmeats for Anne of Austria after their wedding, and while making preserves one afternoon he learned of the betra
yal of Cinq-Mars, his former best friend (and possible lover), who had joined in a plot to assassinate the king’s most important political adviser, hoping to take the post himself. “Cinq-Mars,” Louis proclaimed grandly, “has a soul as black as the bottom of this pan.”

  Easiest Raspberry Jam

  2 pints fresh raspberries (4 cups)

  1⅓ cups sugar

  Freshly squeezed juice from half a lime

  Put a small saucer in the freezer. In a stainless-steel pot, mash together the berries, sugar, and juice and let the mash marinate for 10 minutes. Then heat it over a medium flame, stirring constantly. Once you’ve reached the boiling point, continue for 10–12 minutes more. Turn off the heat. Drizzle a few drops of jam onto the cold saucer and freeze it for one minute. If the texture of the jam is right when you pull the plate from the freezer, then spoon your jam into airtight jars, leaving ¼ inch of headroom at the top. If the jam’s too thin, reboil the mix for another minute, stirring constantly, and try the saucer test again. Once cooled, the jam will keep in the refrigerator for a month.

  The gracious porticoes enjoyed by ancient Romans so impressed sixteenth-century Venetian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) that he rarely designed a palazzo without one. When the English neoclassicists fell for his style two hundred years later, they wholeheartedly adopted Palladio’s signature touch—the porch, or “verandah,” as they liked to call it. The English climate didn’t encourage loads of lounging outdoors, of course, but in the sunny United States the front porch became a national touchstone.