Allegorizings

by Allegorizings (retail) (epub)

  Those confident old times had passed, though, and the twenty-first-century Zephyr aroused very different emotions in me. This time I found it more dispiriting than inspiring. Gone was that colossal assurance, the dazzle and infectious exuberance. Nothing worked the way it used to, everything seemed past its best. The train crew had evidently lost their famous railwaymen’s pride. The passengers were a great deal fatter. We travelled slowly, and several hours late.

  But as we plodded heavily over the Rockies, rattling rather and sometimes subjected to a half-audible commentary over the public address system, it occurred to me that after all the Zephyr was still as emblematic of its time as it had been half a century earlier. Now it just as faithfully represented a world that had grown too old for itself, too tired, too obese, too complacent, too disillusioned. If (as I began to think) it was time for the Flagship of the Western Railroads to give up the struggle, that might be true of our civilization, too—or of our planet. Maybe, as the sandwich-board Cassandras had for so long been telling us, the end of the world was nigh.

  HIGH TIME TOO, I grumbled to myself that evening, when the bunk in my sleeper gave way beneath me, and an attendant had to prop it up with packing-cases borrowed from the restaurant car. “Is it always like this?” I had asked him earlier, apropos of the Zephyr’s more general sense of collapse. He grinned. “It don’t always start like this,” he said cheerfully, mopping his brow, “but it don’t take them but a minute to get it like this.” If the prophets are right, and the end really is nigh, it will be easy to blame our own generations of humans for hastening it. Our predecessors were not much better, but we’re the ones who have taken the world so close to despair. Wars, ethnic cleansings, perfections of cruelty, degradations of every kind, terrorism, greed and avarice unlimited, vulgarity uninhibited, jealous nationalisms, religious bigotry—all these evils, Nemesis may declare, were released upon the world in their most pernicious and conclusive kinds by the class of—well, let us just say your classes and mine.

  And yet, I thought, as the chuckling attendant left me to my slumber, still if ever a final reckoning is made perhaps we shall not be judged entirely harshly. If on the face of it our contribution to eternal history has been distressing, there’s been good to it, too. Even some of our innovative horrors—suicide bombings, for instance—have often been impelled by true virtues of courage and loyalty. If we accuse our contemporaries of random savagery, as they kill innocent bystanders along with the targets of their passions, what must we say of our own forebears who, when fighting causes they too believed to be just, massacred whole peoples with their bomb loads?

  Other things we have given the world, you and I, seem to me equivocal gifts. I am not at all sure if feminism, one of our most fateful movements, will eventually be judged a blessing or a curse—so noble a cause, so often blemished its execution. Our particular contributions to music, that most celestial of human inventions, seem to me ambiguous: have the gods our judges swayed to our rock and roll, or blocked their ears to it—thrilled to our atonal discords, or pined for another Mozart? Will political correctness, the discrediting of patriotism, the decline of organized religion, be marked up on the eternal record as pluses or minuses? We cannot know. Only time will tell—if time survives.

  This much, though, I swear we can be certain of: that ours will be registered as a period of new compassion. God knows many of us have been murdered, burnt or raped—some of us have done the murdering and the raping—but just as many have surveyed the human condition with a profounder understanding than ever our ancestors did. We have known more about the condition, of course, almost every one of us having vicariously experienced its worst miseries on television: but still, can you imagine our great-grandparents turning out in young multitudes to protest public wrongs or injustices, or giving money so generously to help impoverished foreigners far away, or even volunteering in their thousands to try and help in the parched and sorry places of the earth? Genuine sympathy has grown among our peoples, in our time, and a profounder empathy too.

  We are more thoughtful about the beasts than our predecessors were. Even zoos were considered in most of our childhoods institutions of entertainment; now they can generally only be justified as trustees of our fellow species. Vast and profitable works of engineering have been diverted or aborted because they might have interfered with the webs of rare spiders, disturbed the residences of small owls, or simply threatened the general eco-balance somewhere. Only cranks and Oscar Wilde once spoke out against hunting: now you are socially suspect if you threaten to shoot some of the bloody squirrels.

  We care more for our countrysides, when we are not trying to make too much money out of them. We take better care of our heritage, when we are not demeaning it for tourism. There are still many people in this world who would flock to see an execution, but in dozens of countries capital punishment is now outlawed—a sign of public sensitivity inconceivable a couple of generations ago.

  You may laugh, but I think ours will also be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as an age of beauty. There may be fewer sublime artistic geniuses than there were in earth’s supreme creative periods, and perhaps more artistic charlatans, but to my mind there is a more general diffusion of beauty. Ours has been a time of fine (if shamelessly selfish) architecture, freeing itself from the graceless restraints of modernism and brutalism and flowering in forms fanciful and varied—pyramids, globules, asymmetrical devices and magnificently virtuoso displays of construction which have sprung up across the hemispheres, and tempered our unconscious responses. For every privileged art lover who made a pilgrimage to see the Mona Lisa a century ago, a million tourists and business travellers of our time have been uplifted willy-nilly by Sydney Opera House or the airport at Barcelona.

  Domestic design too, in the age of aerodynamics, plastics and electronics, has brought new elegance into all our lives, everywhere. The weapons of war (ships and aircraft apart) are still appropriately ugly—could anything look nastier than a tank, more ungainly than a Kalashnikov?—but the instruments of peace are unprecedentedly graceful. Sold in the most squalid backstreets, clutched in the grubbiest hands, used for the most disreputable of purposes, nevertheless the neat little mobile telephone gleams everywhere like a jewel. The cheapest car can be lovely to look at nowadays, the coffee machine has blossomed into shapes to rival its aromas, and Yves Saint Laurent himself once told me that all I needed to dress stylishly was a simple frock, a raincoat and a pair of jeans—such was the progress in taste since the stuffy crinolines and feather boas of previous centuries.

  So at least we of our generations have given to a distracted world a new instinct for simplicity. Our clothes are simpler, our manners are simpler, we do without the richer sauces that gourmands used to think essential to high cuisine. Many a pretentious convention has been mocked into disuse—even members of the British royal family have deliberately made fools of themselves on TV—and formality is generally out of style, together with pomp, circumstance, neckties and protocol.

  We have perpetrated dreadful things, we eldest sons and daughters of the cyber age, but if any of us are to be remembered after Doomsday, perhaps we shall be allowed some benefit of the divine doubt. We were murderers, racists and vulgarians, but we simplified the look of life, we did away with some of its cruelties, we evened out some of its discrepancies, we tried hard to preserve its merits, and on the whole we loved our cats.

  AH YES, YOU may say, “on the whole.” There’s the rub. Not all of us, by any means, have contributed to these benefits. Not one of us has contributed to them all. In vast slabs of the planet, in every stage of political or economic development, whether democratic or despotic, violently rich or pathetically poor, humanity has made no moral or even aesthetic progress in our time, but has only confirmed the sceptic’s opinion that life on this planet must be nasty, brutish and short. Horrors of every kind, every day, everywhere, big and small, tragic and trivial, belie the very notion of human improvement, and can tempt ev
en the most sanguine traveller, trying to prop up a bed in a railway sleeper, to think the end must surely be getting nigher.

  But generalization is the soul of philosophy, as it is of journalism, and it is my opinion that if there are more odious people in the world at this late stage of its development, there are more decent people, too. For what we have given to the world, you and I and all our classmates, is a large, separate, inchoate, unrecognized community of our own. It is distributed throughout the globe, beyond sect or dogma, beyond nationalism, beyond chauvinism—a community of all kinds and races, people old and young, plain and beautiful, learned and unlettered, sharing elements of humour as of taste, and generally recognizing one another by instinct when they meet.

  I like to think that I am a citizen of that conceptual nation. So was that merry black sleeper attendant on the California Zephyr, and so I trust will be the dedicated preservationists who, if the end doesn’t come just yet after all, will one day restore the Zephyr itself to iconic glory.

  In the Land of the Long White Cloud

  NOTHING SO CONCENTRATES the spirit of a place as the death of a local hero, and as it happens I arrived in Auckland just as its pre-eminent home-bred champion, Sir Edmund Hillary of Everest, was laid to honoured rest in this city.

  It is not the capital of New Zealand, but it is the country’s biggest, richest and most impulsive metropolis—its New York, as it were, to Wellington’s Washington—and so it is a proper enough place to spend a few days contemplating the Land of the Long White Cloud. The hero of Auckland was the hero of all New Zealand too, and during my stay the story of his life and death filled the sentiments of every Kiwi.

  At first I thought all was honest simplicity, governed by the very same principles that had ruled the conduct of Hillary himself, who began life as an Auckland bee-keeper and rose through a sort of innocently resolute decency to die a Knight of the Garter. But presently it dawned upon me that the Long White Cloud, like every other cloud, contains its drizzle.

  HILLARY’S STATE FUNERAL, in St. Mary’s church, was a model of decorous pomp. There were none of the tossing black-plumed hearse-horses I associate with such events, but there was any amount of slow marching and ecclesiastical ritual—pews full of bigwigs, a prime minister, a bishop, impeccably pressed uniforms, Bach, a Scottish piper and many visiting celebrities. The tributes were long and eloquent. The organ appropriately thundered, and eventually the coffin was conveyed slowly across the city to be cremated. Everyone was moved, and I thought that in a way this ceremonial immolation of the old champion set a seal upon the nationhood of New Zealand—for so long the dependency of a mother country far away, and still so often overshadowed by its bold and brassy Australian neighbour.

  For on the whole, bold and brassy Auckland isn’t. In many ways it strikes me as homely still, still recognizably British in its origins—like Hillary himself, from sound and steady stock. Smile at people in the street, and they are sure to smile back. Ask the way somewhere, and you may well find yourself sharing a cup of coffee over a street map. Children are amazingly well-behaved, streets are wonderfully clean, great green trees are everywhere, suburbs are prosperously unpretentious, public transport is splendid, and a benevolent provincial restraint seems to characterize the populace. “If you are displeased with the dining experience,” my Auckland restaurant guide advises me, “it is up to you to calmly and politely articulate that to the waiter . . .”

  Although young bravos regularly sky-dive from the high galleries of Auckland’s Sky Tower (the tallest structure in the Southern hemisphere), and although there are more pleasure boats berthed at Auckland than anywhere else in the universe, and sixteen hundred gaming machines at the Sky City casino, still nobody could call this a racy sort of place. Those sky-divers pay $195 each for the eleven-second experience, and are buckled, strapped and supervised safe as houses.

  Bourgeois, then, conventional and a bit bland perhaps, is Auckland, but also kind, generous, brave and unassuming: these are the qualities that I imagined sealed in the New Zealand character by the symbolisms of Ed Hillary’s funeral.

  THERE IS MORE to this place than simplicity, though. I took a ferry to one of the islands of Auckland Bay, half an hour’s voyage into the wide Houraki Gulf, and found it to be less like the Isle of Wight, say, than one of the flashier holiday islets of the Mediterranean. Long lines of cars are parked on the roads away from the ferry pier, awaiting the return of commuters from their city offices, and the island is speckled all over with showy and expensively Desirable Properties. It is famous for its wines. Among the vineyards many a restaurant urbanely flourishes, while hedonist trippers like me drink sauvignon blanc and eat red snapper all the livelong day.

  Familial respectability scarcely governs the style of the Auckland suburbs, either. Among them you will find whole thoroughfares of trendy indulgence, coffee shops and restaurants and boutiques and clubs, outside whose premises, night and day, the more worldly Aucklanders sit in their hundreds drinking coffee—for tea, which used to be the Kiwi staple, has been so inexorably supplanted by coffee that nowadays Aucklanders like to claim their espressos and lattes to be the very best in the world. Unimpeachable informants (i.e., people I sit next to in buses, or opposite at dinner-tables) assure me that with the coffee, the clubs and the TV all the modern world’s corrosions—dishonesty, juvenile deliquence, teen-age prostitution, racial tension, mob violence—have crept into this old Elysium as they have everywhere else on earth.

  And whittling away at the old mores of the place, the inherited British standards that tempered dullness with decency, is the jostling multitude of Fijians, Indians, Japanese, Chinese and for all I know Tahitians, who have brought with them both a new excitement and a new sense of dislocation. At the funeral the other day the congregation was almost entirely European, except for visiting diplomats and Sherpa guests: but the crowds that lined the streets outside were of countless origins, and the most touching of the musical farewells was a Maori haka, sung by a fierce choir outside the church doors.

  Haka? What’s a haka? I’m still not exactly sure, but the indigenous Maori culture is deeply ingrained here. If you don’t know what a haka is, or a pakeha, or what a pohutukawa looks like, bits of the daily press will be a mystery to you, and for my tastes this adds a potent element of romance to society. The songs and dances of the haka, like the fearful battle-cries of New Zealand rugby players, leaven the ordinariness of things with exotic suggestion.

  YET BEHIND OR below the multi-ethnic, intercultural New Zealand, and the archetypal New Zealand of healthy middle-class loyalties, there is inevitably a subtle deposit of the homesteaders. Auckland doesn’t seem too keen on its original European settlers, but in the days of sail it took guts and imagination to emigrate twelve thousand miles across the globe, robust fellowship to create a new nation, and a spirit of boisterous enterprise lingers still.

  Ed Hillary was its very exemplar, but you might not have known it from the solemn decorum of his funeral. When at last the coffin left St. Mary’s for its stately journey to the crematorium, we in the congregation were left to sit in reverent silence, and a mad impulse arose in me to stand up and burst into the pub song “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” What a moment that would have been—the proudest moment of my life—the amazed fellow mourners, bishop, prime ministers, ambassadors, and all gradually joining in, tentatively at first, hilariously in the end, until the startled organist summoned the nerve to add a joyous diapason!

  When I mentioned the impulse afterwards all, without exception, said they wished I had obeyed it. But not being a Kiwi myself, whether Maori, Malaysian, Polynesian, old-school British or bravo pioneer, I chickened out.

  A Bridge to Everywhere

  SOMETIMES I PREFER my allegories explicit. Now and then I don’t want to have to puzzle them out. I want them self-evident, and in this kind I particularly cherish a bridge over the motor road E18 at Ås, some twenty miles south of Oslo, in Norway. It is not one of your great bridges. It is o
nly a foot-bridge, in fact, about four hundred feet long, going nowhere in particular but beloved of boys with bikes because of its steep inclines. It is, however, extremely beautiful. A sweeping airy structure of pine, teak and stainless steel, its path is supported by complex parabolic piers that gives it a majesty far beyond its size—an allegorical majesty, in fact.

  There is a café nearby, and from its terrace you may contemplate the curious allure of the thing, so modest and yet so suggestively massive, so timeless of feel, standing there in open country with no evident purpose, as though it has been floated out of the empyrean by helicopter, or more properly by silent balloon, and indeed looking rather like some exquisite species of insect. What is it for? you may wonder. Why is it there?

  It seems an enigmatic masterpiece, but actually its meanings are simple. It was erected in 2001 by the Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand, but it is really the creation of Leonardo da Vinci, who originally designed it on a far grander scale five hundred years ago, but never saw it built. So it represents, on one level, that grandest of continuities, the continuity of genius, which miraculously retains its vigour from one age to another.

  In the first years of the sixteenth century the Sultan Bayazit II of Turkey (“The Mystic”) conceived the idea of spanning the Golden Horn in Constantinople by a bridge from Stamboul to Galata. Hearing of this ambition, da Vinci promptly offered to build for him the longest bridge in the world, 1,080 feet from end to end, 72 feet wide, and high enough to allow the passage of ships. “I have heard,” he told the Sultan, “that no man can be found capable of it. I, your servant, know how.”