To the Hermitage (6 page)

And, though it’s just early days, I don’t think I much like the look of the new Naughty Nineties, with its lazy decadence, ideological vacancy, consumerist ethics, empty narcissisms. People are self-creationists; drunk on drugs and aimless shopping, they pass by in the streets with pins through their noses, nails through their navels, clowning with their bodies. The seasoned, reasoned, puritanically serious world I’ve taken as history since the fifties seems to be wearing out. Newly bereft of ideas and a clear political order, it seems to have given itself over to nothingness, froth, senseless self-pleasuring, drab eroticism, licit illicitism, populist emotions, media-fed public moods and crazes. Meantime the millennium that’s rising so confidently from the old Christian calendar reminds everyone that generations, cultures, dynasties, social systems are changing. Well, with time comes age, of course; with age comes a kind of depressed and resigned fatality. Suddenly it seems as if everything that’s happening was already written, in some great Book of Destiny up above.

At any rate the point is, then, that I’m feeling oddly anxious, deeply grey of soul. And if gloom is what you have, and you’re not sure where to take it, then let me advise. Marbella won’t help, but there’s no doubt Sweden – decent Sweden, serious Sweden, liberal progressive Sweden, anxious Sweden, the land of virtue and grievous moral pain – can be warmly recommended. Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve always loved Sweden. I truly love its winter-warm stuffy apartments, their crisp furniture, their huge wood-burning stoves. I like the Lutheran afterglow, the universal air of decency, community, moral sacrifice. Like the Hanseatic trading ports, the old warehouses, stone arsenals, brackish briny harbours, tarry merchant houses, fish smells, grey waters, blustering Nordic airs; like the leggy blonde Viking girls. Finishing my snack in the busy market, I leave it and its bright row of blondes to walk down the dusty hill and into the city’s watery hub. I walk through the harbour parks, the waterside boulevards, the smart
fin de siècle
apartment towers, the inland lakes criss-crossed with concrete bridges, the copper-towered buildings of the old town. I wander the gusty, drizzly waterfront, sit down on a bench to watch the Munch-like lovers crossing the bridges, and observe the intense contemplative players of chess as they slowly move their pieces.

From here, I can see, across the bridge on the harbour island of Djurgarten, some elegant new building, one of those endless modernistic galleries or museums that are springing up everywhere, fresh-formed and concept-designed. Then I suddenly know what it is; and with that an old and well-known northern story suddenly comes back to me. In the days when the Swedish empire presided over the Baltic, when its huge armies marched off down the Elbe as far as Prague, King Gustav II Adolf chose to commission a very great battleship. It would be Number One: the world’s grandest ship of the line. There’d never been anything like it. Deck upon wooden deck it rose, a skyscraper of a vessel, tarred and feathered, high as a prince’s palace, heavy with gold decoration, copper cannon, masts and rigging that reached the Nordic clouds. He named it, of course, the
Vasa
, after his grandfather, the hero who had made Sweden a nation and a power in the world. In 1618 it was launched, here in the harbour in front of me. It cast its moorings and set off from shore; its overloaded decks were packed with admirals and aldermen, courtiers, courtesans and priests. Guns fired, fireworks cracked, flags waved, church bells rang, bishops blessed. As the crowds cheered, the ship toppled offshore, turned on its side, sank to the bottom. The churchbells ceased, the bishops fell silent, the crowds wept, the dignitaries aboard drowned in public sight, an empire plunged.

When I last came to Stockholm, quite some time back now, this early version of the
Titanic
had just been fresh-craned from the water. Timbers black and filthy, its hulk lay on a mudflat by the island, preserved by chemical sprays. But history these days is a theme-park. Nothing is wasted. These are the days of the modern museum, the open-access library, the multimedia experience, the virtual reality ride – high-tech simulations of the way things once might have been in times when people were naïve enough to think they were real. Now over there, as I look through the trees, is the Vasa Museum, complete with a Vasa Experience, built round the old rotting hulk. I rise to my feet, cross the windy bridge, walk through the park, buy myself a ticket for the grand old tragedy. Hundreds of tourists, Japanese, Korean, American, await admission. In these millennial times, all the world likes to attend the drowning of a ship. A young female attendant with a black eyepatch stands in the lobby. For some reason she stops me, offers to steer me round herself. At her side I walk through the great restoration: by computer displays of ships and seafaring, a crackle of multi-lingual tapes. We wander through the disinfected hull: over the great poop, with its regal decorations, through low-roofed gun-decks packed with heavy cannon, past stacks of retrieved water-bottles, rotting uniforms, sailors’ canvas shoes, leather buckets, deckmen’s thimbles, balls of stone and lead.

My one-eyed guide is pleasant, serious, moral, instructive. Civic, that must be the word. As we walk through the sea-darkened timbers, stinking of preservatives, she philosophizes Swedishly. On the rise and fall of empires, the vanity of human wishes, the delusions of kings and princes, how she and I are here today but gone tomorrow. I nod agreeably as she tells me the sea is a very beautiful thing, but a place of danger, and the Baltic the most dangerous place of all. She says it’s a seaman’s graveyard; over the centuries thousands of ships have foundered in the great archipelago, while captains who lost their vessels were hanged from gallows along the shore. When our tour is almost done, she gestures through the tinted windows at the harbour waters beyond. Great Baltic ferries sail close by: huge horizontal office blocks, casinos, fun-palaces, packed with sinners and illusionists, seeking life’s eternal duty-free. But, she says, looking at me seriously, we are never free of duty. What we are looking at, out there in the seaway, are just the modern
Vasa
s, waiting to take the plunge.

As I’m intending to sail off on one of these floating coffins tomorrow, this isn’t quite what I need to hear. ‘
Tack, tack
,’ I say hastily to my one-eyed Virgil, and leave the Vasa Museum. I walk down wide windy Strandgatan, then across the harbour bridges that take me into the old town, Gamla Stan. More guides are waiting, keen to show me the scene of the great Swedish Bloodbath, where forty loyal burghers were hacked to death by the Danes. But Nordic gloom has gone far enough. I prefer to walk on my own, think my own thoughts, down the wet cobbled passages, past the high merchant houses where grain from Prussia met copper from the Upplands, the cloths of Flanders, the furs of Novgorod. They’re all trinket-shops now. The sun has gone for good, the seaborne wind come up. Rain, end of season, the bank and the museum, blonde bankers and one-eyed guides: all do their spiritual work. I walk collar up between high-sided churches and palaces, and start to wonder. What on earth – or for that matter off and beyond it – happened to poor old René Descartes?

Maybe you recall the story? I thought I did, though as things turned out I didn’t, or not as well as I might. It’s a well-known fact that princes and philosophers have consorted together for just about as long as time can remember, with much desire to mix intelligence with power, but not necessarily much success. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. Socrates taught virtue to the gilded youth of Athens, if with unhappy personal results. Plato sought a philosopher-king to guide the nation; the one he served soon sold him into slavery. Noble Seneca taught justice and clemency to the Emperor Nero, though to remarkably little effect. Francis Bacon, who took all knowledge for his province, served James the First of England, Fifth of Scotland: ‘The standing is slippery,’ he warned. Leibniz attended on Peter the Great to spread the spirit of reason; but this did not stop Big Peter killing off his rivals or having his own son hacked to death. By the great Age of the Enlightenment the custom was universal. Reason and humanism were the principles of the age, mind showed its power over God, matter and state. Priests were in discredit, philosophers were in the ascendant. Great kings and queens listened solemnly to tiny thinkers and poets. No European court was complete without its dancing master, astronomer, kapellmeister, map-maker, its physician, mathematician, and its philosophe. How else could the Enlightenment world grow truly enlightened, a monarch become wise, the earthly Utopia be brought into being, than by taking the highest metaphysical advice?

When Frederick the Great, a small man who hated his militaristic father almost as much as he loathed his militaristic wife, took power in Prussia, he saw himself as the true enlightened monarch: the Philosopher-King. When not taking Silesia, losing his fortune, winning his victories, marching his goose-stepping soldiers up and down the Brandenburg streets, he was no classic tyrant but a triumph of civilization: thinker and talker, patron and poet, composer and editor, flute-player and pianist, a prince among statesmen. He nurtured great Bach (‘give me concertos’), rejected petty religious bigotries, refused to use Christian symbols, wrote learned tracts, sweet flute concertos, and some unbelievably dreary pornographic verse in French. He too yearned for his own philosopher, and called Voltaire from France to become, as he put it, his Talking Bird and his Singing Tree. How charmingly it all went to begin with! ‘One thinks boldly, one is free here,’ foxy Voltaire announced in delight when he settled into his fine pavilion amid the high minds, rustic splendours, wild woodlands, great vine gardens of Sans Souci, on the banks of the Havel near growing Berlin. The summer court was glorious. Tinkling fountains and belvederes, a Chinese pagoda topped with an umbrellaed golden Confucius, bands and barracks, music all hours, intense and philosophical dinners under the lantern roof – for Frederick indeed dined only with men.

A world-famous relationship, it’s remembered still. New and re-tarted Potsdam, again a summer adjunct to a winter capital, succours it. Today you’ll find the Voltaire-weg leads into the Schopenhauer-strasse, which ends up in Hegel-Allee, which once pointed the way to Karl-Marx-Platz, now the blind alley of Uncertainty Square. You could even call it the world’s first great creative writing class: for, day after day, again and again, the writer-philosopher went over the king’s unfortunate and often depressingly pornographic poems, trying to mine them for faint traces of literary merit. The months passed, and the years, until it became apparent that the first happiness was not destined to last – not after the sage-laureate began falling out with the King’s other academicians, and then overheard his generous monarch remarking, ‘I’ll need this chap for a year at the most. First thing you squeeze the juice out of the orange, then you toss away the peel.’

Voltaire, a vain, sharp-toothed, angry type, was no monarch’s orange. After three troubled years he resolved to preserve his pips. He haughtily handed back his court titles and honours; soon he was quietly taking the quickest way out of town. But power is power, and thinking isn’t; so it all ended in tears, of course – with the Sage arrested at gunpoint in Frankfurt on his homeward journey, charged with breaching his contract, engaging in illegal financial transactions, running off with some of the king’s unspeakable poems. Yet it simply proved the rule of Enlightenment times; prince and philosopher were bonded to each other. ‘I was born too soon,’ said Frederick unapologetically, ‘but, happily, I have seen the immortal Voltaire.’ An absolute monarch needed an intellectual absolution. Every king or empress sought a philosophe: each needed the absolute homage of the other. Dear Didro, Denis Diderot – and he, by the way, is the chief reason why I’m here in Stockholm – thought for Catherine of Russia. D’Alembert, Condorcet and Rousseau all had need to pass on the lore of reason and human freedom to any who would govern, not least Jefferson and Franklin, makers of the First New Nation.

Naturally the day would come when – largely thanks to all these rational courtly speculations on liberty, religion, humanity, reason – the great chain of being would snap at last. The kings and princes would mostly disappear, often bloodily and irrationally, in some frenzied and thoughtless (or thoughtful) moment of mob rule. On the other hand, the philosophers survived, more than survived, to become the wisdom of the next new age. They mostly outlived the bloodbath, sometimes they were its greatest heroes. They prospered and flourished. They turned reason into will, will into being, being into nothingness. They enlightened and illuminated; they disputed and critiqued. They considered mind and matter, state and person, history and fatality, reason and madness, order and chaos, the limits of our language and the limits of our world. They looked deep into darkness, and they hungered for the light. They existed without being, they were without existing. They spoke, yet they also knew whereof to be silent.

And with thinkers as with chefs and milliners, or wines and cheeses, the most important rule was clear. Anyone could think anywhere – given the time, the space, the mental machinery. But the fact remained that the truly great performers, the top of the crop,
la crème de la crème
, were always assumed to be French. And today, though the kings and princes have nearly all been deposed and are departed (mostly for Lisbon or Gstaad), the philosophes still go on. For even modern democracies need their sages, and modern persons the newest modes of thought. As it was so it is; however many fish swim in the great world of think-tanks, the largest, most shark-like, most powerful are still generally French. Before World War II finished, a desperate America, cut off from thought by the recent hostilities, flew Jean-Paul Sartre by bomber to New York. Simone de Beauvoir soon followed, drawn by such American wonders as Nelson Algren and the electric chair. Onward into our own age of philosophical cafés, and personal thought-trainers who’ll advise whenever you’ve a window in your corporate day. For how else could Americans know their postmodern condition, the strange anxieties of their unbearable lightness of being, their subjectless cogitos, their strange virtuality, without a Foucault, a Derrida, a Lyotard, a Baudrillard, a Kristeva to advise them, a philosopher come by transatlantic jumbo to court?