Thank you for that question, Maddy!

Summer day, sandwiches on the deck, chit chat, during which my friend Maddy asks: “I’ve heard of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, but not William Morris. What is he doing in your book?”

“Very good question! Thank you for asking!”  In this case, I really mean it. Here is more or less how I responded:

Verne and Stevenson are well known because nothing has the lasting power of a good story. They wrote yarns that were best-sellers in their day and still are. Even if you have never read Verne’s 20000 Leagues under the Sea or Around in the World in 80 Days, you have heard of them and have some idea of the plot from the titles. It’s the same with Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

William Morris was famous in his own day as a writer, but it was as author of a long narrative poem titled The Earthly Paradise. He was a serious contender for Poet Laureate of the realm mainly on the basis of this work.  But hardly anyone reads long poems anymore, and even English majors rarely read this one.

Instead, Morris lives on as a writer indirectly through the work of others. He was a folklorist who retrieved and reworked tales from many times and places, becoming especially fond of Norse sagas. After many experiments working with these raw materials, he invented a new prose form, which we now call fantasy.  He wanted to tell of heroic quests that require core human virtues, especially courage, but that had become difficult or impossible to carry out on the planet as we know it.

Some of Morris’s fantasy novels still attract readers (especially The Well at the World’s End), but their loose plots and archaic language make them tough going for many.  Even if they are not best-sellers, however, they have been an enormous influence on later writers–most notably J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Morris’s invention of fantasy adventures has swept the world in the form of books, movies, and games.

In a second way Morris’s work is all around us in unrecognized form: his work as a designer of household furnishings and domestic art. When Maddy asked “Why Morris?”, I answered in part by taking her to a bedroom in our house decorated with Morris-designed wallpaper:

The design is old but the wallpaper is relatively new. The firm that Morris founded to produce such goods went out of business only at the beginning of World War II;  his patterns for wallpaper, fabrics, and other domestic goods are still being made by other manufacturers.  I also took Maddy to our sun room to see the “Morris chair” there, probably made in the 1880s, and coming to me from my grandparents’ house.  It is what we would now call a reclining chair, using a simple but effective movable bar to adjust the tilt of the back:

The usual way of describing Morris as a designer is to say he is the inventor of functionalism, the concept that beauty emerges from utility.  In this general sense his principles of design have long since overflowed their original cultural home of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late l9th century. They are just as relevant for the design of electronic gadgets as for that of household furnishings.

Even more important, though, is Morris’s conviction that beauty and utility depend upon the joy of the workman in his labor. Unless making things engaged human creativity and gave a sense of purpose, they were not worth making.

This conviction–that the needs of producers are paramount–led Morris to become a revolutionary socialist–and in the process invented an entirely new kind of socialism.  He defined the needs of the producers not primarily by material measures, but by the soul-satisfaction they found in their work.  He treasured the beauty of the visible landscape and the vitality of the non-human world at a time when these qualities were hardly registered by other socialists. When they accused him of “sentimentalism,” Morris responded that he was indeed a “sentimental socialist” and proud of it.

I wrapped up my answer to Maddy by saying that it is the combination of these three accomplishments—inventor of fantasy, of functional design, and of a new kind of politics–that gives Morris a place of honor in my book.  Thinking about it more since, I realize that what most intrigues me about Morris is not how these three creative contributions converged in his life, but how they do not.  His moral sensibilities contradict each other from beginning to end.

Morris hates the way human weaknesses and failings have overrun the world.  He is convinced that the triumph of human empire is profoundly wrong, in the fantasy literature sense of wrongness. Yet he also wants to be realistic, to face the facts, to avoid evasion. He  is convinced that what he cares about most–attachments to the deep human past and to the non-human life of the earth–are being lost, rapidly and irretrievably. He will lose. Yet he wants to find happiness in the world.  It is too wide and wonderful a place to dwell in misery, and yet happiness becomes more difficult to find as humankind more and more dominates the world.

How does one hold on to all these convictions at once? This is the question Morris raises and that we continue to live with today.  Good question.  Thanks for asking.

So I have been musing since Stephen King’s 2009 novel Under the Dome has been turned into a TV series (even better than movie rights these days). King has explained that the image of a town under a transparent dome serves a metaphor for our finite global environment.

The same analogy inspired Notes on the Underground, which I wrote in the late 1980s and published in 1990. Among other things, the book recounts many fictional tales of humanity descending below the surface of the earth to live henceforth underground. At the end of Notes I write that we are now preparing to act out such a story, and not just in metaphorical terms:

“The real surface of our planet is the upper edge of the atmosphere, beyond which lies the frigid and uninhabitable realm of outer space. We have always lived below the surface, beneath the atmospheric ocean, in a closed, sealed, finite environment, where everything is recycled and and everything is limited. Until now, we have not felt like underground dwellers because the natural system of the globe has seemed so large in comparison with any systems we might construct. That is changing. What is commonly called environmental consciousness could be described as subterranean consciousness–the awareness that we are in a very real sense not on the earth but inside it.”

Of course at the time I had no idea King had for many years been playing with stories of towns-under-domes, which finally emerged as the novel and now the TV show. It would not be the first example of parallel simultaneous invention. And it would not be the first time when artists show how they can be so much more effective than scholars, by communicating through story rather than analysis.

Being old school, I still get most of my news from newspapers. For a long time now I have hardly glanced at so-called national news. Who wants to read about gridlock, which by definition is not news, because the story is that nothing is happening? I hardly look at international news either, for the opposite reason that it is too chaotic. So much is happening everywhere at once, and my ability to understand, much less intervene, in world events is so low that I can only try to get the basics. I prefer to turn to the topics of sports and art, where things are always happening, most of them comprehensible, and many of them interesting or even uplifting.

In the last week, however, I have been turning to news about crime. At this moment three of the most fascinating crime stories in the country have converged in Boston. South Boston mobster Whitey Bulger is sitting in a federal courtroom listening to FBI agents unveil him as a snitch as well as a murderer, while his lawyers try to defend him against the informing if not the murdering (except for the two murdered women, since killing them is also deemed dishonorable).

Marathon bomber Dzhobkhar Tsarnaev has just been charged with thirty crimes, including murdering four people. From what we know, he will apparently also be more intent on defending his reasons for doing what he did than in showing that he didn’t do it.

New England Patriot tight end (isn’t that a job description!—only now it is his former job) Aaron Hernandez has also just been charged with the cold-blooded execution of a guy he worried might snitch on him. The way that story is unfolding, New England’s legion of Patriots fans is going to have to rework entirely its perception of the last season. Collectively we will be reviewing the tapes to see a murderer loose on the field rather than a sports hero catching passes and making touchdowns.

Three tales of capital crimes, a trifecta of murder, all taking place in Boston at this moment: who could have made this up? The answer is — Dickens or Balzac, who might have woven the narratives together in a novel, or maybe in a trilogy, to portray Boston of the early 21st century, with old stories like Whitey’s converging with new ones like Dzhokhar’s and Aaron’s.

There are so many ways to mash them up to look for common themes and significant differences. I am especially intrigued by the geography of their lives in what we keep calling an age of globalization. Does Whitey’s story start in Ireland, or in mid-century Boston? Where does a story of migration begin and end, or does it end? That is the big question for Dzhokhar (pronounced much like Joker, if you haven’t noticed). He is from what historians used to call the Eurasian Heartland, the pivot of world history, back in the day when that was what people called global history. What is that heartland now but a seething cauldron of ethnic hate and dead-end misery, which Joker and his brother apparently exported to open-minded, welcoming Cambridge Massachusetts?

And where is Hernandez from? He seems to have spent time in Connecticut and Florida, but that doesn’t the answer the question of where he is coming from. He appears to have thought that the best way to hide his crimes was in the glare of publicity, so bright that no one would look for a murderer there. This was true even after, especially after, he destroyed another man’s face in a shooting six months ago, which somehow escaped scrutiny by team and fans alike.

Whitey went on the lam in the old-fashioned way, taking guns and girl to the other coast, successfully evading capture for 16 years. Dzhokhar evaded capture for less than 24 hours in a backyard boat. Aaron went the postmodern route, going on the lam in his own house, so used to being on camera that he recorded his own self-incriminating movements just before and after his latest crime on his own domestic surveillance system. The actual execution was carried out nearby in a so-called industrial park, which at this time in American history is going to be among the most sadly deserted of places in our wide and lovely land.

These stories are ones for the historian as well as for the novelist. They are criminal cases but not case studies. Case studies are episodes chosen to illustrate some larger point in the social sciences. If you try to study these stories as such, you could easily suck all the life out of them, because your focus would be on the larger point you had in your mind already (see: David Brooks). No, these are microhistories, where the macrocosm (the history of our time) is apprehended and understood through the microcosm. The pattern is fractal, or, as the poet wrote, in the butterfly’s wing he sees the mystery of the universe. This is news: in the microhistories of Boston crime, in the dreary wet summer of 2013, you see the larger story.

It’s not quite time for summer beach reading yet, but it is time for end-of-the-spring term reading. For me this consists of catching up on all the New Yorker magazines that have been accumulating during the winter. I feel guilty about letting them accumulate, but this turns out to be an advantage. Now that I have finally got to them, I can focus on a few big themes and let the rest go. This spring the big themes are technology and history—not as two separate topics, but as the same thing under different names (very loosely comparable to the way energy and mass turn out to be equivalent, if you throw in the speed of light squared to balance the equation).

The first article in my catch-up reading was “Laptop U,” Nathan Heller’s recent New Yorker story about MOOCs [Massive Open Online Course). It headed the list upon the recommendation of an MIT colleague who is following MIT’s involvement in MOOCs through a collaborative enterprise called edX. I can see why she recommended it, because Heller’s article is informative rather than opinionated. (Somehow, in the Information Age, information can be hard to come by, while opinions smother us.) Heller conveys what he thinks about MOOCs, but for most of the piece he shows what other people are doing and thinking with and about them.

Most of them love MOOCs. The humanist scholar sees a marvelous means of mounting a sort of multimedia Wagnerian great opera to convey the glories of classical Greece to 21st century teenagers. The economically minded administrator welcomes a new means of production that can finally crash through the longstanding productivity barrier of higher ed, democratizing higher education or at least providing another income stream to support prevailing modes. Teachers of basic intro courses in math, science, and engineering—the real inventors of MOOCs—see them as a nifty way of vastly expanding their audience, which could deliver knowledge to the masses and maybe a fortune to themselves. The educational psychologist foresees a fount of research data. There are some skeptics (such as 60 percent of the faculty of Amherst College who voted to turn down an invitation to join edX), but they are aware that their opposition is small compared to the drive to MOOCs. In the words of one Amherst College faculty member quoted by Heller, “It seemed to come down the road as something that was going to happen.”

The “it” refers, as usual, to “the technology,” in what is a classic statement of technological determinism: there is a technology out there coming down the road, and it is going to happen whether you like it or not. Humans here, technology there, as if the human-built world is as separated from human will as the rising of the sun. In my trade as an historian of technology, I have learned from my academic cradle that technological determinism is an incorrect and dangerous belief. It makes us think that we have no control over what we create, a belief that sets up a negative feedback loop in allowing a few people to manipulate those inventions for self-interested and even nefarious purposes. While belief in technological determinism may be a huge error in the eyes of historians of technology, we have obviously done a bad job of getting out the word. Almost all the people Heller interviews accept the belief that MOOCs are inevitable, including academic leaders of Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.

Historians of technology are much more forgiving of what in the trade we call “technological enthusiasm.” Oddly enough, the sense of inevitability that MOOCs convey to most of the world goes with a tone of technological enthusiasm—excited and happy anticipation about what this humanbuilt system can do to make the world a better place. Heller’s report resounds with the sound of enthusiasm. Everyone says that the new technology raises questions and problems, but the overall tone is not that of doom but of something closer to technological utopianism.

This was not the tone of the second article I read in my stack of New Yorkers, George Packer’s essay on “Depression literature, old and new”. In heading for this article I was going for the author rather than the specific topic. Packer has a new book out (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America) of which I have now read three reviews, all of which make it sound quite interesting. I figured that reading Packer’s recent article might help me figure out if I wanted to buy the book, even if it hardly sounds like reading appropriate for the beach.

Packer’s essay on Depression writing begins by noting that in the 1930s Edmund Wilson and John Dos Passos, among many others, were impelled by the economic and political crisis “to turn literature into a form of activism” (70). Packer points out that today’s economic and political crisis has also created literature, but one that focuses on individuals and elites rather than the ordinary people. What is missing in today’s accounts (and by implication what Packer writes about in The Unwinding) is the story of ordinary people being crushed by current events. Wherever history is headed, it is not in a direction that gives the common person a sense of recognition in the present, much less hope for the future.

Packer makes a convincing argument that the biggest difference between the history of the 1930s and that of the early 21st century is historical consciousness. In our times, technological change has replaced history as the “change agent” in human affairs. This is more extreme than the belief that history is determined by technology. It means that human enthusiasm, energy, and optimism have been invested in technology to the extent that the very concept of history is fading away.

History has become a site of depression in more than economic terms. The cover of the issue carrying Packer’s story about Depression literature (see the link above) is titled “Shadows Over Boston.” It shows disembodied legs running in the bright sunlight that cast ominous shadows of those legs in the foreground. The image alludes to the bombings that concluded this year’s running of the Boston Marathon, but it also represents more generally how we think of history these days. Run as hard and fast we might, it ends in catastrophe.

The paradox is that the more we humans strive to control our world through “technology,” the less we feel in control of the historical world….and yet we keep returning to technology to get us out of the loop. Maybe taking a MOOC will lead to inventing an app that will make a difference…… This is the mindset that seems to animate the most recent graduate of MIT as much as Anant Agarwal, who leads edX for MIT. Salvation is a start-up. That is where hope is to be found. There seems something equivalent to the speed of light squared at work in transmuting the mass of history into the explosive energy of technology.

To restore historical consciousness, the last thing we need is “ a foundational theory of history” (David Brooks’ advice to Packer in his review of The Unwinding in today’s New York Times Book Review). Considering the trajectory of the last big foundational theory, that of Marxism, this does not seem a good path. Human beings need salient examples, often told in stories, more than theories to regenerate conviction that history can be a source of human power. A good story to start is the civil rights movement that became a national movement fifty years ago this spring. There was no foundational theory behind it. There was a conviction that history has an arc, that the arc bends towards justice, and that what individuals and groups did could help make it bend. There is no better way to greet the summer than to take a little time off to read and think about how to make history work this way again.

Even people who have zero interest in general history can get intrigued by family history, or at least some branches thereof. My interest in family history, generally mild, recently got a boost because one of our graduate students, Rebecca Woods, is preparing to defend her doctoral dissertation on sheep-raising in New Zealand in the nineteenth-century (with the terrific title “The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900”).

I have an ancestor, from the Kenway side of my mother’s family, who left England in the late l9th century to raise sheep in New Zealand. I didn’t know anything more about him, however, so I asked my cousin Mary Emerson Smith for help. She reminded me that the name of this forefather is Philip T. Kenway and that he had written several books, some of which may be found in Widener Library at Harvard University. A few days later I had in my hands a 139-page memoir titled Quondam Quaker, published by Cornish Brothers Limited in Birmingham in 1947 when the writer was 86 years old. (The title means “former Quaker.” Kenway slowly but surely lost the family faith and formally renounced his affiliation with the Society of Quakers after he returned to England in middle age.)

Although I tracked down this book because of family history, to my amazement it turned out to be a wonderful microhistory of the large theme I have been writing about in general history–the triumph of human empire. Microhistory has been defined as asking “large questions in small places.” Quondam Quaker bears the subtitle “in Birmingham, New Zealand and Surrey,” and these three places, as experienced by Philip Kenway, tell the larger story.

Birmingham, where he was born and raised, was in his childhood “still a comparatively new town, and few of the people I remember were a generation removed from the country. They could naturally keep a pig but when that was impracticable they had to put up with dogs and pigeons.” As a boy he enjoyed the easy walk from his home to “Bourne-Book, a then unspoilt little stream in a flowery meadow,” where he and his brothers caught fish for the home aquarium, “and where we had a chance to acquire an abiding love of nature and some distaste for city life.”

But the sentences that immediately follow express his consciousness that this is a ghost world, lost to the unrelenting pressures of human settlement and purposes:

“The meadow has been built over and the stream is now a sewer.

“As the country fast recedes from them, I wonder to what extent the little Brumms [inhabitants
of Birmingham] of today can get what they need of love of real nature from the set paths and
pools of the Municipal Parks!” (9)

After trying his hand at being a clerk in a print shop in Birmingham, which he found dull and unlikeable, Philip “began to feel a little unsettled.” His older brother Bill had been working on a sheep station in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, and had just secured some government land in the next district. Bill’s description of the bush, hill, and river sounded like paradise to his younger brother. Philip was also beginning to chafe at the confinement of the traditional beliefs of his Quaker family, “the fetters of which were beginning to gall” (33).

In 1883, at the age of 22, Philip Kenway sailed to New Zealand to join his brother. This was a “pastoral retreat,” in the sense that Leo Marx defines the term in The Machine in the Garden: the move away from urbanized civilization in the direction of wilderness, the quest for a middle landscape between hypercivilization and savagery. In Kenway’s case the retreat was not just metaphorically to the pasture, for in New Zealand he made his livelihood literally tending sheep. In his memoir he provides a thick description of how he and his brothers (four in all emigrated) and their mother (who came over from England to live with them for a while) built a hut and later a real house, cleared brush, split posts, fenced the land, burned off fern, sowed turnips and various grasses for fodder, hunted, cooked, and did the laundry, all to the end of establishing a ranch on which they raised a few cattle and a lot of sheep.

The sheep-tending required a whole other set of tasks, including the initial stocking, dipping to destroy parasites, docking and ear-marking the lambs in the spring, herding, protecting, and shearing. Philip Kenway never felt he understood the large farm animals very well: “I never got to love sheep, had no eye for cattle of any kind, and could not even be sure of picking my own horse out of a mob” (107) But he loved dogs, and one of his most exuberant chapters in the middle New Zealand section of his memoir is titled “Sundry Dogs.” He describes the array of working sheep dogs “of all sizes, shapes, colours and breeds, being selected purely for brains and stamina.” After six days of work, he would take his pack of dogs for a Sabbath ramble, wandering for miles hunting with them for boar and birds. Anyone who keeps dogs in town, Kenway writes, has little understanding “what their life should be, and the joy of their really co-operative companionship” (65).

Philip was happy there. “We all certainly worked pretty hard, but the new life was most exhilarating, and none of us had the slightest wish to go back to England.” (40) Eventually he decided to organize a limited company so that he could buy more land and establish a regular business. He found ready shareholders among his family and friends, mostly Quakers, who were willing to do this mainly on personal trust. Eventually he acquired 14,000 acres with government title to the land, mainly by purchasing land from a Glasgow bank that had failed in 1878. During his second decade in New Zealand, new technological systems made life and sheep ranching easier. “There is no dislike for new things in a new country and no delaying prejudices” (94). Electrical and telephone systems were crude but got the job done. Road-building, which had started when he first arrived, enabled him to make a buckboard and finally to brings one of the first automobiles to his part of New Zealand.

A major reason Kenway enjoyed sheep-raising was that it depended on the exploitation not of human labor but of non-human nature. The business, as he saw it, involved destroying useless scrub on the one hand and, on the other, growing mutton and wool to be sold at auction either for local buyers or in London, where they were a small drop in the world market and did not destroy anyone else’s chances of competing. He and his brothers and other white settlers worked shoulder to shoulder with Maori, who “are no slaves, but our most respected friends” (107). He felt no hostility from them: “A new settler in an undeveloped country is always welcome,” (49) he writes. The dispossessed Maori would not see it that way, but for Kenway sheepraising was, in the title of one subchapter, “A Clean Job.”

After more than twenty years in New Zealand, he had accomplished his work of conquering nature all too well:

“The work of making a well-arranged sheep-run out of rather inaccessible steep bush country,
exploring, fixing on homestead site, surveying for a road, felling and burning off the bush,
fencing and grassing, was all interesting enough an even exciting. But this once done, to
hang about, year after year, just waiting for the wool to grow, was a prospect that did not
appeal to me at all.” (107)

So Kenway “yielded to the temptation of a life nearer to the centre of things, and came Home [he capitalizes the word] in 1906” (107). He had enough money to marry and to live on, and so he and his wife settled in Surrey, just south of London. (No children are mentioned.) There he had time and leisure but “no particular object to live for.” (116). In trying to find one, he tried various ways to import back to England the “fairly widespread happiness” he had found in New Zealand, where “you could lead your own life without bothering your head about other people.” In England, by contrast, “There was too much poverty, misery, and injustice plainly visible, for a decent man to avoid some mental discomfort” (108).

Kenway joined the Fabian Society, published articles in the journal New Age, and became involved in the Social Credit movement supporting its leader, another Quaker, John Hargrave, to whom the book is dedicated. When the Great War broke out, he took his car to northern France, where he drove families of injured soldiers to visit them in hospitals or infirmaries closer to the front. At the same time Kenway engaged in a variety of “constructive arts,” since these had given him so much pleasure in his ranching days. He took up woodcarving, metalworking, and clay modeling. Most of all he devoted time to his garden. The fact that all these pleasures were largely private—he writes that “next to nobody ever saw” his garden—did not deter him. “Whether your work is appreciated or not it never seems to lose its interest, for what you do yourself [as a gardener] is so very little in comparison with what the sun does for you” (117).

In some ways the third and last section of the book has the most human interest, as Kenway, back Home, tries a variety of spiritual, practical, and political activities to provide himself with meaning in life. He seeks to make the world a better place and also seeks post-Quaker peace of mind. As the book draws to a close, Surrey is just emerging from the shortages and dangers of World War II. Kenway ends by advocating the vision he had carried with him to and from New Zealand of “A Free People,” unfettered by superstition or Money Power. He adds, however, that as he writes in 1946 “The industrial and social outlook of the world is far blacker than it has ever been within human memory.” He ends with a suggestion, only half in jest, that humans need to return to seeing themselves as part of the greater life of the planet. Maybe we should return to sun worship, he suggests; after all, our food, warmth, light, and life depend on the sun. As much as in ancient Egypt, we are “The Children of the Sun” (133)

By the time Philip Kenway died in 1952, humans were behaving not as the children but as the would-be masters of the sun, reproducing its processes on our planet in the nuclear age. As much as Jules Verne’s fictional adventures, Philip Kenway’s adventures in New Zealand were part of the human conquest of unknown and unmapped regions of the globe. Like Morris, Kenway found in a small remote pastoral island (New Zealand for Kenway, Iceland for Morris) an existence proof of a more sustainable, equitable way of life. And, like Stevenson, he admired the indigenous people of the South Seas and treasured the insights and pleasures that the arts, whether writing or gardening, could bring to life. (About halfway through the book, in a short chapter about his reading, Kenway interjects: “Then there was the shock of hearing of the death of R.L. Stevenson. He had fascinated me as he has lastingly delighted so many” [51].)

Kenway wanted to make the world a better place, but he also wanted to enjoy it as it is. In reading the account of his life, I was reading both family history and general history. In telling me the story of his life, my forefather was also telling me about his role in the story of the triumph of human empire.

Last week I started looking around MIT to connect with people who might help me develop my idea of doing retrospective GPS tracking of l9th-century writers.  Like almost any university these days, MIT is full of people interested in and working on problems of what is commonly called “digital humanities.”

Many of them, predictably, are in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies, which is in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Others, less predictably (but this is MIT!), are found in engineering or computer science—for example, the Macro Connections research group organized around Professor César Hidalgo in the Media Lab, which develops methods to represent and analyze networks of historical and cultural events and processes.

I looked up Shahar Ronen, who has been part of this group: he has an undergraduate degree and considerable work experience in computer science, a master’s degree in history, and is just completing his master’s degree at MIT in Media Arts and Communications. We were introduced by Brian Keegan, a former undergraduate student of mine, now back in the Boston area as a postdoc at Northeastern University and actively connecting people like Shahar and me who share interests if not disciplines.

I give these details to make this point:  of all the search engines on the planet, the best by far is a university. It collects an enormous amount of information but does so in a way that makes it efficient, and often enjoyable, to find what you need, and to be assured of its quality.

I explained to Shahar my vague ideas about tracking a cluster of 19^th century writers, following them in space on different time scales—days, weeks, months, years, decades—to develop a better understanding of how they moved around the planet, responding to changes in its air, land, and water, and how they were motivated by quests, at once profoundly social and profoundly bodily, for health, stimulation, relaxation, solitude, and society.

Shahar quickly took me to a much more pragmatic level:  what data could I mine to find reasonably precise and continuous geographic information about these writers?  I said that one obvious source would be a diary.  Shahar suggested as a model the website for the diary of Samuel Pepys, which links to maps so that events are coordinated with locations:

http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/05/23/

He followed up later with a sample from the diary showing how named entities (like locations) could be identified and classified using the Stanford named-entity recognizer:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml

The next task would be to assign specific GPS coordinates for each location mentioned in a text such as a diary, as well as to ascertain how long the person stayed at each location.  This additional information would be needed to end up with a dynamic representation of someone’s movements over time in the past.

This is tedious, but certainly doable, if you have a rich text to work with. None of the late l9th century writers of interest to me kept a diary, except occasionally (such as William Morris’s diary of his camping trips in Iceland).  But they were all assiduous letter writers.  The quantity, length, and complexity of their letters should provide a wealth of information regarding their whereabouts and movements.  Sharar and I discussed how published collections of letters, many of which should be available in digital form, could be mined for this information.  In these collections, each letter has a caption telling where it was written, as well as when and to whom. The contents of each letter could be searched for words relating to place and movement.

As Shahar and I discussed the coding involved, the more I realized that such a project in digital humanities is possible only because of a much deeper foundation of scholarship in the non-digital humanities. It depends, first, on the habit of daily letter-writing, so engrained by education and socialization in the educated classes of the l9th century.  It also depends on the habit of saving letters, on both ends of the correspondence, so that they end up preserved in an archive somewhere.

Finally, the project depends on the labor, often over decades, of producing edited volumes of collected letters, which give such rich information and pleasure to countless scholars and readers.  For Morris and Stevenson, this work has been done, and so the digital humanist is set to go. This is not the case for Verne, for whom there is no comprehensive edition of letters, among other obstacles in accessing archival information about him.

I also began to think about what is lost, as well as what is gained, by the whole process of using digital techniques to extract geographical data from a textual mine. What ends up on the slag heap?  The mind of the writer, for starters. We know where he is, or where he is headed, but we don’t know what he is thinking. Information about geographical position omits elements of the text that might provide, for example, rich and vivid descriptions suggesting why the writer cares about that place.

Also omitted would be the crucial information that in many cases a writer is thinking not about where he is, but about somewhere else.  When William Morris was camping out in the northern reaches of Iceland, he was often desperately homesick, thinking about his wife and daughters left behind at Kelmscott Manor in the company of his wife’s lover Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  When Jules Verne was lying on his stomach on a small fishing vessel sailing from port to port in the English Channel, he was daydreaming about a submarine below the ocean’s surface in oceans far away, on the other side of the planet, hidden from all tracking by a captain who had pledged never to have anything more to do with terrestrial humanity.

And when Robert Louis Stevenson was climbing a hill in Apemama, in the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific, during a several-week stay there a guest of its thuggish ruler, he suddenly imagined himself back in Scotland, on a hill overlooking Edinburgh:

 The tropics vanish, and meseems that I,

From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,

Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.

Far set in fields and woods, the town I see

Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, . .

So he wrote to a friend back home, in a poem overflowing with Stevenson’s longing for his homeland.  At that time he thought he would return there someday, but he never did, and now lies buried at the top of another hill, in Samoa.

I want to find a way to track writers as if they were migratory animals, but I want to go beyond that. They are animals with consciousness, which connects them in habit and dream and hope to places far from where their bodies are.  Letters can be used to track not only physical journeys but also imaginative ones.  It should be possible to combine these tracks in a single map.  To do this requires reading the letters with attention to feeling, nuance, allusion, and tone. The full map might end up nearly as large as the territory, but that is how it is with imaginative writing.

The Triumph of Human Empire begins in the spring of 1890. Its first chapter describes where Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson were that April, what they were and thinking, and where they thought they were heading in their work and otherwise. This post explains why the book sets out this way and where the path ends up leading.

I began to be curious about who was where in the spring of 1890 many springs ago, when I was researching the poet Émile Verhaeren. Although he was from the Flemish-speaking area of northern Belgium, Verhaeren wrote in French, and his poetry was a huge hit among avant-garde readers and artists all over Europe in the 1890s.  His best-known work laments the fate of Flanders in the age of industrialization, with striking titles (in English translation The Tentacular Cities, The Hallucinated Countryside, and The Illusory Villages) and powerful symbolism.

Verhaeren felt that to write about Flanders he had to leave it, in order to gain perspective from distance.  In the 1880s he took many long trips around western Europe and the United Kingdom.  He was often lonely and unhappy, but he said that these trips were necessary as his “instrument de rêve,” which could be translated “tool of dream” or more better “instrument of imagination.” In springtime he usually spent several months in London.  In 1890 he did this with a much lighter heart than usual. Over the winter he had fallen in love with Marthe Massin, a painter from Brussels. In April 1890 he wrote to her in London she was with him as “a protective and secret presence,” enabling him to shun “la vie des bars” and instead to write the poetry that would make his reputation.  (They married the next year.)

This tale of love and art linking London and Brussels reminded me that Joseph Conrad, aka Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was in the same North Sea region about the same time, getting ready to take the voyage that would later inspire his novelette Heart of Darkness.  When I looked up the details, I discovered that in April 1890, as Verhaeren was leaving Belgium for London, Conrad was heading to Brussels where he would be given command of the vessel that would take him up the Congo.  Although he actually sailed from Bordeaux, in the novelette Conrad imaginatively makes the estuary of the Thames the place where the journey begins in a glowing sunset, and Brussels the place where it ends in a murky lie.

In this continuing exercise of free association, I then thought about the utopian romance News from Nowhere, by William Morris, which also tells the story of a river journey that begins on the Thames at London.  Morris’s story moves in the opposite direction, not to the heart of darkness but to that of summer, as his protagonist takes a small boat trip upstream to the hay harvest in Oxfordshire.  In the spring of 1890 Morris was writing News from Nowhere at the same time he was in real life going up the Thames from London—by railroad–to spend the Easter holiday at Kelmscott Manor, his beloved getaway place on the “baby Thames” west of Oxford.

By this time I had started researching Jules Verne, so I checked his whereabouts around Easter 1890.   He was living a quiet life in Amiens, a provincial city in northern France, writing methodically and taking daily walks to his club to take notes from books and journals there to draw upon in writing his “extraordinary voyages.”  If Verhaeren used travel to stimulate his art, Verne did just the opposite. He chose a life of strong routine and limited mobility in order to complete the books that would take his readers around the world, under its seas and lands, and into space.

As for Robert Louis Stevenson, I had long ago read his first commercially published work, An Inland Voyage, so I knew he had explored the region between Brussels and Amiens in the 1870s in a canoeing trip with a college chum on canals and rivers there.  By the spring of 1890, Stevenson was far away, in the South Seas, where he had sailed with his extended family for the previous two years. At Easter 1890 Stevenson was building a house on Samoa so he could spend northern winters there.  He was planning to return to England for some time to make arrangements for this new life, when suddenly (for reasons described in the book) he decided to remain in the South Seas for several more months. By the fall of 1890 he realized he would never return to the North Sea region that Verhaeren, Conrad, Morris, and Verne had all made their primary habitat.

You may ask, and should ask–so what?  Answering this question will take more room than I can squeeze into this post, but here is a brief preview. Asking how writers and other artists intersect with each other, especially in cities, is a standard way of connecting place and literature. But if you track individual writers like migratory animals, and observe where their tracks cross over time, you may see intersections in space that are less obvious.

By tracing the spring migrations of Verne, Morris, and Stevenson in 1890, I became more conscious of the patterns of their ongoing grazings over the planet’s lands and waters.  These patterns are in four dimensions: three in space and also in time. Some involve near-daily commutes to work; others were weekly or monthly getaways; still others were less frequent pilgrimages to places of special meaning. They integrate in measurable rhythms, arising as they do from ever-changing mixtures of biological needs, as these writers sought healing, refuge, warmth, cold, stimulation, relaxation, and inspiration.

In this respect these writers are no different from anyone else, except that they are more aware of their mobilities and unusually skilled at expressing how they happen and why they matter. Tracking them in the spring of 1890 weaves together literary history, history of technology, and environmental history into a single web. It reveals writers as migratory animals who are responding to warmer, longer days, embedded in patterns of earthly life much larger than their own.

One of the most difficult parts of writing The Triumph of Human Empire was trying to define an event of consciousness.  The rise of human dominance on the planet has been the ultimate slow-moving process, taking place over many millennia, and it has been composed of all sorts of material elements. Awareness of this dominance, however, represents a change in human thinking, not any particular change in the material world.  Furthermore, this awareness emerged quite rapidly, in a few decades in the late 19th century, once humans could see their dominance in the nearly-completed mapping of the globe.

As the above paragraph shows, it is hard to describe the concept in abstract terms. The Boston Marathon bombing has provided a tragic but dramatic illustration of an event of consciousness that is worth more than paragraphs of explanation.

For Bostonians the event of consciousness, played out in the last two weeks, is the realization that we are Bostonians.  This may seem ridiculously circular, but in a world where Mobility and Globalization and Cyberspace are all supposed to represent the human future, the idea that dwelling in a particular city matters seems quaintly anachronistic…..except when an event of consciousness makes you realize, no, where you live day by day on the surface of the physical world really makes a difference in your life.

In the past two weeks there have been innumerable debates about what it means to be a Bostonian, starting with the question of how much college students count as Bostonians (consensus: very little) and how much those who live in the Boston suburbs count (consensus: it depends). The more interesting discussions are about defining the essential characteristics of a Bostonian . Here the general consensus seems to be that it involves being basically decent and caring but also having an attitude that non-Bostonians might call jerkish and still others might refer to with some version of the expression “Masshole.”

But the point is that almost immediately after the bombing, there was a collective ah-ha moment for people in the Boston area. We may have lived here a long time, maybe all our lives, and our integration into the fabric of the place, in countless material and social ways, has taken place over many years–but in the twinkling of an eye, or, sadly, the bursting of two IEDs, we were conscious of belonging to the city, and the city belonging to us, and being proud of this.

(I live in the suburb of Newton, but only two blocks from the Boston neighborhood of Brighton, so I will claim Bostonian identity.  If you don’t like this you can……well, I still stop here, but remember, the jerkish and profane is part of it.)

Not quite, but almost as quickly, those who do not live in Boston also experienced an event of consciousness.  In this case, it was a new awareness of Boston as a city of contemporary history. As the Boston Globe editorialized on April 28, the image of Boston had become frozen in time, in the 1970s when violent protests against “forced busing” were the staple of news broadcasts.  The multiple changes in the city since then–which the flowering of the Boston Marathon as an international event was a prime example–were off the historical charts, so to speak, not especially newsworthy and therefore little noticed. The aftermath of the marathon bombings displayed a  dramatically different Boston, one where caring and competence triumphed in a crisis.

Among Bostonians, and also among many non-Bostonians around the world, historical consciousness suddenly caught up with slow-moving material and social events.  As the smoke from the explosions rippled away from the finish line on Boylston Street,  so did a new clarity about the importance of the city in personal and collective history.

As usual, the Onion is out in front in making sense of the senseless:

BOSTON—After Monday’s horrific terror attack at the Boston Marathon that killed three and left hundreds injured, officials confirmed Tuesday that the bombings and senseless violence that followed occurred primarily because this is the kind of world we live in now.

According to reports, this is an age when, in an instant, two explosions can go off in rapid succession in a major urban center, disrupt the lives of thousands, and terrify hundreds of millions. In addition, those familiar with the situation went on to note that going through one’s day-to-day life with the uneasy feeling that a devastating act of violence could happen with little rhyme or reason is “just how it is now.”

Sources later confirmed that people crying, blood-spattered roads, and complete and total chaos are how the current world works and will continue to work for the foreseeable future. (http://www.theonion.com/articles/this-what-world-like-now,32068/, accessed 21 April 2013)

There are all sorts of ways we in the Boston area and far beyond are trying to make sense of the senseless right now.  We are piecing together the sequence of events of the last week and its implications for emergency response, security, and law enforcement. We are piecing together what we are learning about the murderers and their motivations.  (The Onion: “Study: Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens.”)

Back of them lies the larger question of what all this has to tell us about the world we live in. The Onion, in its sidebars, has a list of BREAKING stories, including “Can Anyone Ever Truly Know Anything? What Is the Truth?” and “Has the Word ‘Breaking’ Lost Its Meaning?”

When it comes to events like those of the past week, we are all historians. We now share a story of a sequence of events (explosions, rescue, manhunt, death and capture) that is already the stuff of legend as a thrilling account of danger and heroism. At the same time we are trying to understand these events as part of a larger pattern.  In this sense too we are all historians, trying to understand  “how the current world works and will continue to work for the foreseeable future.”  To do this we need some sense of how the current world relates to that of past, how it seems different, how it seems similar, and how the world seems to be changing: in other words, a sense of history.

Most of us have grown up with the assumption that history follows a pattern of progress, both social and more lately especially technological, based on human domination of the planet.  But we are beginning to see more and more that this domination—the empire of the human—has also created conditions of ongoing, interactive crises (what follows is from the last chapter of The Triumph of Human Empire):

The triumph of human empire carries with it a tragic sense of its inevitable ending. It is hard to imagine an alternative for human empire, but it is not hard to imagine that it will collapse. Human empire appears invincible in the short run and unsustainable in the long run.

            The experience of crisis as an indwelling condition, containing its own aftermath, increasingly dominates our historical lifeworld.  Crisis, in this sense, is not a potentially world-ending cataclysm, such as a meteorite strike, nor is it a serious but solvable problem, such as episodic shortages of food, water, or energy. The crises that seem most threatening today are in the middle range, involving processes initiated by humans but, once underway, not necessarily controllable by us….

In our new historical condition, crisis is no longer imminent, out there on some future horizon, but has become immanent, incorporated into ongoing history. In the words of Frank Kermode (in his book The Sense of an Ending), “the older, sharply predictive apocalypse, with its precise identification, has been blurred; eschatology is stretched over the whole of history, the End is present at every moment.”  Just as local and global space seem to converge in the condition of human empire, so do immediate and distant time. The end of history dwells in the present as a rolling apocalypse.

From this perspective, history is already and always ending. Human life goes on, sometimes happily, sometimes not, but always in the context of a disappearing world: blown-off mountaintops in West Virginia, desiccated marshes in southern Iraq, toppled neighborhoods in Beijing, dried-up waterfalls, extinct species, extinct civilizations. It is no longer only supposedly untamed savages and untrodden wilderness to which we bid farewell. More familiar peoples and things are disappearing all the time.

We do not have to wait for the last fish in the ocean to die, nor the last tree in the forest to be felled, to see the end coming. It is here and now and all around, as we look back to our home island and realize we cannot discern it anymore. Its end may be experienced as a loss of physical habitat, or as a loss of social coherence and predictability. In the words of one Russian citizen, responding to an especially vicious criminal attack in her country, “I think the end of the world has already arrived in this land.”

That comment was made after the recent acid-throwing attack on the director of the Bolshoi Ballet. It could also be made by a citizen of Boston, who never imagined she or he would see the finish line of the Boston Marathon, this wonderful civic celebration, held for over a century, ending in bombs, shrapnel, blood, and death.  One of today’s front-page articles in the Boston Globe refers to “the emerging stories of survivors and their saviors [that] still resonate, each tale its own vivid apocalyptic world.”  We are also writing the story of the rolling apocalypse of our shared historical world.