24 Jun 2025
Footsteps.
Last month, I read Ian McEwan’s new book, What We Can Know, which is a literary mystery, an environmental nightmare novel, and most of all, a reminder that other people contain multitudes and are sometimes real bad. It concerns a researcher 100 years from now who is studying a poet from the 1990s-2030s era, who, on the occasion of his wife’s birthday, wrote a corona (a series of sonnets), which has never been found. Between now and then, the world has flooded (enter the environmental nightmare) and has made historical research more difficult, though the cloud has made it easier: everything the now-people texted or emailed is available to pore through in the future times. Anyway, it’s great and I loved it.
The narrator, who is on the hunt for the lost corona, ruminates on the nature of biography and history and of chasing the past. He also references Richard Holmes’s book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, in which the author attempts (in 1964) to recreate a journey that Robert Louis Stevenson took across France in 1878. Obviously, I tracked down a copy because what else is there to do in this burning world?
Holmes is in Langogne here:
But here something strange happened. The feeling that Stevenson was actually waiting for me, in person, grew overwhelmingly strong. It was almost like a hallucination. I began to look for him in the crowds, in the faces at the cafe doors, at hotel windows. I went back to the bridge, took off my hat, rather formally as if to meet a friend, and paced up and down, waiting for some sort of sign. People glanced at me: I felt an oddity, not knowing quite what I was doing, or looking for. The twilight thickened; bats began to dart over the river. I watched their flickering flight over the gleaming surface, from one bank to the other.
And then I saw it, quite clearly against the western sky, the old bridge of Langogne. It was about fifty yards downstream, and it was broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy. So Stevenson had crossed there, not on this modern bridge. There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this was the true sad sign.
Keeping up with current events is bringing me down. The constant barrage of evil deeds done by the truly stupid people in charge makes me want to sell all my belongings and retrace Richard Holmes’s footsteps tracing Robert Louis Stevenson’s footsteps. Then, 50 years later, someone else can retrace MY footsteps and so on. It’ll be an Escher of footstep tracing. An infinity scarf of melancholy nerds tromping around France looking for connection with ghosts.