thomas m wilson

I have come to Athens, my final port of call in my journey south across Europe. I sit in my room on the big green park, Pedion tou Areos, and look out of the window and see canopy, and beyond that, arid yet green hills. Of course I should add that: in all other directions I am hemmed by the concrete jumble and cacophony of traffic that is 2023 Athens, and my window is firmly closed to stop the sound of traffic from overwhelming me.

I leave Europe in a few days, and start my journey home to Australia. I have had moments of beauty and pleasure living in Europe this year, but also moments of loneliness. In Moby Dick, when the sea captain Ahab is old and grey and tired, tired of the chase, he turns to the character Starbuck and says: ‘stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky […] By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and child in thine eye’. As for Starbuck, now is the time for me to forego hazard. Ahab could see home in the human eye, and he could have been looking into mine.

Greece – that beautiful country that is sometimes sullied by the architectural and auditory manifestations of its capital.  The Agora and the Temple of the Winds area and on top and on the south side of the Acropolis are parts of what redeems Athens as a city.  Walking in these places early or late in the day without the crowds reminds one of classical greatness and the beauty of old Greece.  Sometimes I think of Greek society as I felt about ancient Rome and modern Italy. Antiquity bears little relationship or apparent continuity with the loud, cigarette puffing societies of the present. 

This morning I was sitting upstairs in the Stoa of Attalos in the Agora.  It was cool and quiet.  What a relief after what is more common at the moment in Athens – thirty degrees and loud crowds and roaring motorbike engines.  I felt cool and spacious, stone under foot and soaring heights up to the ceiling.  The feeling of spaciousness and tranquility that a stoa gives you on a sunny Mediterranean morning is a balm.  We should replicate it at with a huge building at UWA.  But of course no contemporary architect or university administrator would consider such an idea.  This building was put up in the 1950s century with money from American benefactors (for example John Rokefeller gave a million US). 

This stoa is a faithful reproduction of the stoa that was here in the time of the Stoics. When you are here you are wandering in a large open portico where those same philosophers and their school of wisdom take their very name. Zeno of Citium for example, may have walked here, the man who started this school. Stoic philosophy taught methods to reduce negative emotions such as fear and anger in life, and maximise positive emotions such as joy. I consider Stoicisim as one of the major contributions of Western civilisation to answering the question: How should we live? For proof I recommend reading A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Braxton Irvine (2008), or How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci (2017).

As I sat there this morning, immediately ahead of me was about ten metres of stone floor, ending in a row of Ionic columns and a few hundred metres from the balcony I could see the Temple of Hephaestus.  All was quiet.  No tourists to be seen for the minute thank god.  The Temple and the stoa and the agora slept in the sun of a September morning.  Ancient and peaceful. 

IN THE LATE nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Vienna was the best evidence that the most accommodating and fruitful ground for the life of the mind can be something more broad than a university campus. More broad, and in many ways more fun. In Vienna there were no exams to pass, learning was a voluntary passion, and wit was a form of currency. Reading about old Vienna now, you are taken back to a time that should come again: a time when education was a lifelong process. You didn’t complete your education and then start your career. Your education was your career, and it was never completed. For generations of writers, artists, musicians, journalists and mind-workers of every type, the Vienna café was a way of life. […] Most, though not all, of the café population was Jewish, which explains why the great age of the café as an informal campus abruptly terminated in March 1938, when the Anschluss wrote the finish—finis Austriae, as Freud put it—to an era (from Cultural Amnesia by Clive James, 2007).

Reading James’ words made me more sympathetic towards Vienna than I would otherwise have been. And for years I had known it was the city of Wittgenstein and Freud and Klimt and plenty of other intellectuals and artists. But that was years ago and this is now.

Having just made a brief visit to the city I found it a smallish and architecturally dignified city north of the Alps. Not a world capital.

Yet it was. Vienna was the third largest city in Europe in the nineteenth century, after London (the biggest by far) and then Paris.  Apparently Freud used to walk along the Ringstrasse to clear his head after a long evening’s writing.  I walked there too, and enjoyed the tree lined boulevard lined with late nineteenth century neoclassical Parliament, neogothic Rathaus, and Renaissance Kunst history museum.  On my first afternoon in Vienna I actually made it into the Kunst history museum with an old friend who moved here from Brazil several years ago.  We walked to the room upstairs full of paintings by Brueghel.  I stood in front of his Tower of Babel for a while.  In this painting a huge tower is being built but it is falling apart in area – symbolising that the monoglot truth of humanity is crumbling into polyglot tribes. Perhaps this is a good symbol for the present state of the West as we become more stridently polarised on a political and cultural level. And I also stood in front of Brueghel’s The Peasant Wedding painting – the one I see when I visit two friends in Fremantle where a reproduction hangs on their wall.  It is a good reminder of the humanity of people long ago in north-western Europe being individual personalities with individual stories and dramas played out in their own time, in the 1500s.  In ways that still play out today, in different clothes, and with different material and technological environments, but otherwise with many of the same impulses and qualities stemming from a deeper human nature. 

Vienna is a pretty city.  Clean, full of caryatids on nineteenth century facades, and has very civilized koffee haus culture where you can find a table, get a newspaper and order your cup of coffee and slice of strudel and while away the afternoon.  It has the ghost of the House of the Habsburgs lingering in it.  You see this ghost atop the Hofburg in the shape of a two headed eagle in carved stone.  The konig of Hungry looks one way, and the emperor of Austria looks the other, a two headed overlord. At the end of the line this overlord was a whiskered and side-burned Franz Joseph.  The self-importance of this monarchs took a beating as in 1848 Europe was erupting with a rash of republican uprisings. And as the great buildings in stone went up on the Ringstrasse in Vienna the Austro-Hungarian Empire already had its days numbered.  These buildings try to assert something that wouldn’t last.

As my train rolled west from Vienna the countryside became more hilly and alternated with deeply green grass and copses of trees and little villages clustering around a church with a tall, onion domed spire.  And then the Alps…

What can you say about the Alps?  What would Europe be without the Alps?  As I approached a feeling of power and drama came to me.  The power of the world seemed heightened as I saw the colossal rock faces and ridges of the mountains to my south, looming under cloud tossed skies.  It was as though a part of me lit up again, a part of me became alive again.  These mountains emanate a sense of undeniable wildness and sing a song of adventure to the world.  They shrug off humans and our inventions and our cultural fabric, as if we are marginal and they central.  They say nothing and yet I feel infused with a sense of spiritual grace approaching their slopes and peaks.  I know others have felt this – Bruno Manser, Reinhold Messner, Herman Hesse, and of course the English pilgrims such as Wordsworth and Byron, have felt the spiritual power of the Alps.  John Muir spoke about the sense of grace and uplift that mountains can bring into your life more memorably and clearly than anyone in English, even if those words were about a mountain range far away from here.  Forget about the others, my own feelings this night as the train sped down into the valleys of the Alps, past church spires crowned by onion domes, rising up against the backdrop of steep stone and high places, were feelings of happiness.  I felt like I was stepping back into adventure.  The cities of Europe can have great beauty, but I was in need of the song of the earth in my ears. Now it is here. 

The next day in Innsbruck I took two buses up to 800 metres, then walked for a few hours up to 1900 metres on Nordkette.  It was a very steep incline full of loose stones in full sun much of the way.  I drew fast paced gusts of breath and could only concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and not falling off the slope for some of the ascent.  My legs and my lungs took me to the top, whereas the tourists at the restaurant at the top had paid 70 dollars to get there in the metal cable car.  Cresting a ledge of grass I looked across to a stone scree slope along the flanks of the mountain’s ridge.  The Brenner Pass was to my south, over the other side of the Inn valley.  Thousands of years ago Roman soldiers marched down the Brenner pass, in the middle ages horses and carts made the journey, and after 1945 some of the escaping Nazis fled that way.  So much history below, but up in the sky you could just see distant peaks, covered in snow, and jutting stone ledges pushing into the blue above.  The walk down was sometimes accompanied by wildflowers blooming in clearings that were made for ski slopes when the temperature is about thirty degrees below what it was today. 

Today my friend who lives here and I took a bus about an hour west of Innsbruck to Kuhtai, a little ski resort.  Kuhtai in the Tyrol is the highest alpine ski resort village in Austria, with a base elevation of around 2000m.  We hiked up to three perched lakes, and took our clothes off and swam in the last one.  The water was very cold, as you’d expect from snow melt.  The second time I went in it was actually a bit painful – the kind of pain you feel if someone holds an ice cube against your skin for a bit too long – even in the seconds after I got out, this discomfort endured.  But then the day’s warm sun defrosted me and the pleasure of being up at a high, wild alpine lake, sitting on a warm stone feeling clean and new came over me. 

We walked on, and climbed a route up a 2641 metre peak.  A bowl of water below us looked iridescently light blue, Speicher Finstertal, and above it towered jagged aretes atop another mountain ridge.  A tiring steeple chase up and up and up began, pushing just slightly into one’s fear and against one’s hesitation.  And then after an hour or two I am there, and straining quadriceps have elevated us into a realm of stone and ice and cloud.  One’s motivation and muscle have done what almost doesn’t seem plausible when standing low in the valley below.  I looked at the rocky high panorama around me, down into the bowl in the mountains filled with surreally blue water.  At that moment I thought that this alpine climb and this moment high on the earth is one of the memorable moments that I will get in this life.