Comments / thoughts / discussions covering Part III, chapters 9-14

My 2 cents worth on Part 3.

http://elentarri.booklikes.com/post/1578426/the-invention-of-nature-by-andrea-wulf-progress-update

I think someone needs to give Alexander von Humboldt a sedative or 3. The guy needs some sleep. ;)

He sounds like the Energizer bunny.

I've started Part III last night, but fell asleep towards the end of Chapter 9.

I love the way that Wulf describes the events around the characters, too. It almost like she took Humboldt's idea of the Naturgemaelde (painting of/by nature) and applied it to create a painting or series of frames of a time period.

As for Alex, ... geesh, a squirrel on speed comes to mind.

I don't know about you, but the book now moves into an era that I am more familiar with, and every time Wulf mentions a name a I recognise or a thing/place/whatever that I recognise, my mind goes "Yay!".

On a different and yet related subject, so if Humboldt was in Paris at the same time and frequenting the same salons as Cuvier, I guess it is likely they have met?
That's kind of a neat idea. Cuvier features heavily in the other book I'm reading (The Dinosaur Hunters) as he was pretty much the leading figure on prehistoric life forms and was much involved in the debate that gave life to the theories of evolution. (Btw, Cuvier did not believe that animals would adapt and evolve. He thought species simply went extinct.) Cuvier was also closely connected with the story of Mary Anning as he was the one who initially accused her of fabricating her (the world's first!) pleisiosaurus find as a scam. He later was gracious enough to recognise that he was mistaken and that Anning's find was genuine.


**Update: Nevermind - at the end of chapter 11 it becomes clear that they did indeed know each other as Cuvier seeks Humboldt's help to save his collections.

Erm, here's why we can't trust Wiki:

At the end of Chapter 11, Wulf says that Napoleon's statue at the top of the column on Place Vendome was toppled.
I had to look this up as I remember the column quite well from the last time I was in Paris - and wondered what had persuaded the people of Paris to replace the statue later on.

According to Wiki, the statue was not toppled in 1814, but only in 1871. Wiki says, the statue refused to budge in 1814 and adds an anecdotal postscript. There is no citation for this claim.

According to Napoleon.org, the statue was taken down in both 1814 and 1871.

Reply to post #4 (show post):
I'm woefully behind, but your comment about Naturgemaelde reminded me I wanted to ask our German speakers a question about this word. Wulf says there's no clear translation of it to English, but when I first saw the word I thought "melded nature", or a combined nature.

Am I way off base?

Pfft, Wikipedia. To be taken with large grains of salt.

No- you are not off base. That's what I came up with too and the family speaks German at home. Of course there are all the connotations that go with melded, especially in context with nature.

Reply to post #9 (show post):
Yay! Sometimes I look at German or Dutch words and I 'see' English equivalents in them, or hear in my head English words (i.e. 'keuken' sounds like kitchen). Sometimes I'm not even close, but often I can pick up a hint, at least, of meaning. But when she said there was no direct translation I thought maybe this was one of those off-base moments.

Re Naturgemaelde - You're not off base at all. But that is why it is difficult to translate.

The word itself, on first glance, simply means a picture of nature. But that could mean a picture as seen by the observer as well as an image created by nature itself.

In Humboldt's use of a schematic representation, it seems to be a bit of both and more because he tried to express an underlying commonality of his observations of nature by representing an abstraction of his findings as a picture of nature - so it is an image of nature and at the same time it is not.

...I need more coffee.

Reply to post #11 (show post):
If that's what you can put together before coffee, your after-coffee state frankly intimidates me. ;-)

Before proper caffeination/medication I can, at best, string together two vaguely groan-like sounds.

Anyway, I think I saw the word and thought 'melded nature' in the context of what he was aiming for: the concept of the web of life. And I did that only because it was in this text. If you'd shown me a landscape painting and said 'Naturgemaelde' I'd still have thought 'melded nature' but would have come away thinking it was just the German word for a landscape. I can rationalise anything given context, lol. :D

I've read up to chapter 12 so far today and my first thought was: this man is manic and trying very hard not to spend too much time with himself. How has he not dropped from exhaustion by this point?

Also, he nailed plate tectonics 100 years before anyone else did. And obviously nobody paid any attention.

BrokenTune: I thought about you when I was reading about the impact Humboldt had on Jules Verne, to the point where he quoted him verbatim in at least one book. :)

Oh, almost forgot: you can really see the beginnings of isolationism in these chapters too as Humboldt struggles to do what's best for his career, but has to fight against accusations of disloyalty from all corners. I get where they're coming from, but anyone who knew Humboldt had to see how single-minded he was and how little he'd have cared for politics.

Could it be that Humboldt was somewhere on the autism spectrum, maybe Asperger´s syndrom? The way he behaves toward other people, the way he talks, his relentlessness, his unusual interests in every aspect of science and his ability to do everything at once, he just doesn´t strike me as a person like you and me.