A History of the Wind
Description
Everyone knows the wind's touch, its presence, its force. Sometimes it roars and howls, at other times we hear its wistful sighs and feel its soothing caresses. Since antiquity, humans have borne witness to the wind and relied on it to navigate the seas. And yet, despite its presence at the heart of human experience, the wind has evaded scrutiny in our chronicles of the past.
In this brilliantly original volume, Alain Corbin sets out to illuminate the wind's storied history. He shows how, before the nineteenth century, the noisy emptiness of wind was experienced and described only according to the sensations it provoked. Imagery of the wind featured prominently in literature, from the ancient Greek epics through the Renaissance and romanticism to the modern era, but little was known about where the wind came from and where it went. It was only in the late eighteenth century, with the discovery of the composition of air, that scientists began to understand the nature of wind and its trajectories. From that point on, our understanding of the wind was shaped by meteorology, which mapped the flows of winds and currents around the globe. But while science has enabled us to understand the wind and, in some respects, to harness it, the wind has lost nothing of its mysterious force. It still has the power to destroy, and in the wind's ethereal presence we can still feel its connection with creation and death.
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Content
Acknowledgements
Prelude
Chapter 1: The Inscrutable Wind
Chapter 2: The Winds of the Common Folk
Chapter 3: The Aeolian Harp
Chapter 4: New Experiences of the Wind
The Balloon "At the Head of the Wind"
The Sandstorm in the Desert
The Wind in the Sequoias
Chapter 5: The Tenacity of the Aeolian Imagination in the Bible
Chapter 6: The Epic Power of the Wind
Chapter 7: The Fantasy of the Wind in the Enlightenment
Chapter 8: Gentle Breezes and Caressing Currents
Chapter 9: The Enigma of the Wind in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 10: Short Strolls in the Wind of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 11: The Wind, the Theater, and Cinema
Postlude
Notes
Index
3
The Aeolian Harp
During the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a sudden surge of literary self-expression: intimate journals, notebooks, and correspondence, all attesting to an ever-intensifying "I" - an "I" that was sensitive to and reflected the weather. The risks to this "I" mirrored the risks of fate. And the history of the wind transcribed this new sensibility. This concept of the wind expressed and symbolized the sounds of nature, which have haunted literature ever since. "The tempest, the thunderstorm, and the hurricane all entered literature as signs of the basic instability of the human condition," especially in the guise of solitary subjectivity.1 The Sturm und Drang movement illustrated this point in its formula of the "storm" as portrayed as an extreme intensification of the wind, most often accompanied by snow and associated with notions of assault, impulse, and momentum characterized by the word "stress."
A musical instrument quickly became the sign of phenomena larger than itself; the Aeolian harp symbolized this new attention (figure 3). Its first incarnation was as a wooden box said to have been invented by Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) in the middle of the seventeenth century, but it was not taken up with any degree of popularity, notably in Germany and England, until the end of the eighteenth century. This string instrument, on which the wind produces sounds that are considered musical, takes several forms; most often, it is a box with a resonance chamber over which strings of different kinds of materials are stretched all along its length. They can be adjusted to produce this or that sound, but, in view of the variations in the speed of the wind, the frequency of the vibrations varies and so does the sound that it produces. In a word, the wind becomes the instrumentalist. Most often, the Aeolian harp is placed on an open window. It is a domestic practice that funnels a collective sensibility.
Figure 3 An aeolian harp.
© Granger/Bridgeman Images.
For our purposes, the most important thing is that the Aeolian harp is evoked in the title of numerous scores, such as the first movement of the étude by Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), opus 25, no. 1, and it was celebrated in literature several times, most notably by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).2 It also came to designate all tones produced by the wind, both in the forests and on the moors, even when men did not intervene. Since antiquity, the wind god Aeolus has been attributed the characteristics of nature's musician, using trees as his instruments. At the end of the eighteenth century, few poets had forgotten about this music of the winds, whether delicate or savage. "Nature as the universal lyre - i.e. the Aeolian harp - is eminently romantic," wrote the philosopher Pauline Nadrigny recently,3 a theme that was originally explored by Novalis (1772-1801). In 1822 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) composed a poem initially entitled "He, She," but responding to the fashion of the day, and wishing to place it among those consecrated to nature's voice, he changed the title to "Äolsharfen," even though it was not about the wind or the harp.4 In March 1811 (or 1812) Maine de Biran (1766-1824) chose this theme to define his own sensibility: "My imagination and my sensibility, raised to a high level, was like the Aeolian harps whose strings vibrated at the least breath of wind and made the most harmonious sounds."5
Much later, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) took up this theme. On this point, the latter also referred back to Novalis and claimed that he himself was very sensitive to the "universal lyre." In July 1851, for example, Thoreau made an allusion in his Journal to the subtle music of the "Aeolian harp." He returned to this theme several times, notably referring to the sound produced by telegraph wires, which corresponded to his sensitivity to everything that came out of the air.6 A little later, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), after having devoted a long passage in his Journal to Joseph Joubert (1754-1824), cited a quotation attributed to the latter, which was found in a manuscript discovered after his death: "I am like an Aeolian harp that emits some beautiful sounds but plays no melody."7
Let us return to the manifestations of the intimate union between sensibility and wind. Already in the seventeenth century - but this case is totally exceptional for its era - Mme de Sévigné (1626-1696) grew anxious in the face of the wind and the rain. She worried that her daughter, Mme Grignan (1646-1705), might find herself exposed to these "cruel winds from the south that knock over everything and could kill you." She detested certain strong and cold winds that blew in Brittany. They affected her health, she wrote on July 13, 1689, and, above all, they made her "melancholic."8
Readers of Julie, or The New Eloise will remember the importance that Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) placed on the "desiccating" wind that, in the opinion of his hero Saint-Preux, killed nature. It concerned a diurnal thermal wind, characteristic of the Leman, the region around Lake Geneva, which blew from the east to the northeast.9 However, Anouchka Vasak notes that Rousseau created "a break between the meteorological reality - that is, its exterior form - and the consciousness that sketched out the neat contours of the subject." In this sense, the man who first conjured up "the barometer of the soul" did not push the aforementioned traits to their logical conclusions in order to arrive at a concept of the "meteorological self."10
That concept shows up throughout nearly all of Joubert's writings, to which we have already referred in regard to the Aeolian harp. This author dreamed about "writing in the air," "even in the sky." He paid special attention to the rain and sunny weather. He was particularly endowed with a barometric soul that transmitted into his writing "this disjointed, disconnected, and sporadic principle."11 In other words, it followed the pattern of the wind.
Not long ago, I analyzed in detail the theological foundations of "the discovery of the seaside."12 The principal architect of this social phenomenon, Dr Richard Russel (1687-1759), perceived the winds as subject to the guidance of natural theology. If the storm, through the turbulence of the water that it engendered, was intended to modify the air by purifying it or replacing it, the sea winds were created by God, not only to drive ships but, more importantly, to cleanse the waters. Thus, we let go of the ancient image of the sea, as well as the presence of Aeolus and the nymphs, concepts to which we shall return. All the same, the desire to go and examine the great classical texts in Italy, in person, was paramount among travelers of this era, and especially among the English, who had been undertaking the Grand Tour for 200 years. In terms of our subject, the wind, this was particularly true in regard to the storms of the Aeneid.
The emotions aroused by the wind were therefore determined by conflicting concepts: either natural theology or classical studies. Later on, in light of the ideal of the sublime, the importance of storms figured in the works of James Thomson (1700-1748) and James Macpherson (1736-1796). And let us add to this discussion the fact that, in the seventeenth century, Robert Burton (1572-1640) recommended open air as a remedy for melancholy. In the middle of the Enlightenment, it was believed that the sea could calm the anxieties of the elites. A visit to the seaside re-established a contact with nature, which remedied all the ills of civilization.13
What is the place of the wind in this set of processes? Of paramount importance is the fact that the beach must be clean and the quality of its air must be pure. This is what justified the vogue for Brighton, recommended by Dr Russel as the ideal place. "The cliffs," wrote Anthony Reilhan (1715-1776) in an ode that he composed in honor of Brighthelmston (Brighton), "defended by hills to the northward, which intercept the land breezes and prevent their bringing any quantity of matter with them when they blow . ; and the southeast and southwest winds, which blow from the sea . , must be assistant in blowing off any accession of solid matter that may arise from the town."14 Throughout the years, this attention to the quality of the air and the winds grew, whereas the discourses on the merits of the waters declined. Good respiration was essential. That is why doctors ordered women to take short walks on the dunes, followed by a bath in the afternoon. At the same time, Swiss doctors and their followers prescribed an "air cure." All these recommendations were to promote the inhalation of good air.
In England, such advice was addressed to invalids, who were quite numerous among those who came to...
