I ONCE KNEW A MAN who was nearly sixty years old and had led the life of an intellectual, and with such people it quite often happens that the body is neglected and becomes aged and decrepit long before the mind, and that’s how it was with this man—although he had neither the burdens of office nor any great financial worries, and although he didn’t lead the hectic life of the city-dweller but wasn’t your actual stay-at-home either, age had prematurely marked and weakened him, and while his energy when in the service of his thoughts and work seemed just as great as ever, as soon as he had to make a physical effort or to exert his will in order to reach a decision, it would to a considerable degree desert him, and while the works of this intellectual were highly praised and had kept their youthful vigour, his physical everyday life had gradually become that of an old, sick man who suffered from all sorts of pains and problems, who had to be careful what he ate and drank, and in whose bedroom there were assembled more and more bottles, pots and glass tubes full of medicines. And so old age had crept up on him and caught him in its web, with the same slow and silent, almost imperceptible inevitability with which the apple ripens and the evening light fades away from the earth. Many people say that the natural processes of life occur in leaps, but I am more inclined to believe in the quiet, invisibly flowing forces of nature, as the poet Stifter describes them in the preface to his Bunte Steine. On the other hand, people frequently imagine they can see such leaps, both through perception and experience, when before their very eyes, after long slow preparation, something suddenly falls from the branch. That’s how it is for most people when they grow old—it happens imperceptibly, but there are moments in which all at once a mirror is held up to the ageing man, he is confronted with a test, and then the hitherto unnoticed decline is abruptly, often shockingly revealed.

The man I’m talking about had travelled a lot when he was younger. Once a year he had gone to Italy and had spent days, or sometimes weeks wandering through stately old towns and villages, gazing up at towers and cathedrals, walking round collections of ancient works of art—an activity engaged in by so many since Winckelmann and Goethe, and for which his true model, whom he loved the most, was the scholar from Basel, Jacob Burckhardt. As well as Milan, Florence and Venice, in this manner he had got to know a large number of Italian towns, and many of them he liked so much that he often returned to them. Others, however, attractive and promising though they might have been, remained unvisited, and these were not so much the remote and inaccessible places as those very towns that lay on major railway routes and whose stations the man had frequently seen for himself, each time thinking that he should get out here too in order to change his book knowledge of these towns into living images and experiences, though each time also thinking that there was no hurry for him to do so.

The last journey of this kind was to Lake Garda, Lake Iseo and Brescia, and it had ended with a long and delightful trip on Lake Maggiore, from Arona to the northern end of the lake, on a day as clear as glass and with the foehn whipping the water, and as it later seemed to him, he had found it even more difficult than usual to bid farewell to Italy. This was in spring 1914, and it was to be his last journey to Italy, because shortly afterwards the Great War began, and when it was over the man had other things to think about than lovely, educational journeys—his youth and some of his joie de vivre had gone, and year followed year, difficult years and bearable years, and slowly, as the evening sun filters its light away until everything is grey, youth and the desire to travel and many other urges and many other lights filtered away and were lost from this man’s life and feelings, until he stood on the spot where we first met him, in his sixtieth year, a diligent and intellectually still unwearied man, but a man with routines and with problems, with a lot of work and little leisure, still a long way from the end, still spared from any major illness, but fading all the same and barely mobile, no lover of parties, no lover of surprises and quick decisions, no longer the curious traveller and wanderer whose heart leaps at the sight of a distant blue mountain, a golden cloud hovering on the horizon, filling him with the joys of travel and an unquenched love for the beauty of the world.

Last year, he was badly affected by several personal blows and losses, and in suffering and enduring them he felt that they had struck at the very roots of his own life force. This bad period, however, was followed by a kinder one, in which he received signs of love and loyalty from old friends, so that gradually he regained his confidence and accustomed himself to accepting without defensiveness or irony this and that reference to the approach of his sixtieth birthday, and even secretly began to look forward to it. In this calm and indeed cheerful frame of mind, he also began to flirt with the idea of perhaps travelling once more to Italy, after a gap of over twenty years, and to try a trip to Tuscany or Umbria, wandering through beautiful foreign towns and landscapes, with all the little delights and adventures of a traveller’s life. Of course he had long since given up making such journeys, even just for pleasure, and often enough he had expressed his dissatisfaction at the now fashionable forms of travel which, although they seemed to give people no less pleasure than in former times, still seemed to him unworthy of a person with taste. All these arrangements with travel agents, preoccupation with the current exchange rate, the superficial race through different countries whose languages and cultures the tourist didn’t know, with Venice becoming just a village for an enjoyable evening on the beach, Marseille a restaurant for fish soup, Palestine and Egypt decorations for spoilt guests in luxury hotels—all of this seemed to him to be a sign of decadence and triviality, and if you objected that the world had grown younger, and instead of scholarly, meaningful journeys in the style of Goethe or Humboldt people nowadays quite rightly enjoyed simpler, more primitive and more easily digestible things like swimming pools and sport, and the carefree attractions for youth unsullied by intellect, then he would let out a scornful laugh and say that although he couldn’t deny people were getting younger and younger, soon they would no longer need their swimming pools and sports facilities but, having got even younger, would be satisfied with the delights of thumb-sucking. Just lately, though, he seems to have forgotten these somewhat grumpy assertions—or at any rate, he hasn’t let them stop him from once more thinking of travelling himself, and going to Italy …

c1936