Free Anatomy of Restlessness by Bruce Chatwin Page B

library—the visible part of it at least—was not a library in the usual sense but a collection of texts that held for him some special significance. They were bound in grey papers and kept in a shagreen travelling box. I shall itemise the order of their arrangement, since this order itself furnishes a measure of insight into their owner’s character: Cassian’s treatise on Accidie; the Early Irish Poem The Hermit’s Hut; Hsien Yin Lung’s Poetic Essay on Living in the Mountains ; a facsimile of the De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus by the Emperor Frederick II; Abu’l Fazl’s account of Akbar’s pigeon flying; John Tyndall’s Notes on the Colour of Water and Ice ; Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s The Irony of Things; Landor’s Cottage by Poe; Wolfgang Hammerli’s Pilgrimage of Cain ; Baudelaire’s prose poem with the English title Any where out of the World and the 1840 edition of Louis Agassiz’s Etude sur les Glaciers with the appendix of chromolithographs of the Jungfrau and other Swiss glaciers.
    It should be clear, even to the most unobservant reader, that I am Maximilian Tod. My history is unimportant. I detest confidences. Besides, I believe that a man is the sum of his things, even if a few fortunate men are the sum of an absence of things. Yet a few facts of my existence may help pattern my acquisitions into a chronological sequence.
    I was born on 13 March 1921 in the granite mansion of my American forebears at Bucksport, Maine. (The house contained an indifferent portrait by Copley and a collection of Attic vases that did not, even as a child, excite my cupidity.) My father was Caleb Saltonstall Todd and my mother Maria Grafin Henkel von Trotschke of Ueckermünde in East Prussia. The Todds of Bucksport owed their fortune to the export of ice to India. My German ancestors stepped into history in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. My father was a disciple of Madison Grant and was forever quoting from that author’s The Passing of the Great Race . As an undergraduate of the Harvard Class of 1910 he read and swallowed the racial philosophy of Ernst Haeckel, whose attempts to explain history in terms of a crude biological determinism are an affront to logic and common sense.
    Caleb Todd first went to Germany in 1912 where his looks won him many admirers and his charm concealed a mind of exceptional vacuity. At Harvard he had become interested in archaeology and, after reading Kossinna’s inflated chronology of the German Bronze Age, seriously believed that the Aryan Race had occurred, spontaneously, on Lüneburg Heath. He stayed in America for the duration of the War, but went back to Germany in 1919. While excavating the tumulus on the Von Trotschke’s estate, he met my mother and married her.
    The summers of my childhood were divided between Maine and the vast neo-classical house at Ueckermünde, with its view of marsh and sky and its atrium of frigid marble goddesses. I can date my enthusiasm for blue ice to a visit to the Hamburg Kunsthalle in 1930 where I saw Friedrich’s masterpiece The Wreck of the Hope . I confirmed this passion in 1934 when I first set eyes on the pinnacles and ‘chimneys’ of the Lower Grindelwald Glacier.
    My mother drowned in a yachting accident in the Gulf of Bothnia in June 1938, the consequence of my father’s cowardice and lack of seamanship. I never saw him again.
    My education had been entrusted to private tutors: as a result I was entirely self-educated. In May 1937 published the first of my art-historical essays, on Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht in Munich. Some months before I had bought from an antiquaire in the rue du Bac the steel easel on which Napoleon had the picture wheeled into his bathroom at Malmaison. My theme was the expression in the eye of Darius, horrified yet amorous, as he sees the tip of Alexander’s lance aimed at him through the furious mêlée of the battle.
    I was in