Vermeer's Hat Read Online Free PDF Page B

that belongs to any world but the one they now had to share. It was their burden as well to inhabit a reality imbued
     with a permanent restlessness, where people were in constant motion and things might travel half the globe just so that a
     buyer here could obtain what a maker there had made. These burdens forced people to think about their lives in fresh and unfamiliar
     ways. For some, such as Song Yingxing, the author of China’s first encyclopedia of technology, Exploitation of the Works of Nature (1637), this mobility was a sign of living in more open and better times. “Carriages from the far southwest may be seen traversing
     the plains of the far northeast,” he enthuses in the preface to his encyclopedia, and “officials and merchants from the south
     coast travel about freely on the North China Plain.” In the old days, you “had to resort to the channels of international
     trade to obtain a fur hat” from foreign lands, but now you could get one from your haberdasher down the street.
    For others, the emerging global mobility did not just redefine their idea of the world, but widened horizons and opened opportunities
     that would not have existed a few decades earlier. However much pleasure Song Yingxing gained from knowing that a new and
     wider world existed, he was fated to spend his life tucked away in the interior of China as an armchair surveyor of the world—so
     far from the ocean that he may never have even seen it, let alone sailed on it. Had the Chinese encyclopedist had the opportunities
     of a Dutchman of his generation, however, he might well have been someone like Willem Cornelisz Schouten. Schouten hailed
     from the Dutch port of Hoorn, home to many of the first generation of Dutch sea captains. He first circumnavigated the globe
     between 1615 and 1617, and then was back in Asian waters with the VOC in the 1620s. Schouten did not survive the long sea
     journey home across the Indian Ocean in 1625, however. He died of unrecorded causes just before his ship reached Antongil
     Bay on the east coast of Madagascar, and was buried there. An anonymous epitaph in verse epitomizes him as personifying the
     spirit of his age.
    In this our western world, where he was born and bred,
Brave Schouten could not rest; his inmost soul afire
Urged him to seek
     beyond, to voyage and strive ahead.
    The poet could have bemoaned brave Schouten’s death as a failure to return home to Hoorn, but he doesn’t. Instead, he celebrates
     this sailor’s death as a great success, the culmination of the global life he had chosen to live.
    ’Tis meet then that he lies i’ the world of his desire,
Safe after all his travels. Oh great and eager mind,
Repose in blessed
     peace!
    Dying abroad in the seventeenth century was not banishment from home for Schouten, but permanent residence in the world he
     desired. The only final end for Schouten, should he ever tire of Madagascar, was not Hoorn but heaven.
            . . . Yet if they soul refuse
In narrow Antongil for e’er to stay confined,
Then (as in earthly life so fearless thou didst
     choose
The unknown channel ’twixt the seas of East and West,
Outstripping the sun’s course by a whole day and night),
Ascend
     thou up, this time surpassing the sun’s height,
And find in heaven with God hope and eternal rest.
    The commanding passion of the seventeenth century, on both sides of the globe, was to navigate “the unknown channel ’twixt
     the seas of East and West”; to reduce that once unbridgeable distance through travel, contact, and new knowledge; to pawn
     one’s place of birth for the world of one’s desire. This was the fire within seventeenth-century souls. Not everyone was thrilled
     with the disorder and dislocation that the passions of great and eager minds produced. One Chinese official complained in
     1609 that the end result of this whirlwind of change was simply that “the rich become richer and the poor, poorer.” Even Willem
     Schouten