Walking Among Palm Trees: Beauty, Culture, Geography

Abstract

In Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities there is that startling assertion: “You cannot walk among palm trees with impunity, and your sentiments must surely alter in a land where elephants and tigers are at home.” In this emotional outburst of one of Goethe’s characters, palm trees signify utter and horrible difference, a difference that seems atavistic to us now. Still, palm trees have continued to symbolize strangeness and promise to those from Western and Northern climes. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry wonders how she can have been blind to the beauty of palm trees for so long. She mentions unfamiliarity and cultural distance, but she frames those not as essential but as accidental factors; beauty is the essential power: it can fight through obstructions of culture and overcomes them by generosity, by a willingness to consider unfamiliar cultural traditions and judgments under the aspect of beauty. Her campaign of increasing the field of potential beauty beyond given boundaries of culture and geography brings up the question of what happens to beauty when no limits of such kind exist anymore. This question is theoretical for Scarry: she remains aware of limitations. But can human consciousness take on a form in which perceptions are not impeded by prejudices of culture or geography? Pico Iyer, in The Global Soul, suggests that such a culturally and geographically unbound consciousness is indeed possible and, actually, increasingly common. “Global souls” is Iyer’s term for what he feels many of us are now: radically unaffiliated creatures, at home in airport terminals exactly because such places are not at all like home. To “global souls,” designations such as foreigner or exile, nomad or migrant lose all significance; there is no punishment for walking among palm trees, environment does not alter sentiments, and nothing is not beautiful. Iyer is a true global soul and poet of jet lag—kind, engaging, and slightly spacy—but many people even now, I think, must keep at bay an old kind of panic that palm trees do exact a price and that sentiments do alter when one dwells where elephants and tigers are at home.