Postcard From Venice

Reflections on a Stupefying City

Reflection in a canal, Dosoduro

Catch-up service:
5 AI Failure Modes Shared By Humans
Why Are LLMs fixated on the number 7?
The Emperor’s New Diplomacy
Podcast: Jemima Kelly on the radical right
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Is Civility a Fantasy?

A reminder to book tickets for my choir’s concert at Cadogan Hall on November 13. Lads, it’s Mozart and Beethoven. With first-rate soloists and orchestra. As Prince would say, it’s gonna be a beautiful night.

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Postcard From Venice

In a recent interview, Tyler Cowen embarked on a riff about the trade-off between cultural sophistication and economic dynamism:

People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels—it’s very impressive. They’re cultured, they have wonderful taste, they understand all these different countries, they know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you lived in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%.

There is a fine line between loving history and living in it. In Tyler’s view, European elites are too respectful of the past to seize the future, and this is why the continent is in long-term decline. Note, however, that he probably knows something about Chinese porcelain himself and would greatly enjoy dinner with the French official. Yes, he would like Europe to be more dynamic - a little more barbarous, as he puts it later on - but he is also attracted to its civilisational riches.

It’s one thing to grasp this trade-off intellectually but it’s another to feel it. This week I’ve been in Venice, the epicentre of anti-innovation. There is no better place to feel the weight of history pressing down you like a heavyweight duvet, anaesthetising ambition, smothering get-up-and-go. And I have to say, I love it. It’s a different way to be in the world; more Thanatos than Eros. You can just do things, they tell you in Silicon Valley. To which Venice says, sure, but you could just do nothing. Cicchetti with your wine?

There is no better place to wander aimlessly; to get deeply lost in; to drift. Venice invites you to accept that there is nothing to strive for, no destination to reach, because you have already arrived. It’s not a city for that fills you with ambition, like New York - it’s the polar opposite of New York - but one that asks you to slow down and pay attention. Its labyrinthine streets and byways and canals offer narrowly constrained perspectives, occasionally opening out into squares. The density of captivating detail before your eyes means you rarely feel bored or claustrophobic.

Venice is an inside city, both in the sense that it feels OK to spend a lot of time inside (we did, in our artfully cluttered rental) and in the sense that even when you’re outside it feels as if you’re inside. Henry James, master of the interior, wrote that Venice is like an apartment consisting of endless drawing-rooms and corridors. The city is like a James scene, heavy with drapery, elaborate ornament, murmured conversation. The water and the absence of cars make for a distinctively soft, echoey aural envelope. Venice is also a city of irregularities, of crooked bridges, of uneven stones under the feet; a masterpiece of slow evolution, not design.

In his book Venice Is a Fish, the Venice-born Italian writer Tizanio Scarpa quotes the 1998 world champion body-builder Oscar Krickstein: “In any other part of the world, every time I set foot in a gym I wreck the joint. Here, though, I’m calmer, Venice pacifies me.” It pacifies; it sedates. Venice Is a Fish also includes a very short and funny piece by the Brazilian writer Diogo Mainardi, who celebrates the city’s enervating effect on him: “Sometimes I wake up [in Venice] with a great desire to re-adapt myself to an active role in the world, but luckily I go back to sleep a couple of seconds later.” Venice, he writes, “represents the refusal to accept any form of innovation. So total is this refusal that not even man’s most primordial inventions have managed to assert themselves here…The wheel, for obvious reasons.”

Of course, Venice started out in the opposite camp. The proto-Venetians were insanely agentic. They needed to be, to think, “Here is a lagoon with a hundred or so lumps of mud which might at a stretch be called islands…HOW ABOUT WE BUILD A CITY ON IT?” And not just to think it but to do it: ferrying hundreds of thousands of tree trunks down the River Piave, banging them into the mud with mallets, constructing churches and houses on top, building canals for roads.

Then instead of being a curio, a literal backwater, Venice became a military power and the world’s foremost trading centre, a magnet for merchants and entrepreneurs from around the world. The Venetians innovated the hell out of everything: governance, theology, war, art, science, architecture, music. But after a few hundred years of moving and shaking they more or less gave up on creating the future, and opted to gorge on their own beautiful past. By the end of the eighteenth century the city had become a museum of itself, sinking into a stupor from which it had no wish to emerge.

By refusing progress, Venice has remained itself. Tourist tat aside, it has not succumbed to the bland international style which infects Paris and other historic cities. There are plenty of cafes but none of them serve flat whites or avocado on toast or have all-white interiors. There are no gyms (actually, that’s an exaggeration, I did see one, incongruously housed in a mansion, but reassuringly nobody was in it). Its bars are not hip but they are irresistibly convivial. Its restaurants are - well, mostly not great, but there are plenty of perfectly good meals available and no stress about missing out on the best places in town.

I admire the Venetians for getting off the modernity train just as the rest of the world was climbing aboard. In a way that was as stubbornly contrarian as the original decision to build a city on a lagoon. I’m a partisan of innovation, growth, progress, but to truly be for something you have to understand the allure of its opposite. If Europe really is sinking into the sea, then Venice has become the future again, this time without trying. Having spent the week in this backward future I can report that there are worse places to be. Time for one more negroni, before wandering back home to bed.

After the jump: some slightly more practical notes and tips on Venice - what (not) to see and what to read. Plus a Rattle Bag of good stuff, including a provocative argument about the harm that the Beatles did to American music, surprising historical data on the age at which women had babies, and some great art and music. Paid subscribers make The Ruffian possible.