The Age of the Unthinkable (14 page)

It was precisely this visual habit, this new and fragmented way of seeing that influenced the French artist who invented camouflage,
Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola. One day in 1915 Scévola (a modestly talented painter who was in the French Signal Corps)
watched from the height of a telephone pole as a Germany battery shelled a French unit mercilessly. In the bloody landscape,
his painter’s eye caught a possibility: with the right application of texture and color, he thought, it might be possible
to distort the image of the troops and machines enough to make them harder to see. As a test of his theory, he arranged for
one unit to be covered with different colors of paint. Observed from a spotter plane, the soldiers were nearly invisible.

Scévola’s Section de Camouflage began work on February 12, 1915. “In order to deform objects,” he recalled, “I employed the
means Cubists used to represent them — later this permitted me to hire for my camouflage section some painters who, because
of their very special vision, had an aptitude for decomposing any kind of form whatsoever.” A year later the British followed
with a unit led by Norman Wilkinson, a landscape painter moonlighting as an admiral, who developed naval camouflage — disorienting
“dazzle painting” that made it harder to line up ships for artillery or torpedo fire. Cubism thus begat camouflage, life reflecting
art instead of the usual opposite arrangement. Braque liked to joke that this wasn’t a first. After all, he said, soldiers
arrayed in the last century’s pale blue or off-white uniforms resembled nothing so much as an impressionist canvas — at least
until someone started shooting at them.

In labeling the Great War a “Cubist War,” Stein was trying to explain more than simply how the war looked. It was true that
under the pressure of millions of armed men and the industrial power of five great nations, the landscape of Europe had been
transformed into something that could be said to resemble a Cubist canvas, crisscrossed with rail lines, trenches, and runways
and deformed throughout by bomb craters and burnt cities. It would never be possible to look at Europe in the same way after
1914, just as it was no longer possible to look at a vase or a guitar in the same way after the Cubists. But Stein was writing
about more than the deforming of objects by color or firepower. She saw the idea of Cubism, the notion that no object should
be seen simply, as a symbol of the age. Modernity, she felt, required chopped-up and different perspectives if it was to make
any sense at all. Cubism argued that traditional formal painting was a lie, that it froze objects too simply. Those detailed,
accurate canvases had a certain charm, to be sure, but what real figure was like that? They were “realistic” in the same way
Morgenthau’s “realism” was: they hid a great deal. Painting, Picasso and Braque believed, needed a new visual language if
it was ever to hold the range of influences suddenly apparent in everything from design to our own personalities. This was
what Stein was trying to say about life after World War I, that it could no longer be made sense of in simple terms, like
some Romantic-era painting of a country house — still, placid,
fixed.
Only Cubism, that trick of treating a single object with multiple perspectives, could hope to make sense of the intricately
ordained carnage of 1914–1918 and the world that emerged afterward.

Looking back now from a distance of more than a hundred years, we can easily spot this instinct for Cubist multiplicity everywhere
in turn-of-the-century Europe. The 1900s renaissance in Vienna, which included men such as the painter Gustav Klimt and the
composers Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, was puzzling through similar questions: how to represent the full object, how
the forces of modernity demanded a different way of looking and listening. Klimt was one of Vienna’s most successful society
painters. At thirty-five he was making a fortune hammering out traditional images of the city’s aristocracy. He began to find
the work intolerable. The old way of painting simply wasn’t getting at what he found interesting about his subjects. His revolutionary
spirit got the best of him, and he invented a whole new approach, transforming the bankers’ wives who sat for him into vessels
for statements about everything from politics to lust. What else to make of his portrait of beautiful, rich Johanna Staude,
whose porcelain-white face hovers like a perfectly rendered cameo in front of a background of lurid orange and above a coat
whose explosive Technicolor depths hint at the real woman lurking behind that bleached facade? The jealous line of Viennese
gossips — that Klimt painted two portraits of every woman, one clothed and one nude — went further in capturing the multiplex
spirit of the age than they might have guessed. Like the Cubists, Klimt was trying to reach deeper than any classical image
would ever allow. In the portrait of Staude that we know, she is dressed, but everything about the image screams a sort of
humid emotional nakedness. Today we may take this for granted, but in Vienna at that time, the pictures were firebombs.

Vienna was also home to the man who became perhaps the most famous mechanic of this new instinct for complex depths, Sigmund
Freud, who was composing a theory of the human mind the same way Picasso might have sketched a table. Freud’s psychological
explorations were all about the notion of how fragmented and shattered our personalities might actually be, how hard and often
painful it was to make any intellectual coherence from the shards of experience that shaped us. Another Viennese native, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, chased after a similar problem in his philosophical writings. Wittgenstein, who wrote most of his masterpiece,
the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
while a prisoner during the Great War, was obsessed by a desire to reconcile what he called the innumerable “atomic” elements
of the new world into a whole. And what was Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper if not an insistence on a science of seeing the
world differently from different angles? “Each generation,” Stein once wrote, “has its composition, people do not change from
one generation to another but the composition that surrounds them changes.” Stein had found in art a marker, a very colorful
and even very romantic one, of that “composition.” Each painting of Picasso, each symphony of Mahler, even every one of those
epic Freudian interviews — all of them were like beautiful, fluent reports sent in from a distant field station in a war.
These artists and scientists, with their deeper instinct for the vibrations of history and culture, were making maps of a
new psychological country without quite knowing what they were doing. It was to be called the twentieth century.

But if a few people could label this new world precisely, most of the continent’s great figures were oblivious. They were
stuck — as many of our leaders are now — with old ideas. The result was tragedy. Take the canonical moment of early twentieth-century
Europe, the Paris Peace Conference, which became a sort of
tableau vivant
of the unintended collision between men and the composition around them. The conference was called to negotiate the details
of the end of World War I. It was meant to be a masterstroke of contemporary power, an object lesson in the symphonic grace
of nations working together. Representatives from twenty-seven nations, including the heads of state of the most powerful
countries on earth, met to order the world. They worked for six months and numbered among their advisers some of the greatest
minds of the time: the German sociologist Max Weber, the British economist John Maynard Keynes, the American lawyer (and future
secretary of state) John Foster Dulles. In they end they produced a catastrophe. The Treaty of Versailles was a lose-lose
agreement that not only failed on its own terms but also drove Germany and Italy into a pit from which they could escape only
through another, even more violent war. The treaty was an attempt to jam a seventeenth-century style of treaty making onto
a world far too dynamic for such a narrow document.

Keynes, who resigned as economic adviser to the British delegation midway through the conference, was sensible to the tragedy
unfolding around him. He would walk the streets of Paris at night in an insomniac trance, performing what can only be called
a Freudian analysis of power, trying to untangle the knots of personality and history that were binding these great nations
into a disastrous agreement. “Wilson,” he mused at one moment about the American president, using the Freudian technique of
matching myths to a man, was “a blind, deaf Don Quixote.” Walter Lippmann, the American journalist, looked back in 1922 on
the meetings he had attended at Versailles with a still darker view and an almost angry sentiment. “Of the great men who assembled
in Paris to settle the affairs of mankind, how many were there who were able to see much of the Europe about them, rather
than their commitments about Europe?” he wrote. “Could anyone have penetrated the mind of M Clemenceau, would he have found
there images of Europe of 1919, or a great sediment of stereotyped ideas accumulated and hardened in a long and pugnacious
existence? Did he see the Germany of 1919 or the German type as he had learned to see it since 1871?”

For men like Keynes or the British diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, who sensed impending disaster at Versailles, the immensity
of the errors was baffling. It was as if the postwar world had been slathered over with enough of Wilkinson’s dazzle paint,
to make judgment of the situation impossible. There is a desperate sadness in Nicolson’s written remembrances of these years,
Peacemaking, 1919.
If only, he wrote, Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson had been able to really
see
the Europe around them, the Cubist Europe that Stein and Picasso had seen pass by that night in the sixth arrondissement,
the atomist continent Wittgenstein was recording from a POW camp, then great tragedy might have been avoided. One thinks,
by way of example of this new-dazzles-old dissonance, of Wittgenstein concluding his dissertation defense in 1921 at Cambridge
in front of legendary philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, patting the two men on the shoulders and offering as
a kindly concluding remark, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand.” (At least they understood enough to make him professor.)
This was the frustration of Keynes that screamed from every page of his Versailles masterpiece,
The Economic Consequences of the Peace,
as well as, twenty years later, as Europe teetered again toward war, the words that are the epigraph for the book you are
reading now
.
It was that sinking sense of mismatch you could find in the head-shaking words of Mahler after the debut of his Fifth Symphony:
“Nobody understood it. I wish I could conduct the first performance fifty years after my death.”

There is nothing more horrible than to walk that fault line between new and old, seeing what the future holds, screaming about
it in your art or your writing, and finding only mute incomprehension or dismissal in your audience. “We make to ourselves
pictures of facts,” Wittgenstein declared in one of the early propositions of his
Tractatus,
a line that foreshadowed Louis Halle’s 1950s observation about making policy based on the wrong image of the world
.
The lesson of Stein’s time, the lesson that the artists and intellectuals around her saw so clearly, was that just as the
twentieth century demanded new ways of representation in physics, in painting, and in writing, it laid a similar demand on
statesmanship and economics. But the intellectual and spiritual leap this required was, for the greatest men of the age, simply
too much. Passing our eyes back on that history, we can only wonder how they missed it. And, if we’re honest, we have to ask
ourselves what we are missing about our own time. Surely the twenty-first century, too, demands its own tools of statesmanship
and finance. Fortunately, stashed around us, as it was in Stein’s day in those paintings of Klimt or the physics of Einstein,
is evidence of precisely what is happening, of a force for change that’s basically invisible using old ways of seeing. It’s
a force we have to let collide with and even destroy our old ideas about how the world should be before we can hope to make
any sense at all of our own time. As such, it’s the first concept we need in establishing deep security. And, just as it did
in Stein’s time, appearing on the sides of trucks or in the paintings of rebels, the signs of its emergence are appearing
in some places you might not think to look.

Thirty years later, when his last name alone had become a synonym for brilliance and creativity in certain circles, the detail
almost everyone recalled about Shigeru Miyamoto’s job interview at the Nintendo Corporation was the hangers. The hangers became
a shorthand among electronics engineers, Web page designers, and video-game addicts in the same way Lorenzo Ghiberti’s doors
on the Battistero di San Giovanni in Florence might have been a shorthand for sculptors, or Michael Jordan’s midair hand-to-hand
ball swap during the 1991 NBA finals was for basketball geeks. “The hangers!” they would say to themselves, laughing. “Miyamoto!”
they would exclaim.

The year was 1977, and Miyamoto was a fresh college graduate with an all-but-useless degree in art from an obscure Japanese
technical college. Nintendo was at the time one of Japan’s leading manufacturers of playing cards and children’s toys, though
the company had recently begun exploring (and failing miserably at) the new business of electronic arcade games. Miyamoto
knew a bit about Nintendo because his father was a friend of the chairman, Hiroshi Yamauchi, but Shigeru had not been the
sort of student you would have predicted for a
sarariman
job at Nintendo. It had taken him five years to loaf through college. He spent his spare time (and time that should not have
been considered spare) playing guitar and card games, stretching his high-school rebellion out an extra couple of years. Even
after he had passed fifty and was a titan in his field, he still was marked by an energy that led people to call him “mischievous”
or “childish.”