Goethe’s Backpack

Overload. noun. a. An excessive load or burden; too great a load.

The civilized man… has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory: his libraries overload his wit…

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

The peasants at the Italian border, who saw him coming one sunny day of 1679, might have taken it for an understatement. But for John Cecil, Fifth Count of Exeter, it was simply “my luggage”: seven coaches, 80 suitcases, one wife, little heir John aged five, two tutors, two bodyguards, a chaplain, five maids, 14 waiters, and around 30 horses well curried and fed (Pagano de Divitiis 127). If such procession was meant “not so much as a safety precaution, but as ostentatious display of the traveler’s social standing and wealth” (De Seta 33), the message for those Italian peasants must have then been loud and clear: the count was a wannabe, a social climber still far from the elevated condition of the famous Bishop of Bamberg, who, pastoral humilities aside, “had brought from Germany, at his following, one hundred and thirty servants; throughout Italy, he had then collected fifty more” (Maczak 120). Accustomed to such images of touristy showiness, a following generation of peasants, sitting slothfully at the same Italian border, was, quite obviously, unable to fit the 37-year-old stranger, so “unprepared and alone” (Goethe, Journey 123), into their preconceived image of “The Tourist”: they “looked me over,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recounts, and “showed some signs of indignation” (ibid., 44).