Man of the world | The Economist

Man of the world | The Economist: "Once, Humboldt seemed to be on everybody’s lips; his portrait even hung in the palace of the King of Siam. Born into an aristocratic Prussian family, he showed an early and insatiable curiosity for the natural worlds “perpetual drive”, he said, as if chased by “10,000 pigs”. As young men he and his brother, Wilhelm, were lights in Berlin’s intellectual circle which, though admittedly small, included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. But always Humboldt was consumed by Fernweh, a longing for distant places. His misery was to be “too good a son”. A cold and distant mother (his father had died when he was young) had strict ideas about what it meant to be a member of the Prussian elite. In 1790, at 21, he was all set for a career in the ministry of mines. Then came Humboldt’s jubilee with the death of his mother and a generous inheritance."



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