The fragility of the creative process in Coleridge’s experience is too familiar to need emphasis. Everyone knows how the inspiration of Kubla Khan vanished forever when someone called unexpectedly. For Coleridge dreams were as valid as waking life, and were possibly a higher reality. Poetry was the imprint, the imperfect copy of experience within the Imagination. Experience of the material world depended on what he termed “the science of mere understanding.” Poetry, the art of metaphor, transcends the limitations of reasoned enquiry. Like its enemies, it may call unexpectedly.

I may hold in my hand a tamarind flower. I live close to Byron’s Pool in Cambridge, and I frequently pass by Ezra Pound’s house (I look away) in Kensington. I have lived in Coleridge country. But how do I explain a metaphor? What was known in antiquity should not diminish with time. This is the more evident when we consider that time itself is a metaphor, that it stretches and retracts and turns. It is a measureless cavern where many musics play. A writer even today may see the poets and thinkers of previous ages pass by. And as they pass they speak.

Poetry, the art of metaphor, transcends the limitations of reasoned inquiry. Like its enemies, it may call unexpectedly.

For “almost” you may read “very likely.” Coleridge observed how the mind makes of nature what it likes. But nature “mocks the mind with its own metaphors.” The tamarind and the flower in paradise are equally real, and imagined. We know of them because they were inscribed on memory, on consciousness, by way of words acting on our imagination.

Picture the poet, born into an age of oil lamps and mail-coaches. He makes frequent appearances in Fadiman’s essays, for his is, as she writes, a restless mind. The brilliance is in the vagaries, digressions and spontaneous insights. When Dr. Johnson suggested that Boswell might visit China, Boswell objected that he could not neglect his children. Johnson retorted that any neglect they would feel should be submerged in the status gained by being the children of a father who had seen China. A romantic would have take up Johnson’s challenge. The journey was to be arduous. Restless minds may lack the necessary tenacity. A man who misses the last mail-coach walks for many miles.

So the voyage to China was undertaken. Coleridge said it had been a dream. His cottage in Somerset is remote even today, the more remote then. From the Quantock Hills the Bristol Channel and, beyond it, Wales are easily in view. But we have in mind the bamboo palace of Xangdu beyond the distance of a continent in one kingdom. That the Chinese saw China as the center of the world should be neither unfathomable nor ridiculous to us. This fabulous Elsewhere, whose history is hearsay, is rich in imaginative trajectories. We read its possibilities credulously.

Let us consider not any supposed center, but the world as a whole. One thing we can see of our planet is that it is round, though not a perfect sphere. That very lack of perfection may appeal to our human sensibility. One way of describing our species (“Well, he’s only human”) is its incompleteness, frailty and failure. We speak of truth in plain sight, even when the horizon is limited by the Earth’s curvature. We cannot see to China. And therefore we must use our imagination.

Another much-favoured person in Fadiman’s canon is Alfred Russell Wallace, the barely-remembered Victorian biologist who told a horrified Charles Darwin of his idea of evolution. Wallace is the Engels of Evolutionary Science. He deserves to be remembered. A memorable, though essentially trivial, contribution to science was Wallace’s experiments to demonstrate once and for all — not the biological ancestry of homo sapiens — but the roundness of the world, for this also was a matter of contention in his time. Wallace, who had travelled in fact as well as mind to the ends of the Earth, found that each practical experiment to falsify theories of a flat Earth ended in failure. (An English judge in all seriousness ruled that it was not a matter about which one could have a definite opinion. This continues to stand in English Common Law.)

Although the Earth — seen as a whole — is round, we experience it tangentially as a flat surface on which we can move freely without fear of falling off, or being spun into giddiness. On the ground or in space, we experience the Earth itself as metaphor. How we see the world signifies how we are and who we are. The journey to Xanadu was not undertaken in vain.