80 Days

It took me three read-throughs to work out why I like about Jules Verne's Round the World in 80 Days so much as to number it among my favourite books. It isn't what one may call an epic or a masterpiece like a few other books on that list – but it is entertaining, visionary, and it inspires ideas.

I had one question on my mind when I was reading through Phileas Fogg's adventures this time: What makes it plausible? Where does the protagonist find the time to have adventure alongside his mathematical circumscription of the world? More directly: to what degree is humanity allowed in mechanics, and why is it a deficit?

Let me tell you a little bit about Phileas Fogg.

Verne endeavoured to make a clockwork man. Phileas Fogg has no past, but has simply 'been' for as long as anyone can remember. Every day he follows the same routine. His obsession with rigorous time-keeping has led him to a very orderly life. He rises at the same hour, goes to and returns from the Reform Club at the same stroke every day, and plays whist like an automaton. And it isn't just time – Fogg demands certain conditions in which his time is spent. A difference of 2 degrees Celsius in the temperature of his shaving foam is enough to upset the balance of his life.

From this introduction to Fogg, we learn two things. First, that he is capable. To keep such rigorous discipline in his life is no easy task – most people find it impossible to live by a schedule, not only because they are undisciplined, but because the world changes around them. Every day demands new activities and trials, hosts upsets and challenges, and we rise to meet them or fail, and in doing so lost time and unbalance the schedule.

What Fogg has created in his London life is a static world: one in which every disaster can be foreseen and averted, and in which conditions can speed progress in his favour. One of Fogg's greatest benefits is that unlike most people he has no need to work or procure finances – he focuses his energies on keeping what he already has and maximising its use.

And then, when he appears to have tuned his life to a perfect state of efficiency, Fogg departs on the greatest journey of his life. In most of the essays I've read on the subject, Fogg is seen as a gambler. But that's not right. A gambler weights odds and accepts the chance of loss. Fogg intimately understands the universe and how it works, and in doing so knows he cannot lose. He is not a gambler, no more than the rest of us are gamblers for going out of our bedrooms every morning and hoping we won't be tackled by flying walruses.

Fogg's comments are brief, and to the point. He himself offers no clues to his immaculate time keeping, claiming only that all is foreseen, and taken into account. That itself holds so much mystery: how and what has Fogg foreseen, and how did he do so?

The answer is quite simple, and comes out as the true nature of the bet Fogg has set to prove to his fellows at the Reform Club that we live in an ordered universe. First; every disaster is foreseen. Fogg is aware of all the delays that come with travel and living. He is aware that life is not static, that there are problems which prevent absolutely fluid motion. The gentlemen at the Reform Club have foreseen these difficulties too, and hope to win their wager by them.

But what they have not foreseen and what Fogg knows as the missing scientific principle that shall save him is that every journey will also have unpredicted windfalls. There will be times when travel goes smoothly, and times when a typhoon pushes you towards your goals. Circumstances can be kind as well as cruel. Fogg knows this. Fogg believes that we are not men desperately struggling in a chaotic world, but finding the measure of a balanced world where luck and misfortune exist in equal measure.

Windfalls are where Fogg's extra time comes from. What makes Phileas Fogg so special, and what makes me love him as a character is that he is optimism engaged as realism; he knows that life isn't as difficult as it appears.