The idea that wisdom is found through exploration has long been with us. It is a cornerstone of many cultures and the driving force behind scientific inquiry. We venture forth into the undiscovered, leaving behind the familiar, and the distractions and temptations therein, as the early Christian desert fathers and mothers did in Egypt. One need not travel far to satisfy this impulse. Extremes of experience have long fueled enlightenment, as memoirs of exile, debauchery, and disaster promise to this day. Many of the adventurers had no choice, however. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned, facing execution on trumped-up treason charges. And while writing Don Quixote, Cervantes partly drew on experiences of five years as the galley slave of Barbary corsairs.

With the advent of modernity, writers and artists actively sought out these edgelands of insight. During the age of Romanticism, a tendency developed toward outward journeys into the physical world (Humboldt, Caspar David Friedrich) and inward journeys into the psychological interior (De Quincey, Schiller). Often, both routes were simultaneously sought (Goethe, Novalis, Coleridge). As the world was increasingly mapped, the voyeuristic explorer was viewed as a more questionable figure. Knowledge became associated with delving into the depths rather than seeking the heights of what mankind was capable of—Conrad’s Heart of Darkness comes to mind. At times, the writer-explorer described what he was already experiencing—hence, Carl Jung’s observation that Lucia Joyce and her father, James, were “like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.”

In other cases, this descent (what the ancient Greeks called katabasis) was cultivated by design—for instance, George Orwell’s intentional destitution in Down and Out in Paris and London, where he sank in order to see. There was treasure, it seemed, for those who dared to dive deep and could safely return. Yet those who had come close to actual netherworlds urged caution. “We, the survivors,” Primo Levi wrote, “are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill, or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”