In Hesse’s story, Knulp the vagabond returns “home” after a life on the road. He has spent years passing through the daily humdrum of friends and acquaintances and brightened their households for a few moments. Each time he moved on, he left them with a few lines of poetry or perhaps just a smile, and the light flickered away a while as he receded into the distance.

As he returns home, he is wracked with guilt for the son he has never taken the trouble to know, and for what he considers his “wasted” talents where he was once a gifted pupil. He holds a final conversation with God, who admonishes him for his doubts. “Can you not see, Knulp,” God adminishes him, “that you had to become a vagabond so that, everywhere you went, you could bring a little childish tomfoolery and a little laughter, so that people everywhere could love you a little… and feel a little grateful?”

Knulp had not been blaming himself because he was unhappy, but because the people he met had judged him by their own lives and told him that, by their standards, he had wasted his. None of them were as talented as he was as a young man. None of them understood Latin like he did or excelled at school, but they had somehow found their place in society, by chance or design. The fact that Knulp did not fit into that world was not entirely his own fault. It was also, to an extent, the fault of a society that could neither value nor find a place for his talents. Not until he was gone did people understand what they had lost.

Society has no functional hierarchy for some things, yet what use are gifts if they are used in the wrong way?

The second time, however, if they are optimistic and keep on trying, they are likely to be puzzled about whether there is something callous in human nature, and they may ask themselves why this keeps happening, why they seem to have been born cannon fodder. Finally, if they keep walking back and feeding themselves to the lions (because human beings are not born victims or anything else for that matter), they may become angry and lash out, but for some reason, it keeps happening. By this time, it does not matter what they do. It always elicits a lack of respect in some form or other. Each time they extend a hand to help, it is returned with indifference or a qualifying “but”, as though it were their fault for being ingenuous in the ways of the world.

Then, like the Pied Piper, they may (quietly so that no-one notices until it is too late) take away the thing they know is the most precious, and this time there will be no negotiation. For the Pied Piper, it was not about the money, it was about the lack of respect for his work, something the councillors needed but could not understand. They believed they were stronger, and did not need to respect what they did not understand.

Respect is a basic human right. We should start out with it in life. It may be lost with imprudence, but that is a person’s own responsibility. In Spain, the law gives motorists ten points on their license, and for each offence, they take one away. In Britain, however, they are initially given none, and earn the respect of the authorities only by remaining at zero. Perhaps this reflects more than an attitude towards the road.

People are not born victims of ill-will, they are born into societies where basic respect for fellow human beings is either a given or has to be won by fighting your way through, often with nothing at the other side. I am increasingly of the opinion that respect is not ours to hand out as we choose. It is a basic necessity we should guard with all the human honour we can muster, lest our children be spirited away on a cloud of our own arrogance.

As each watercolour appeared out of its place in the box, a light emerged, almost like an aura, and the artist’s greens and vermilions stood out in hundreds of dimensions so that the plant moved a little to its other side, caught in its own shadow. Ferdinand Bauer’s images, in fact, transcended reality. They were the work of a steady hand and an unwavering certainty about his art which led him into conflict with his employers, who had more difficulty seeing beyond the parameters of the mundane or, more accurately, their own part in them.

Such beauty carries neither price nor recognition, and did not bring Bauer a significant place for himself in history. Indeed, he does not seem to have sought it. His images, however, remain a hint at something greater than the world is ready for, as it cannot find a way to put it to use, and should not, in fact, be trying. Each time he completed one of his drawings, he captured the plant almost on the edge of his vision, out of the corner of his eye, and on the limits of the plant’s own being, as though it were about to slip into another. It is at once a single moment in time and the beginnings of infinity, a lateral dimension we can only comprehend by not trying.

Perhaps this is Bauer’s real legacy.

On the one hand, the King battled with colonial delusion and frustration, and on the other, he was astute enough to build an impressive library and art collection, to sponsor the construction of some of Herchel’s telescopes and to back the expeditions of botanical and zoological discovery engineered by Sir Joseph Banks. His reign presided over the works of the Romantic poets and the great Gothic Revival. His interests extended from agriculture to architecture and from scientific exploration to literature, book collections and the visual arts. Scientific discussion and recording merged with art and discourse of a less concrete nature to make us think again about the grey areas beyond our boxed world.

An atmosphere of this type, where art and science merge, is not a given. It cannot be forced or even, on occasion, actively encouraged. More often it grows, and develops out of conversations which cannot help themselves. Perhaps it is time we began to appreciate in its own right the thin line between madness and sanity, a love of both chaos and order, so that we can see history in terms of its imaginative legacy, not just its political failures.

He writes about “Indians” as opposed to “Native Americans” and is allowed to, because he has dared to cross the line. He writes about people who break the mould in their own communities, because it’s harder to be different in a small place than in a large one. Like Thomas King, he writes about the absurdity of political and literary stereotypes, but he also tackles the ones communities use to protect themselves when they gang up on the wayward because they are afraid to be labelled human. The important thing is the right to be different, or the same for that matter, and we are just as prone to deny each other that right as the authorities are to deny it to our communities.

Finally (and maybe it is the same thing) he writes about identity, which is the hardest one of all, the right to be allowed to be part of something we think we belong to and at the same time walk the long, dark road to becoming ourselves. It is the age-old intellectual struggle between home and uncertainty. As Alexie shows us, the bravest thing of all is cutting through the red tape and demolishing the stereotype coming at us from all directions.

The road home is a catalogue of broken links.

We are apt to forget that the more memorable moments in history were not facilitated by straight lines at all, but the relatively rare occasions when something bizarre slipped through the net. Occasionally, despite our long history of attempts to bring wayward imaginations back into the fold where they could be put to good use, loopholes have appeared for the bizarre and unfathomable. They have left us with the music of Mozart, the paintings of Van Gogh and a scientific legacy of discovery generally resisted tooth and nail by those who did not discover it.

Things have not changed as much as we would like to think. We are not encouraged to be different or use our imagination outside defined limits as too much is invested in preserving the mediocre. Amongst the modern equivalents of historical folly are the probability that Mozart would have been forced into special measures for behavioural problems at secondary school and Galileo would have been ridiculed by the tabloid press under the headline, ” Environment Agency silences crackpot scientist”.

Einstein said, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination,” and Mark Twain finished it off with some advice: “Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”

I am not advocating irresponsibility – that is a matter for each one of us to judge for ourselves. I am advocating moral loopholes for the clinically talented, a psychological disorder generally known by a variety of less complimentary names.

I admire people who make strange decisions, the ones no-one understands until years later, when it becomes apparent they were right. They are the hardest decisions to make, as they must always be made alone. The trick is not to try and explain, which makes it worse, as explaining is the slippery slope towards doubt, and the decision may never be made.

This is how it is with leaving. I remember vividly the day I left, the day only the closest friends came to say goodbye, the ones who loved me no matter what – and perhaps because of it.

There are yellow paths in this country, where the sand has covered the bare rock and which go on for ever. They widen out sometimes, cross roads, almost disappear on occasions between stone walls and grazing land. They go nowhere and come back to nowhere, and that, for the moment, is where I should like to be. I am most at home with the ability to wander, and from there I can see all the paths in the world as clearly as day.

People often wonder at the great artists’ feelings towards their home, the places they grew up, their “ambivalence” as it is often called. There is, I think, less mystery about it than they think. It is just that home is best seen, and best loved, from afar, as it is a state of mind. I have fond memories of aspects of England I never even liked when I lived in it. Cricket on the village green, idiosyncracies. Were I there, I would still only watch them from a distance. I have long since learned that the images are clearest that way.

His family listened to him with care, but they were worn out, because they could not give him what he wanted, otherwise anything might happen, and everyone was telling them what to do.

He could not be useful, because this meant he would have to be of use, and society could not find much of a use for all his wild wanderings. So he was introduced into a programme which kept him at bay, and tried to tie all the disparate knots in his head into one big knot, so that it was easier to manage.

They damage-limited his wanderings by whatever means they could find, except the right one, because they wanted to show the world that boys like this could make a useful contribution to society, even if it was only minimal.

So for years, the boy cut wood and made things and went along with their attempts to focus his mind on all the wrong-shaped holes. When the assessments came around, they had his name on them, but only showed what a good job the psychologists had done in making him useful in a contained sort of way.

They had missed something, however. In an old home, in a corner of the room where he had lived a long time ago, was a fiddle. When he was a younger boy, he had picked it up, and played, and all the knots in his head, the thick ones and the narrow ones and the tight ones and the sloppy ones, had fallen away, and all the wires straightened out and produced a long, low endless music, which carried people – including him – away. Maybe this had been the problem. It carried him away.

Then again, everyone knew he was talented, they just couldn’t think what to do with it, because it always came out so disparately, and could not be trusted. Sometimes he played and all was well, and sometimes he would say no, he wasn’t feeling like playing. So he would never make anything of the music, because he could not be relied upon to hold it down. Once again, they had all missed the point.

Matthew Flinders was in charge of the expedition, a Lincolnshire man. He married John Franklin’s aunt, was captivated by Robinson Crusoe and probably realised, even then, that he would be disappointed by human nature and the legitimised deceit of powerful men. Flinders lies in the no-man’s land where, if you are forced to retain your integrity amid human folly, you stand alone, for no-one is brave enough to stand with you. Flinders’ cat accompanied him on all his voyages, a symbol of quiet diplomacy and tact. Like Flinders, he became the victim of unscrupulous men who lived only with their fears.

The artistic genius of the expedition was an Austrian, Ferdinand Bauer. The colours in his paintings of plant life are so extraordinary, they are almost more beautiful than the plants themselves, and he discovered their essence. He only sketched them in the field. He reproduced the colours later from an intricate numerical coding system and, I suspect, from a lateral mind. Like his contemporary Goethe, he found a place somewhere between precision and imagination, between art and science, and produced the impossible.

Robert Brown had studied, at one point or another, both art and medicine, in a time when an interest in one did not preclude the other. He became a botanist, a logical slot between two worlds, and eventually founded the botanical department at London’s Natural History Museum. When I asked about the department at the Museum’s front desk, I was told it contained very little of interest, and I discovered that its slot had been replaced by a theme park dedicated to Charles Darwin, a more fashionable scientist. Brown catalogued the plant life of Terra Australis, and gave names to Bauer’s images. On their return, the two joined their colours and words into a monumental publication which sapped their strength, and which the world did not appreciate.

The publications of all three men were commercial failures. Their genius languishes largely in museum store cupboards, but their story is one to inspire all those who dare to read between the lines. Perhaps, one day, the story will bring the images back out of the cupboards.

Is too much a mountain, seen from the foot, or a chasm seen from the edge? Is it an excess of the mundane or a longing for it? Are we subject to it or do we seek it, and where do we draw the line or write the rules? Is too much yours or is it mine? Can it make us right or call us wrong, and when are we ever safe from it?

And what is too little? Is it a lack or a fear of commitment, a failure to respond or to rise when rising is called for? Is it the mundane or a facet of it, creeping into the rules and greeting us each morning before breakfast? Is it forgotten or too much remembered, and where does it begin and end?

Is too little a half finished dream, interrupted by a call to arms? Is it a half-hearted plea or an unanswered prayer, and is it the lie we tell or the truth we seek? Is it a weak line or incongruity? Is too little yours or is it mine?

And were I to hazard a guess, the answer may lie in whether we fear too much or too little, and dream too little or too much?