Travelogue 819 – August 23
Fall Coming

Time re-asserts itself. The summer heat wave is long gone. Clouds are allowed to roam freely about the skies, capriciously cooling the thirsty lands below without yielding a drop of rain.

Streets are crowded again. I can’t find a seat on the metro in the morning. My work email has come alive again, abuzz with September energy. Co-workers return refreshed from abroad, writing chipper emails about planning meetings.

I’m judging that my perception isn’t quite aligned with theirs. I stayed in town, and it’s only been a few weeks, after all, since we all traded gloomy emails about closing down the last academic year. It’s jarring. It would be better if I left town next summer. I might return as cheery as my co-workers. I might experience the new year as new, rather than a sort of ghoulish rising from the grave.

But leaving town would mean missing the blessed peacefulness that descends on the city. I do quite enjoy having some space while strolling around downtown, foregoing the constant negotiation that crowds require, particularly ones that are raised to stare dully ahead and offer no quarter.

I learn to appreciate cycling across town without the adrenaline rush of those brushes with death. I appreciate the empty seats at the cafes, the ones that separate me from the sound of video on smart phones. This is the real food for modern zombies, flashing light and the tinny lo-fi replay of voices. Outside, the parks offer open spaces, even on sunny days.

But the zombies are back, re-populating public transit, pouring onto the bike paths, weaving drunkenly and riding the wrong way. Maybe they will be slow to discover the parks.

It might have been summer’s return yesterday. The clouds gave us some respite from their sport, and we leapt at a chance to take the girls to the park. ‘Leapt’ here should be read in context of parenthood. Leaping takes hours, getting babies dressed and supplying the buggy for a major journey.

Once we had leapt, all was good. We strolled among banks of flowers toward the open space of grassy meadows, where the girls could run and tumble. We brought the inflated kickball, and they chased this with great glee. I took them to the pond, where we watched the baby ducks run after flies. Little Ren immediately sat in duck poop. Mama scolded Papa at length about this, but the mess didn’t faze the girls. They chased the ducks some more, enthusiastically accumulating more poop on their shoes for deposit on Mama’s slacks.

They pretended to climb trees, while I lifted them up to the leaves. They found rocks to climb, with Papa’s help. Repetition is key to infant enjoyment, so Papa donated his back to their happiness, lifting them again and again. It was very important to Baby that she got to dismount from her rock by sliding down the side of it, again with Papa’s help. Papa prayed for distraction, but these girls have admirable faculties for focus when playing.

Once the babies’ energy had begun to flag, we recommended cookies and they cheered. We guided them toward the outdoor café, following them with aching backs and clothes stained with duck poop. We gratefully occupied the deck chairs and submitted a rush order for pacifying sweets.

While I could, I enjoyed the prospect of open spaces, grass in sunshine, untrodden by the spring masses or the winter cold. Free space, warmed by sun, a vestige of summer. Baby had the same thought. She took off suddenly, running toward the grass. I’m up and running after her.

Travelogue 818 – August 19
The Tracks of Time

I was listening to a recording I made of Baby in April. She’s singing a song her mama had taught her. I remember that stage of pronunciation, the testing of words, the lisp and the lovely round vowels. I remember the loving repetition, her joy in singing. It seems much longer ago than April. Things change so quickly.

Quite suddenly, a few weeks ago, Baby started speaking in Dutch. She had experimented with isolated words before, but one afternoon she addressed me in full sentences, quiet out of the blue. She smiled slyly at my astonishment, as though this had been her intention. Then she repeated what she was saying, something about the provenance of one toy or other, which was hers and which her little sister’s.

I was speechless. Where did that come from? She’s in no school this summer. She has no little Dutch friends to play with outside. Does she absorb that much from the short spells of cartoons dubbed in Dutch that we allow? She certainly brings to those viewing sessions real intensity. For weeks she had cried for more reruns of ‘Peter Konijn’, her favourite.

Time asserts itself with authority. It never ceases to inspire wonder in me. There is no forgiveness, no soft spot for the beautiful moment. Baby sympathizes with time. She would pause for nothing along the way. She doesn’t seem sentimental at all, simply ready for the fray.

Sentiment is not something one sees much in nature, is it? It’s perhaps a cultivation of the effete, a sublimated form of grief or fear for those who haven’t kept up with life somehow. If that’s true, then I was running among the last in the race of life from the very start. I remember always being sentimental. Sentiment is linked powerfully to one’s experience of time, and I was aware of time at a tender age. Very young I decided I wanted time to pass as slowly as possible. I wanted every moment, joyful or painful. I decided life was about appreciation. Even the very worst of times I would accept without haste, accept and appreciate. That seems like a fairly sophisticated conclusion for a little boy, and recalling it is not the first time I have felt that I had much more wisdom as a boy than as a man.

The decision to respect time and appreciate life might explain my years as a dedicated slacker. There is no better way to slow the sensation of time down than to have nothing to do. When I had great ideas, I preserved them only in the mind, turning them over like gems in sunny windows. They prompted no action. In mid-life I seem to have lost my determination to achieve nothing and appreciate everything, perhaps succumbing to the shame we like to heap on slackers. I became busy. Time gathered momentum, and now I’m not sure what to do about it. Time is a runaway train, and I am no engineer.

Travelogue 817 – August 10
A Thousand Years
Part Six

The English found themselves victors on the field of Crecy. They had matched chaos with their chaos and prevailed. Froissart wrote, “This night they thanked God for their good adventure and made no boast thereof, for the king would that no man should be proud or make boast, but every man humbly to thank God.” Adventure here doesn’t have its modern meaning, and yet I find it appropriate in any sense. It wasn’t history, but the work of the moment.

Churchill famously said, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ But the obverse may pose the real danger: ‘Those who learn from history are doomed to try to repeat it.’ Bullies parse history for their purposes, intentionally misreading it and nursing it for their own gain.

Churchill’s great adversary, the tyrant Adolf Hitler, proclaimed the thousand-year reich. He referenced the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire, and modelled himself on the thousand-year Roman Empire. He had his people greet him with the salute of the ancient Romans.

The Romans might have recognized the salute, but I doubt they would have recognized much else. The simple cruelty in him, perhaps, and the hubris. These sorts of dramas are always written in blood, they might have said, shaking their heads as they left the theatre. I sense that tragic madness didn’t appeal to the ancients the way it has to modern European cultures. And Hitler’s ideas about race and nation and purity and destiny just wouldn’t have registered at all.

The thousand-year reich of the Nazis lasted just about the time it took to breed one generation of Aryans. History wasn’t on Hitler’s side, it would seem. At least, things didn’t turn out as he predicted.

There is a sense of humour to things. It’s written into the code of the universe. The joke is, nothing goes to plan. The plan produces a prodigy, something monstrous. The thousand-year reich fell in twelve. And the survivors wrote their stories, only to have younger generations interpret them for their own purposes. The joke cuts two ways.

Another aphorism attributed (probably wrongly) to Churchill was, ‘History is written by the victors.’ All too often being the victor requires little more than coming along afterward, like the Renaissance scholars writing about the Middle Ages. In Churchill’s case, in the case of the Allied armies, it was a battle won. Something like Crecy, but on a scale that would have made the medieval knights think they had sunk through the mud into hell.

As the Russian troops bombarded Berlin and took the city block by block, Hitler took his own life. There doesn’t seem a clearer admission of defeat than that. But does defeat in battle mean recanting? As he prepared his suicide, he probably still held a flattering idea of his place in history. Our own day’s fascists would never have hung his portrait in their dirty clubhouses if he had admitted defeat, surrendered, and saved a million lives. That would have robbed him, and them, of fascism’s great victory.

If the victors write history, then who are the victors? Definition is the trapdoor in that phrase. Perennial victory is the beauty written into the code of fascism. Categorically, it never loses. We have no further to search for examples than Trump. He has never had occasion to reconsider, doubt, regret, or apologize. It’s a wonderful life. Even if he dies in a jail cell, his self-image will shine with righteousness. Amazingly, he will tell himself, I was always right! I was the best there ever was! And a chorus of followers will affirm it, hammering the evidence of tawdry defeat into gilded symbols of triumph.

Travelogue 816 – August 1
A Thousand Years
Part Five

Today I ignored the forecasts. I checked the sky. The heat has moderated, though it is still hot and summery. The sky has resumed a Dutch character, changeable and varied. Now white clouds ride imperially through the blue sky. It’s a classic summer sky. I have no idea what the clouds intend to do. It’s happening now. They’re not acting out a prediction.

I’m writing a story based in the Middle Ages, so I’ve been doing some reading. Mr. Huizinga has provided the scholarly perspective. I’m supplementing with Jean Froissart, a fourteenth-century historian. And a good complement he is, providing a wide-eyed account of events that Huizinga’s cool cultural history sidesteps. It’s nice to hear the voice of a story-teller.

One of the stories Froissart tells is the one about the Battle of Crecy in 1346. King Edward III of England has decided that he has as good a right to the French throne as Philip VI. Already the English king is lord of several provinces in the southwest, inherited from his forebears.

Before Crecy, there are only skirmishes and the minor battles. In 1346, in response to some French encroachments in the south, Edward lands in Normandy. Apparently, he has the element of surprise with him because the country lies completely open to him. He marauds unopposed for four months before the French king can pull together a force and march north. He’s marching toward disaster.

The story reminds me of nothing more than Monty Python, the chaos and disorder, the unwarranted, almost nonsensical, violence. Edward and his troops have to stop at the coast to arrange ships to take back to England all the loot they have accumulated. And prisoners: peasants and the rabble in the towns are expendable, but any nobility is worth keep alive for ransom.

In the story of the battle, we witness the end of the age of chivalry as clearly as we do in any of Huizinga’s more abstract illustrations. The English army, drastically outnumbered by the French, wins the day by pitting archers and infantrymen – and even primitive cannons – against knights on coursers. The result was absolute mayhem for the French, and the beginning of nearly a century of bullying and invasion by the English.

But significance doesn’t indicate destiny. Crecy is a big name in history, but it doesn’t mean much to the English archers hunkering down in the fields. They don’t see how fight leads directly to Joan of Arc and a new French nationalism eighty years later. They don’t know they are acting out a rough version of Monty Python’s Platonic ideal. They are camping in a field, scared or excited. They are praying for a simple victory and some spoils. They’re not planning to make history. They probably wouldn’t have been able to relate to Froissart’s version and wouldn’t at all understand our analyses of their events.

Churchill famously said, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ But the obverse may pose more real danger: ‘Those who learn from history are doomed to try to repeat it.’ History can’t be repeated, try as you might. Reading imperfect histories as templates leads to disaster.