Travelogue 831 – November 28
An Aching Trail Through Two Cities
Part Two
Nijmegen claims to be the oldest city in the Netherlands. It lies on the Waal River in the east of the country. The Waal is a major distributary branch of the Rhine, carrying some 65% of the parent river’s waters to the sea. It breaks from the Rhine only a kilometre into Dutch territory, as though the old river couldn’t bear any other name outside German territory. And it would seem Germany feels the same attachment, the way the border lunges toward the Netherlands just at that point, like a hand reaching for the departing Rhine.
Depart the river does, though, and it disappears among its distributaries. A few kilometres westward, the Waal flows into Nijmegen. Right downtown, the river feeds a quiet little harbour, the Lindenberghaven, where we stayed in an inn located in an old river boat. Our apartment was in the back of the boat, requiring us to carry the girls and our baggage along a precariously narrow walkway beside the cabins. It was night already and the temperatures were near freezing. The cold waters were all too close. Inside, the cabin was cosy, in the functional way of boat furnishings, everything small and pieced together meticulously. The walls were panelled with wood. The windows were round portals. The doorways had high bottom lips we had to be careful to step over. The girls treated the space like an amusement park. There was a cosy restaurant in the front of the boat, warmed with a fire in a raised central stove. The walls were steel and curved.
Boats make noises. They groan and creak as they shift in the water. Mama and Baby found these sounds spooky. “What was that?” they ask each other most of the night. Some of the noises came from the bridge high overhead. This is the famous arch bridge that played a critical part in the Battle of Nijmegen in 1944, when the Allies were trying to relieve forces in nearby Arnhem. The bridge was a key asset for both sides, and when the Germans finally left the city, they planned to blow the bridge. It was saved by a local Resistance fighter, and the Allies finally crossed – too late to relieve troops in Arnhem and after the city had suffered considerable damage. It should be said that the bridge launches from a high bluff above the Lindenberghaven harbour where, two thousand years ago, the Romans built their fortress. The bridge still stands, if the Roman fortress doesn’t, and during our long night underneath it, it provided passage to dozens of trucks that made the big structure shudder and boom.
Morning did come, and we were unspooked. The morning was cold. The sunlight was winter hazy. The decks were slick with frost. But it was daylight, and Baby was comforted. Friends came to pick us up and ferry the family to their house, which, as it happened, stood right on the course of the race. Mama and babies got to drink tea in the warm kitchen while the runners made their way to the starting line. When the time came, my family only had to stroll out to curb to shout their support. I stopped to give each a kiss before I continued on to my fate of hills and pain.
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Travelogue 830 – November 21
An Aching Trail Through Two Cities
Part One
Discovering one’s limits is a human privilege. It’s one that I indulge in regularly. Very satisfying for the psyche is rediscovering one’s own cowardice. It’s not a quality I have to reach far for; I stumble upon it often.
Visits to the dentist are profoundly humbling for me. No matter how often they occur the terror never dissipates. Yesterday, I knew I was in for a long and painful treatment. I had two root canals scheduled for one day. I experienced acute anxiety for days. I made my wife accompany me to the appointment. Sitting in the chair while the dentist prepared his tools, I came surprisingly close to giving in to panic, getting up and making an escape.
Menna and I have made a point of finding the kindest and gentlest hands at our tandarts (dentists’) practice. They belong to a young man whose sincerity is affecting. It keeps me in my chair. I don’t want to let him down.
The nerves are exposed. I’ve been told to raise my hand when there’s pain, and so I do, raising it so several times. The dentist’s assistant kindly holds my hand. It’s oddly comforting. The doctor pours anaesthetic on the nerves, which sets them afire for a moment, and then quickly numbs them. This little operation must be repeated over.
Each shot of pain leaves me more tired. I stare up and into the lights that are focused on my mouth. I daydream, and I’m able to drift surprisingly far from the scene, that tableau in which a man is labouring over my open jaw.
Spacing out in the dentist’s chair, I review the race I ran the previous weekend. It was a 15K in the eastern Dutch town of Nijmegen. It was the first time I had been in Nijmegen. A new friend of mine had spoken so highly of the town, and of the race, that I couldn’t say no to the invitation to run this year. My running season was not supposed to extend this late into the fall, into the growing cold and gloom, but I did welcome one more chance at a redeeming performance. My races this year have not been too inspiring, at least in terms of final times.
My friend was not wrong about the race. It was a beautiful course, leaving town to roam among autumnal woods and fields. There was a pleasant chill to the air, and the skies were clear. Autumn is defined by that perfect moment, the season’s fulcrum point, when the colours are richest and the temperatures still crisp and bracing, but not unpleasant. This weekend was that moment. And the only way to celebrate autumn was to be out in it.
There were hills! I rarely have the opportunity even to miss hills. Rotterdam’s hill is the bridge. If I see a staircase while training, I aim for it, like a thirsty traveller. I enjoy engaging in the climb. The Nijmegen race promised seven hills, like Rome, and it delivered seven. The first, after two or three kilometres, was a long and slow incline, the kind that forces you to shift gears halfway through, lowering your head and settling into a steady gait that will see you through. Later, midway through the course, there were two short and steep ones, the kind you attack with the exuberance of a boy and finish with the shuffle of an old man. It was great fun.
Fun with pain. Sport is an engagement with pain, a diary for suffering. We may naively assume that life is about avoiding pain, but in fact we are always measuring our days by it, quantities of pain, frequency of pain. We abandon the warm bed on winter mornings in order to make money and avoid the worse pain of starvation. We suffer through our controlled daily runs so we don’t crash and burn on race day. We micro-dose on pain during flossing in exchange for visits to the dentist. Exchange visits to the dentist for tooth decay. We volunteer for small daily shots of it, our tonics and our bitters, in order to sweeten the intervals.
An Aching Trail Through Two Cities
Part One
Discovering one’s limits is a human privilege. It’s one that I indulge in regularly. Very satisfying for the psyche is rediscovering one’s own cowardice. It’s not a quality I have to reach far for; I stumble upon it often.
Visits to the dentist are profoundly humbling for me. No matter how often they occur the terror never dissipates. Yesterday, I knew I was in for a long and painful treatment. I had two root canals scheduled for one day. I experienced acute anxiety for days. I made my wife accompany me to the appointment. Sitting in the chair while the dentist prepared his tools, I came surprisingly close to giving in to panic, getting up and making an escape.
Menna and I have made a point of finding the kindest and gentlest hands at our tandarts (dentists’) practice. They belong to a young man whose sincerity is affecting. It keeps me in my chair. I don’t want to let him down.
The nerves are exposed. I’ve been told to raise my hand when there’s pain, and so I do, raising it so several times. The dentist’s assistant kindly holds my hand. It’s oddly comforting. The doctor pours anaesthetic on the nerves, which sets them afire for a moment, and then quickly numbs them. This little operation must be repeated over.
Each shot of pain leaves me more tired. I stare up and into the lights that are focused on my mouth. I daydream, and I’m able to drift surprisingly far from the scene, that tableau in which a man is labouring over my open jaw.
Spacing out in the dentist’s chair, I review the race I ran the previous weekend. It was a 15K in the eastern Dutch town of Nijmegen. It was the first time I had been in Nijmegen. A new friend of mine had spoken so highly of the town, and of the race, that I couldn’t say no to the invitation to run this year. My running season was not supposed to extend this late into the fall, into the growing cold and gloom, but I did welcome one more chance at a redeeming performance. My races this year have not been too inspiring, at least in terms of final times.
My friend was not wrong about the race. It was a beautiful course, leaving town to roam among autumnal woods and fields. There was a pleasant chill to the air, and the skies were clear. Autumn is defined by that perfect moment, the season’s fulcrum point, when the colours are richest and the temperatures still crisp and bracing, but not unpleasant. This weekend was that moment. And the only way to celebrate autumn was to be out in it.
There were hills! I rarely have the opportunity even to miss hills. Rotterdam’s hill is the bridge. If I see a staircase while training, I aim for it, like a thirsty traveller. I enjoy engaging in the climb. The Nijmegen race promised seven hills, like Rome, and it delivered seven. The first, after two or three kilometres, was a long and slow incline, the kind that forces you to shift gears halfway through, lowering your head and settling into a steady gait that will see you through. Later, midway through the course, there were two short and steep ones, the kind you attack with the exuberance of a boy and finish with the shuffle of an old man. It was great fun.
Fun with pain. Sport is an engagement with pain, a diary for suffering. We may naively assume that life is about avoiding pain, but in fact we are always measuring our days by it, quantities of pain, frequency of pain. We abandon the warm bed on winter mornings in order to make money and avoid the worse pain of starvation. We suffer through our controlled daily runs so we don’t crash and burn on race day. We micro-dose on pain during flossing in exchange for visits to the dentist. Exchange visits to the dentist for tooth decay. We volunteer for small daily shots of it, our tonics and our bitters, in order to sweeten the intervals.
Friday, November 16, 2018
Travelogue 829 – November 16
Bolt for Block
It’s time to say adieu to Le Grand K. I may not have known about K’s existence until this morning, but I miss K terribly already.
Le Grand K is a small cylinder of platinum and iridium that is housed under a glass bell in a locked vault in Paris. It was fashioned in 1879, and its purpose in life was to be the manifest international standard for the kilogram. It is the kilogram.
Now, it should not be in the nature of the kilogram to change or decay. That’s because the kilogram is an idea. It shares that beautiful incorruptibility among all things abstract. Nothing ages in Plato’s world of ideals. But in this world, for more than a century, the kilogram has been a corruptible object. No matter how cossetted and revered, Le Grand K is a physical object and shares the delicate properties of all physical things. It has shown signs of decay. There has been some concern about K’s reliability.
After all these years of service, the plucky paperweight will be retired. Where do retired weights and measures go, particularly weights of K’s stature? Will the French treasury offer K up on eBay? Will K end up in some private collector’s display case? Will some new Kafka tell the story of K? Will anyone feel sense some injustice in this callous retirement of a civil servant who dedicated over years to the good of humanity?
And what will replace Le Grand K? As seems appropriate to our age, the new standard will be a measure of electricity. Specifically, it will be a very precise amount of juice that will be shot through an electromagnet.
Max Planck has played his part in this quiet drama, as he has in so many. Is there a mathematical measure of Max Planck’s ubiquity? In this case, the old man has provided us with the key to measuring the electrical equivalent of one kilo. And that is his signature formula: 6.62607004 × 10-34 m2 kg/s. That’s Planck’s Constant. I find numbers beautiful, so I print this one, even though I don’t understand it. I’m quite sure I will never understand it, even if I were tutored by Mr. Planck himself.
I ought to be the last person to write science fiction, since the last time I showed any sophistication in scientific thinking was in the fifth grade. Maybe, I tell myself, the lack of qualifications is the best qualification, since I entertain the appropriate amounts of awe and wonder. I’m like the clumsy nerd who writes for the sports pages.
Work on my ‘summer project’, the science fiction novel, has gone well. The rough draft is finished. I am editing. I am sending out queries. Max Planck might have been proud. In my small way, I’m contributing to his cultural legacy. It’s his world we inhabit and elaborate, after all. Planck is the Constant.
Sadly, the reputation of time travel has taken a hit this week when it was revealed that the new acting Attorney General of the U.S. was on the advisory board of a patent company that scammed investors for millions with a variety of schemes, including one claim that the development of time travel was near at hand.
In an odd twist, the investment in time travel was tied to Bitcoin values. My understanding of currency is about as sophisticated as that of Planck’s Constant, but even I can perceive some irony in pegging the value of time travel to a volatile crypto-currency.
And that brings me back to poor, dear K being traded in for a burst of electricity. I picture Igor standing at the big lever, ready to release the lightning bolts that will bring Frankenstein to life. Electricity is the new gold standard. Cryptocurrency is one more monster fed by electricity. Block chain, the engine of cryptocurrencies, is fed by arrays of computers around the globe crunching numbers day and night, solving arcane mathematical questions in pursuit of new generations of crypto-cash. The trouble is, it all runs on tremendous amounts of energy – every year as much as the nation of Austria, I’ve read recently.
What happens when the lights go out? Will both coin and kilogram disappear? Will gravity short out, leaving us to float weightless and penniless above the earth? Weights and measures are fundamental statements of value. Their anchors – gold bars, platinum game pieces, lightning bolts – seem at times little more than cultural talismans. They are primitive symbols of potency.
Bolt for Block
It’s time to say adieu to Le Grand K. I may not have known about K’s existence until this morning, but I miss K terribly already.
Le Grand K is a small cylinder of platinum and iridium that is housed under a glass bell in a locked vault in Paris. It was fashioned in 1879, and its purpose in life was to be the manifest international standard for the kilogram. It is the kilogram.
Now, it should not be in the nature of the kilogram to change or decay. That’s because the kilogram is an idea. It shares that beautiful incorruptibility among all things abstract. Nothing ages in Plato’s world of ideals. But in this world, for more than a century, the kilogram has been a corruptible object. No matter how cossetted and revered, Le Grand K is a physical object and shares the delicate properties of all physical things. It has shown signs of decay. There has been some concern about K’s reliability.
After all these years of service, the plucky paperweight will be retired. Where do retired weights and measures go, particularly weights of K’s stature? Will the French treasury offer K up on eBay? Will K end up in some private collector’s display case? Will some new Kafka tell the story of K? Will anyone feel sense some injustice in this callous retirement of a civil servant who dedicated over years to the good of humanity?
And what will replace Le Grand K? As seems appropriate to our age, the new standard will be a measure of electricity. Specifically, it will be a very precise amount of juice that will be shot through an electromagnet.
Max Planck has played his part in this quiet drama, as he has in so many. Is there a mathematical measure of Max Planck’s ubiquity? In this case, the old man has provided us with the key to measuring the electrical equivalent of one kilo. And that is his signature formula: 6.62607004 × 10-34 m2 kg/s. That’s Planck’s Constant. I find numbers beautiful, so I print this one, even though I don’t understand it. I’m quite sure I will never understand it, even if I were tutored by Mr. Planck himself.
I ought to be the last person to write science fiction, since the last time I showed any sophistication in scientific thinking was in the fifth grade. Maybe, I tell myself, the lack of qualifications is the best qualification, since I entertain the appropriate amounts of awe and wonder. I’m like the clumsy nerd who writes for the sports pages.
Work on my ‘summer project’, the science fiction novel, has gone well. The rough draft is finished. I am editing. I am sending out queries. Max Planck might have been proud. In my small way, I’m contributing to his cultural legacy. It’s his world we inhabit and elaborate, after all. Planck is the Constant.
Sadly, the reputation of time travel has taken a hit this week when it was revealed that the new acting Attorney General of the U.S. was on the advisory board of a patent company that scammed investors for millions with a variety of schemes, including one claim that the development of time travel was near at hand.
In an odd twist, the investment in time travel was tied to Bitcoin values. My understanding of currency is about as sophisticated as that of Planck’s Constant, but even I can perceive some irony in pegging the value of time travel to a volatile crypto-currency.
And that brings me back to poor, dear K being traded in for a burst of electricity. I picture Igor standing at the big lever, ready to release the lightning bolts that will bring Frankenstein to life. Electricity is the new gold standard. Cryptocurrency is one more monster fed by electricity. Block chain, the engine of cryptocurrencies, is fed by arrays of computers around the globe crunching numbers day and night, solving arcane mathematical questions in pursuit of new generations of crypto-cash. The trouble is, it all runs on tremendous amounts of energy – every year as much as the nation of Austria, I’ve read recently.
What happens when the lights go out? Will both coin and kilogram disappear? Will gravity short out, leaving us to float weightless and penniless above the earth? Weights and measures are fundamental statements of value. Their anchors – gold bars, platinum game pieces, lightning bolts – seem at times little more than cultural talismans. They are primitive symbols of potency.
Friday, November 09, 2018
Travelogue 828 – November 9
Night Vision
I’m always dreaming about travelling. Rarely do I dream about the town I live in. Rarely do I dream about a quiet night at home. I’m always somewhere else, and on the move. Last night, it was New York. The night before, it was L.A. Those were the dreams I remembered. Before those, there were probably other places and other journeys.
Sometimes it feels as though I’m making up for lost time, as though the purpose of this life were travel, and if I weren’t adding miles in waking life, it would have to be done during sleep. There is some urgency to it. Maybe the dreams are just vehicles for midlife angst.
I had occasion to wonder how dreams are recorded in the great ledger. Do they count? Are they added into the pool of life experiences? What if one appeared before the judge of the afterlife and were held accountable for acts taken during dreams? What if one had lived a principled and disciplined daytime life, but committed horrible crimes in dreams?
I have no memory of crimes, but I do remember lots of trips. Do those destinations become compiled with my conscious travels? What makes the dream trips fun is that dream places rarely correspond to the daytime ones. For example, the New York in my dream last night was located next to Colorado somehow. I could look at the landmarks of Manhattan through the gap of a mountains pass. That’s fun.
And then there are places I’ve never been in day’s life. For example, I dream about Russia regularly, though I’ve never been. That might make sense if I saw my nocturnal travels as compensating for my sedentary daytime life. I’ve always wanted to see Russia. The way I’ve settled down with work and family, it’s hard to say I ever will.
And then there are the people. One of the characters in my dream last night was a high school classmate. He was one of our group, but he kept himself aloof. He didn’t participate in all our shenanigans and binges. He was more mature than we were, cooler in ways high schoolers were ill-equipped to recognize. I always liked him and was frustrated by the distance he maintained. At parties, he generally drank little and watched us with amusement, choosing calmer company.
This friend passed quietly through high school, achieving less and causing less damage. The rest of us were high achievers, in academics and in sport. We were high achievers in adolescent mayhem, staging spectacular shows of unleashed id. I saw this friend only a few times after high school. Our lives carried on in the forms established. He attended the local community college and lazily picked up the guitar. I went to university, earned high marks, and made even more ruckus and mess.
This is the most I’ve thought about this friend in years. It’s funny how things circle around. You can’t help wondering about the timing. I’m just well-versed enough in psychology and in what our age calls spirituality to know it should be significant, and it ought to be measured the way a medieval alchemist weighed every ounce of dross or gold. But I’ve grown sceptical about ideas that attribute such precision to the unconscious.
I can readily admit that I’ve been ‘taking stock’. I’ve been wondering what sort of narrative might be recovered from curlicues of my life’s path. Sometimes the oddest memory will pop up, unbidden, wholly unrelated to what was in my sight or in my mind. It’s funny.
Night Vision
I’m always dreaming about travelling. Rarely do I dream about the town I live in. Rarely do I dream about a quiet night at home. I’m always somewhere else, and on the move. Last night, it was New York. The night before, it was L.A. Those were the dreams I remembered. Before those, there were probably other places and other journeys.
Sometimes it feels as though I’m making up for lost time, as though the purpose of this life were travel, and if I weren’t adding miles in waking life, it would have to be done during sleep. There is some urgency to it. Maybe the dreams are just vehicles for midlife angst.
I had occasion to wonder how dreams are recorded in the great ledger. Do they count? Are they added into the pool of life experiences? What if one appeared before the judge of the afterlife and were held accountable for acts taken during dreams? What if one had lived a principled and disciplined daytime life, but committed horrible crimes in dreams?
I have no memory of crimes, but I do remember lots of trips. Do those destinations become compiled with my conscious travels? What makes the dream trips fun is that dream places rarely correspond to the daytime ones. For example, the New York in my dream last night was located next to Colorado somehow. I could look at the landmarks of Manhattan through the gap of a mountains pass. That’s fun.
And then there are places I’ve never been in day’s life. For example, I dream about Russia regularly, though I’ve never been. That might make sense if I saw my nocturnal travels as compensating for my sedentary daytime life. I’ve always wanted to see Russia. The way I’ve settled down with work and family, it’s hard to say I ever will.
And then there are the people. One of the characters in my dream last night was a high school classmate. He was one of our group, but he kept himself aloof. He didn’t participate in all our shenanigans and binges. He was more mature than we were, cooler in ways high schoolers were ill-equipped to recognize. I always liked him and was frustrated by the distance he maintained. At parties, he generally drank little and watched us with amusement, choosing calmer company.
This friend passed quietly through high school, achieving less and causing less damage. The rest of us were high achievers, in academics and in sport. We were high achievers in adolescent mayhem, staging spectacular shows of unleashed id. I saw this friend only a few times after high school. Our lives carried on in the forms established. He attended the local community college and lazily picked up the guitar. I went to university, earned high marks, and made even more ruckus and mess.
This is the most I’ve thought about this friend in years. It’s funny how things circle around. You can’t help wondering about the timing. I’m just well-versed enough in psychology and in what our age calls spirituality to know it should be significant, and it ought to be measured the way a medieval alchemist weighed every ounce of dross or gold. But I’ve grown sceptical about ideas that attribute such precision to the unconscious.
I can readily admit that I’ve been ‘taking stock’. I’ve been wondering what sort of narrative might be recovered from curlicues of my life’s path. Sometimes the oddest memory will pop up, unbidden, wholly unrelated to what was in my sight or in my mind. It’s funny.
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