Travelogue 903 – April 28
Our Pilots

Clearly, I’m reading the Guardian too much. This morning I saw a report that the Pentagon has released the official videos of UFO sightings that have been circulating illicitly for five years. The videos spooked me. On my daily trip to the grocery, I was checking the skies.

There was nothing to see. Coincidentally, it’s been the first rainy day in weeks. Riding my bike to the store, I gazed into the clouds, and I saw no strange lights or shadowy vessels. But the change in weather and the darkening of the skies only heightened the mystery. What lay beyond the low screen of rain clouds?

Maybe they’re monitoring our progress with COVID-19. I’m guessing that public health would be a major concern among interstellar organisations. If the germ we’re dealing with currently was able to jump from bat to human, then what sort of devastating bug could leap from us to them? We might wipe out the whole star system. They came a long way to be taken out by something like COVID.

Maybe they’re monitoring the American election. I can imagine this might explain their long silence. The first Pentagon video was recorded in 2004 – during an election year. They may simply have found every election more disturbing than the last. In 2012, they might have been tempted by humanity’s uncharacteristic show of reason. But then they waited one more cycle in the name of caution, and 2016 happened. If my theory is correct, we won’t hear from the emissaries of reasoning extra-terrestrials for quite a while.

We do one thing right as a species. Watch these videos and listen to the Navy pilots as they track down these mysterious objects. In a movie, these scenes would have been scripted as hushed or full of portent. That’s not reality. These boys are having fun. They’re laughing, and they’re shouting to each other in admiration of these little flying saucers.

I hope the banter of these pilots was the aliens’ first impression of us. It’s definitely the best they will have for a while.

Travelogue 902 – April 26
The Tory Emperor

I had to laugh when a Guardian writer attributed an interest in Marcus Aurelius to a type of privileged Tory who would downplay the threat of the coronavirus. Huh? Strange that I hadn’t seen myself as the privileged backbencher before. I don’t have the penetrating mind of a Guardian columnist, clearly. And so I still read the old man, even as I obey social distancing rules without complaint.

Perhaps Aurelius himself wasn’t aware how prejudiced he was, favouring economic productivity over precious human life. But, of course, we all recall his proclamation against quarantine when the Roman stock exchange took a tumble and unemployment figures were skyrocketing.

I can only reassure our esteemed columnist that life is fleeting, and all prejudices die. I read it often enough in the writings of the Tory emperor, Marcus Aurelius. “Celer buries Hadrian and is buried himself. These noble minds of old, those minds of prescience, those men of pride, where are they now?” Sage commentators from the Guardian can be sure that the fat Tories will follow soon, rolled into Aurelius’s intellectual limbo and forgotten.

The sort of frontal attack her article represents is so boring. Proving yourself smart and taking the liberty of being unkind, these are the hallmarks of most commentaries during the early Trump years. Aside from a few late-night talk show hosts, most opinion has been too earnest. It seemed to us as though indignation should work. It was justified. They were a dark couple of years, and opinion makers being right and snarky didn’t really help anyone.

I’ve been seeing some funny stuff online lately. It seems like people are getting funnier. It’s very possible that I’m only now discovering what was always out there. But it may be that things had to get worse. Or we needed time to mature into confident opposition. It’s a kind of ripening of opinion.

Oppressors are nearly always comical. Look at our autocrats from the past century, their strutting; their fantastical, clownish oratory; their peculiar grooming; and their fondness for costumes and parades. They and their followers are ridiculous. And they can’t stand being laughed at. It’s too bad they’re so feral, but that doesn’t eclipse the comedy. Why are we so drawn to the Tiger King story? It’s the autocrat written small. Repulsive and a little frightening, but delightfully funny.

I admit, there aren’t too many passages in Aurelius advising us, “Laugh. Have a good time.” But his writings were ruminations. They suggest he didn’t need a reminder to have fun. Maybe the comedy in his position came to him readily enough. Maybe he needed reminders of graver responsibilities. We clearly don’t need to be reminded how serious the situation is. The Trumpistas, on the other hand, have their eye on a different ball than we do. Their reminders should come in the form of laughter: “you are mortal; you are ridiculous.” Trump wilted after the disinfectant episode. He was playing a bad part without conviction, and the crowd jeered. Simple enough.

Travelogue 901 – April 22
Sin and Distancing

I’ve started into the ninth book of Aurelius’s Meditations, slowly working my way through the emperor’s thoughts verse by verse, fortifying my spirit with his spare language and sun-baked philosophy. A dose of Aurelius is like a dry sauna, cleansing by desiccation.

There are interesting variations, though. Sunday evening, I had an asthma attack that sent me to the doctor. I was utterly wiped out. But Aurelius’s words that night were about kindness. Predictably, his words were an exhortation to show the kindliness of the gods, but I was touched, as though a stern dad were putting his hand on my shoulder.

The emperor starts the ninth book in a way I would have thought uncharacteristic, speaking with some passion about ‘sin’. I’ve been meaning to look into other translations. Was the Greek translated correctly, or appropriately for his time? It’s hard for me to dissociate the word from its Christian usage. That’s probably unfair. I doubt the Christians came up with the concept.

I’ve been thinking of Christianity – again unfairly, I’m sure – as a kind of tonic to the philosophies of Aurelius’s time and class. I’ve come to think of his ideal virtues as those of the noble classes. From those assured power and renown, religion and philosophy asked an ongoing contemplation of death, the great leveller and the waster of reputation. Christianity was a religion that spread among the plebeians. From those who never had power nor fame, Christianity asked an ongoing contemplation of heaven, where everyone was redeemed in the eyes of a familiar God who knew where every sparrow fell.

But there’s something current about Aurelius’s Spartan ways, stressing internal strength and contentment, something apropos while the world suffers through a time of pandemic, exercising social distance and suffering silently. And least those with dignity are. There are those protesting, like school kids whose recess has been taken away. But the majority have a care for the other as much as for themselves, a virtue commonly recommended by both Aurelius and Jesus. When encountering on a narrow sidewalk a stranger who makes a circuit to maintain social distance, one person is offended and another sees a courtesy. Which are you? It’s really as simple as that.

In Holland, we’re well into our sixth week of shutdown. It’s a culture that prides itself on common sense and moderation, and it must be said that things are calm. Dutch moderation didn’t go for full lockdown. Perhaps as a consequence, the country has always been among the top ten in deaths from the coronavirus. But no one panics or protests. The streets aren’t deserted, but people are generally and genially careful. They maintain distance, but they do it with a wry smile.

Travelogue 900 – April 19
Choosing the Gulls

The sea gulls are loud. It’s all I hear as I wake up. I lie still and listen to them. I like bird song, even the plaintive cries of gulls. I can imagine them circling around each other, perhaps fighting over some scrap of food. I know some people hate gulls, but I’ve always liked the sound of their voice. They remind me of the sea.

It means a lot to me, living by the sea. But it would be hard to say what that means. Without the sensory experiences of the winds, the North Sea clouds, the occasional salty smell, and the cries of the gulls, how would I know the sea was there? I rarely visit it. The sea is more an idea than a fact, and the gulls the opposite. The mind likes ideas, but the emotions favour facts. I see the gulls every day. Did I choose the sea or the gulls?

The sun is out again, after only one day of light showers. It’ll be another beautiful spring day, and I can’t wait to take the girls out for a walk by the canal. The grass will be strewn with pink petals from the cherry blossom trees. They’ve been in full bloom for weeks and their flowers are beginning to drop. If we can get out in the morning, there will be a pleasant chill in the air.

It’s Sunday; ballet classes come first. Ballet class doesn’t mean leaving home. Nothing does anymore. It all happens by video call. Little Ren’s class is first. We set the computer on a chair in the kitchen so the girls can dance on the clear floor of the attached dining room. I help her slip on her pink ballet shoes. I join the meeting on Zoom, and we all say hello to the teacher. Other children show up in their windows.

It’s wonderful that the lessons continue despite the shutdown, but the rituals around a family activity can be as important as the activity itself. We used to arrive early and change, while the other families arrived. I would take Little Ren into class. We would sit together on the wooden floor while the other children entered. After both classes, we would go out to a café for treats.

Living the video conferencing life is convenient. It saves us a lot of time. But I’m sure the girls miss the excitement of seeing everyone, the immediacy of dancing for your teacher in the same room. Little Ren finds it hard to concentrate in this format. She gets distracted; she wanders. Seeing the world through her eyes is a reminder of how small the computer screen is, and how flat. If we could afford the thoughts, we might wonder at the arbitrary power we’ve invested in these little screens and their pictures.

Travelogue 899 – April 11
The Lonely God

Someone on Facebook has warned me to beware any vaccine they develop for the coronavirus. It’s part of a plot on the part of Bill Gates to wipe out a portion of humanity. It wasn’t clear what Gates’s reasons might be for that; and it didn’t seem to matter much. Guys like Gates have evil agendas. They eradicate people like weeds. They take guns away, like ice cream from babies, just to watch children cry.

I shouldn’t find it funny, but I do. Isn’t it wonderful that fans of the Avengers find adventures in the headlines, that they should see Thanos in the spindly figure of Bill Gates? The human imagination is dazzling.

Who are we to each other? I think the pandemic has offered opportunities to take stock, look at society and our fellow humans with a new eye. In general, has it made us appreciate each other a litte more? Does absence make the heart grow fonder? Or was alienation already a cancer in the body of post-modern societies? And has the pandemic only exacerbated the situation, making our fellow man even more sinister-looking beyond that metre and a half, behind their masks, behind their windows and doors?

Edgy people are getting edgier. Those not used to courtesies and self-sacrifice are finding an end to their patience. They stalk the streets and host vengeance-on-the-world parties. Ideologues have had time to dig their trenches. Behind their lines, they scribble pages of new twists on old paranoia.

“Men exist for each other,” Aurelius writes, in one of his blunter formulae. “Then either improve them or put up with them.” It’s a sentiment he returns to repeatedly, and you feel the depth of the challenge. We don’t know much about the emperor’s social life. He may well have been an amiable gent and a gregarious host. But the essential friction among people affects extroverts as much as introverts. Even the cheeriest garden party only allays our tensions for a minute.

That said, the landscapes that I glimpse through his prose are lonely ones, not unlike the recent photos on Facebook posted to illustrate the lonely feeling of social distancing. “It’s a lonely job,” the cliché tells us, being at the top. Holding all the power, in a position that comes with godhood, might isolate a person. He talked himself through his trials, drawing on the wisdom of his teachers from the past, the philosophers. These pep talks are his Meditations.

How many are writing their Meditations in these lonely times? What ratio would describe the Meditations being written compared to the treatises of raging propaganda?

Travelogue 898 – April 6
A Different Time

The girls are adapting easily. How would they know whether it’s a new world? Coming one year later, the pandemic might have been an event that really registered with Baby, an event that made a permanent mark in her memory. But she’s too young. She was going to school every day. Then, quite suddenly, she wasn’t. She didn’t ask questions. She plays with Little Ren, her little sister, and she does her lessons with Mom at the kitchen table. The rhythm of life is familiar enough.

For older kids, I imagine it will be a milestone of sorts. For young adults, it will be more, a turning point, perhaps like 9/11 was for a previous generation, perhaps like the fall of the Berlin Wall for another. For old-timers, it’s more like a quiet watershed, like a massive mudslide you watch from a distance, too far away to hear, an event that changes the landscape you’ve been admiring for years. Who knows? There are plenty of partisans out there ready to tell me that everything corona is hyperbole. Why did we ever shut down the taverns and the stadiums?

I’m happy if the girls are free from worry. They don’t need this particular dose of cold water to the face. The world is not safe, and they’ll find that out in due time. For now, adversity wears the mask of the sister. They make each other cry. They monopolize toys; they pinch; they steal more kisses from Mama than is fair to the other.

Leave it to us to shoulder the horror. Leave it to the ouders.

At night, I listen to my ghosts, and I turn to my solaces. I read a verse or two from Aurelius, the counsellor, the consoling voice to those with a plague of concerns. He’s a good counsellor because he’s an anxious man, confiding to his journal the needs of the soul for order and sense. An emperor, he felt powerless. Someone unique, he felt anonymous before time and fate. His meditations read like affirmations, like the comforts one breathes to oneself at the end of a tough day.

And then he reminds us he’s from another age. “You have perhaps seen a severed hand or foot, or a head lying by itself apart from its body,” he writes, reminding us he’s a ghost himself. My fears have no life anymore, he slyly says.

Travelogue 897 – April 2
Farther

There’s always some train passing. I see a tram, or I see the intercity trains. The interiors are empty. The sun shines through the windows unimpeded. If auto traffic doesn’t look to have slowed much, public transit looks hard hit.

In Week Three of the Shutdown, I’ve wandered a bit farther afield on my walks. When the sun has been shining, I’ve been drawn to walk into the sun. It’s the end of the day, and sometimes I find myself on the high road leading west to Schiedam. I say ‘high’ because it rises above the level of the neighbourhood, passing over a busy artery that leads north into the Spaanse Polder. That’s about where the elevated Metro curves in to run parallel to, and above, the road to Schiedam. Dead ahead, at this time of day, at this time of year, shines the sun. I can’t turn away from the warmth and light, and so I keep walking.

Without turning around, I enter Schiedam, following the road into the town centre, following the Metro line to the central train station. It isn’t far; I can see the zig-zagging roof of the station from where I start on the Schiedam road. My eye follows the elegant curve of the elevated Metro track as it turns to the right, gliding down the gentle hill toward the station.

The effect of the station itself is unsettling. It’s nearly empty. The people who are there seem lost or vaguely hostile. Everyone walks around each other without looking, except for the teenage boys horsing around and laughing too loudly. The quarantined world is one that bad boys seem to enjoy. I check the boards, curious to see what is still running. The train schedule seems normal, except for the abundance of red script identifying trains that have been cancelled.

The Metro ride back is also an eerie experience. There are four of us in the car. All of us are male. Three of us are young and shrouded in hoodies, - meaning, the other guys. All in all, public transit is a spooky experience. The Metro train takes no time to cover the distance I’ve fashioned a long walk from, taking that long turn in the sky over the football pitches in less than a minute, while I watch out the window from my seat, trying to count my steps.