Travelogue 922 – July 26
Dawn Ride
At 5:30 in the morning, the clouds are grand in scale, drifting quickly across the screen of the sky. Maybe it’s the framing of the bedroom window that exaggerates their size. Everything is early morning grey. The background of the sky is pearlescent; the clouds more the shade of San Francisco fog rolling in off the Pacific, making only idle threats. With every day, the summer gets older, and sun’s light gets a later start. This was the tint of the sky half an hour earlier just a month ago. I’m going to get up. My mind gives the order a few times. Each time it seems to me the body obeys, but then I wake up in the same position. Finally, the order takes, and I’m out of bed.
The catalyst for rising this early is my new bicycle. My guy at the local bike shop put it together from an old frame and bits and pieces. It’s light and fast, but nothing like a high-end racing fiets that would cost thousands and excite all kinds of anxiety. No, this is purely for fun. I throw on the first old running clothes I can find, and I’m outside. The new bike rolls along so lightly and smoothly compared to my day-to-day omafiets with the child’s seat that I’m surprised how quickly I reach the outskirts of town and can look out over the open fields.
I’m rediscovering bike paths I haven’t seen since I first moved here. I had a lot of time for exploring back then, before Menna arrived. There are a lot of narrow little roads and even smaller bike paths that criss-cross these green strips of pastureland that almost float among a grid of little canals. These fields stretch west into what’s called the ‘Westland’, the lands lying between Rotterdam and the ports and the seacoast.
The peace and the chance to speed along under glorious skies are all I care about. The clouds have retreated to the horizons, and they are white with the day’s new light. These flat stretches of land make the skies seem vast, seem more than their hemisphere of space, seem like our true domain, seem like a domain of spirit and joy. The exercise hormones are obviously kicking in. The space and the pace are intoxicating. No stop lights.
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Friday, July 24, 2020
Travelogue 921 – July 24
Hard Workers
It’s summer vacation at last. My last day at work for the school year 2019-2020 was last Friday, and it was rather anti-climactic. I was just cleaning up small tasks. That’s good time management; I had no pile of unfinished work; I had no disasters to resolve. I’ve earned a right to brag about that, since much of my work life here has been messy and poorly managed. I’m fortunate in my colleagues’ patience.
Speaking of messy lives, I watched an interview with Jim Carrey last night. He’s about to publish a memoir, which seems to be a crazy fictionalization of the truth. Should we be surprised? It’s a daring move for the actor and comedian. A book like that has to be genius to rise above the initial gotcha. His motion picture magic is sometimes genius, sometimes bathos, but always memorable. It’s likely the book will be a similar mix, leaving the reader unsure how to judge it, unsure whether he or she should have spent the time reading it. Just watching him in an interview provides that same kind of stress, the anxiety you get watching a tightrope walker. What’s missing is the grace or the sense you get with a tightrope walker that, well, he’s a professional and will not fall. Carrey pushes it every time. Watching him is to squirm with discomfort.
The self-own in the interview is his admission that a character in the book, named something like ‘Laser Eyes’, is in reality Tom Cruise, who he criticizes for his calculating intensity. The truth is, these are two men I admire quite a bit, and for the same reasons. They try hard. They take risks. Dial up both of those qualities, and you have the near-insane intensity that Carrey criticizes. The two of them don’t just take risks; they never stop taking risks. They don’t just try hard; their lives are continuous effort. I really admire them for that, and I enjoy the strenuousness of their performances. I know that isn’t a popular opinion, but I do think the intensity and commitment do pay off. They have made themselves into artists. And both of them, consciously or unconsciously, benefit from the high-wire tension of tempting failure.
I think people prefer artists who achieve their effects effortlessly. In many cases, that is an illusion, but some just have natural grace. Unfairly, the most careless artists are often the ones that achieve the sublime, a quality that a labourer like Carrey visibly yearns for all his life. If he did attain the sublime, it was early on, in his Fire Marshall Bill days, or maybe in “Dumb and Dumber”. I shouldn’t comment on comedy greatness.
Anyway, all that occurs in a realm far above mine, where corrected papers, quickly forgotten by author and teacher, have all been filed away; where the work email account has been programmed with an automatic reply; where purposeless time has urgent purpose. I have four weeks or so, just enough time to lose track of time. I wish the summer were more summer-like. The Dutch summer is already over, as far as I can tell. The weather has reverted to never-ending spring, intermittent cloudiness and cool breezes.
Hard Workers
It’s summer vacation at last. My last day at work for the school year 2019-2020 was last Friday, and it was rather anti-climactic. I was just cleaning up small tasks. That’s good time management; I had no pile of unfinished work; I had no disasters to resolve. I’ve earned a right to brag about that, since much of my work life here has been messy and poorly managed. I’m fortunate in my colleagues’ patience.
Speaking of messy lives, I watched an interview with Jim Carrey last night. He’s about to publish a memoir, which seems to be a crazy fictionalization of the truth. Should we be surprised? It’s a daring move for the actor and comedian. A book like that has to be genius to rise above the initial gotcha. His motion picture magic is sometimes genius, sometimes bathos, but always memorable. It’s likely the book will be a similar mix, leaving the reader unsure how to judge it, unsure whether he or she should have spent the time reading it. Just watching him in an interview provides that same kind of stress, the anxiety you get watching a tightrope walker. What’s missing is the grace or the sense you get with a tightrope walker that, well, he’s a professional and will not fall. Carrey pushes it every time. Watching him is to squirm with discomfort.
The self-own in the interview is his admission that a character in the book, named something like ‘Laser Eyes’, is in reality Tom Cruise, who he criticizes for his calculating intensity. The truth is, these are two men I admire quite a bit, and for the same reasons. They try hard. They take risks. Dial up both of those qualities, and you have the near-insane intensity that Carrey criticizes. The two of them don’t just take risks; they never stop taking risks. They don’t just try hard; their lives are continuous effort. I really admire them for that, and I enjoy the strenuousness of their performances. I know that isn’t a popular opinion, but I do think the intensity and commitment do pay off. They have made themselves into artists. And both of them, consciously or unconsciously, benefit from the high-wire tension of tempting failure.
I think people prefer artists who achieve their effects effortlessly. In many cases, that is an illusion, but some just have natural grace. Unfairly, the most careless artists are often the ones that achieve the sublime, a quality that a labourer like Carrey visibly yearns for all his life. If he did attain the sublime, it was early on, in his Fire Marshall Bill days, or maybe in “Dumb and Dumber”. I shouldn’t comment on comedy greatness.
Anyway, all that occurs in a realm far above mine, where corrected papers, quickly forgotten by author and teacher, have all been filed away; where the work email account has been programmed with an automatic reply; where purposeless time has urgent purpose. I have four weeks or so, just enough time to lose track of time. I wish the summer were more summer-like. The Dutch summer is already over, as far as I can tell. The weather has reverted to never-ending spring, intermittent cloudiness and cool breezes.
Sunday, July 05, 2020
Travelogue 920 – July 5
Hard Lines
It doesn’t help that the winds are back. It puts me in mind of February, when the winds were hard and constant, when the winds were exhausting me. And ultimately those winds seemed to bring the virus in their malevolent persistence. Significantly, when March brought calm rains, the disease took hold and spread among those ominously cloudy and quiet times. What are these winds carrying?
I struggle on my bike against June’s winds as I take on February’s responsibilities again. Baby is back in school. Little Ren is going back to day care. The spring’s calm agenda is chopped up into rushes of activity.
It’s time to practice my Stoicism, practice humble (and uncomplaining) observance of duty. I am still reading Aurelius, by now in Book Twelve of the “Meditations”. I should derive strength from his guidance. Maybe I do.
But it happens that I’ve also picked up the latest book by Michel Houellebecq, “In the Presence of Schopenhauer”. Schopenhauer, in the English translation of Houellebecq’s translation, says of the Stoics that their ideal, “the Stoic sage, is described in a way deprived of any life or poetic truth; he remains a stiff, inert manikin.” Schopenhauer was Houellebecq’s hero when he was young. I certainly don’t see restraint and ‘submission’ appealing to the French author as philosophical principles to live by, especially as a young man.
There is some truth in what he quotes Schopenhauer as saying. I’ve reflected on the flat quality of Aurelius’s moralizing, mistaking it, as I think Schopenhauer does, for a world view. That would not be fair. I do believe these were the emperor’s notes to himself, whether they were published or not. Meaning, they were applied philosophy. His thoughts reference existing metaphysics; they don’t present new systems. Schopenhauer, heir to Kant, wants an explanation for everything. Aurelius wants a moral system that gets him through the day, a notion discredited among the Romantics of Schopenhauer’s day.
The times were very different. Schopenhauer’s call for ‘poetic truth’ gives it away. Nineteenth-century philosophers craved personality and passion, things that a Stoic would have found irrelevant. Perhaps the latter weren’t looking for Zarathustra or C.G. Jung so much as the measures of a good man, which could be applied to all manner of personalities. The Stoics talked a lot about the ‘indifferent’ things, the possessions, qualities and experiences that had no impact on human virtue. It’s tempting to say the indifferent things were the only ones nineteenth century writers were interested in. Think of Flaubert and Hugo and Dickens and Carlyle. So much detail, so much colour and personality. And these became moral principles in themselves.
Hard Lines
It doesn’t help that the winds are back. It puts me in mind of February, when the winds were hard and constant, when the winds were exhausting me. And ultimately those winds seemed to bring the virus in their malevolent persistence. Significantly, when March brought calm rains, the disease took hold and spread among those ominously cloudy and quiet times. What are these winds carrying?
I struggle on my bike against June’s winds as I take on February’s responsibilities again. Baby is back in school. Little Ren is going back to day care. The spring’s calm agenda is chopped up into rushes of activity.
It’s time to practice my Stoicism, practice humble (and uncomplaining) observance of duty. I am still reading Aurelius, by now in Book Twelve of the “Meditations”. I should derive strength from his guidance. Maybe I do.
But it happens that I’ve also picked up the latest book by Michel Houellebecq, “In the Presence of Schopenhauer”. Schopenhauer, in the English translation of Houellebecq’s translation, says of the Stoics that their ideal, “the Stoic sage, is described in a way deprived of any life or poetic truth; he remains a stiff, inert manikin.” Schopenhauer was Houellebecq’s hero when he was young. I certainly don’t see restraint and ‘submission’ appealing to the French author as philosophical principles to live by, especially as a young man.
There is some truth in what he quotes Schopenhauer as saying. I’ve reflected on the flat quality of Aurelius’s moralizing, mistaking it, as I think Schopenhauer does, for a world view. That would not be fair. I do believe these were the emperor’s notes to himself, whether they were published or not. Meaning, they were applied philosophy. His thoughts reference existing metaphysics; they don’t present new systems. Schopenhauer, heir to Kant, wants an explanation for everything. Aurelius wants a moral system that gets him through the day, a notion discredited among the Romantics of Schopenhauer’s day.
The times were very different. Schopenhauer’s call for ‘poetic truth’ gives it away. Nineteenth-century philosophers craved personality and passion, things that a Stoic would have found irrelevant. Perhaps the latter weren’t looking for Zarathustra or C.G. Jung so much as the measures of a good man, which could be applied to all manner of personalities. The Stoics talked a lot about the ‘indifferent’ things, the possessions, qualities and experiences that had no impact on human virtue. It’s tempting to say the indifferent things were the only ones nineteenth century writers were interested in. Think of Flaubert and Hugo and Dickens and Carlyle. So much detail, so much colour and personality. And these became moral principles in themselves.
Saturday, July 04, 2020
Travelogue 919 – July 4
Gentle Calendars
The sheep are back. They’ve cycled through the chance plots of grass between here and Schiedam Centrum, and they’ve turned up here again, on a kind of organic schedule based on how fast the grass grows and how quickly a herd of sheep can eat it up. It is surprising how thoroughly they can crop the new growth. There’s no mistaking the path they’ve followed. On one side of the bike path I take every morning, the one that winds up the hill toward the Metro station, the sheep are reclining in the early morning chill, watching my slow progress up the incline. On the other side, the grass is uniformly pared down to yellow nubs.
The progress of the sheep around the neighbourhood form a friendly sort of calendar, nicer than the cruel work calendar, which milks the end of the school year with long days and prolix meetings. It’s nicer than the civic and news calendars, counting the nightmarish days since the corona virus hit and the hellish days until the American election.
There’s another sense in which the calendar has started up again for my family. Now that the Netherlands has the virus pretty well under control, primary schools have been back in session. We kept Baby home for a while longer because I was still getting my lungs checked out. Now she’s back, and I’m back on Papa’s bike duty every morning, lifting Baby up into the bike seat and chugging on that heavy bike all the way to the school in Delfshaven.
I’m afraid I have to report that I’m in horrible shape. How did that happen in just a few short months, since March, when the shutdown started? I look back at my schedule in the fall and winter with some awe. How did I maintain that routine, cycling kids to schools, cycling to work, sometimes cycling downtown for lunch in between classes? On top of all that, I was training for half marathons!
Now that all my road races have been called off, I don’t run much. And until Baby returned to school, getting on the bicycle was to leisurely pedal to the store, no more than a kilometre away. My experience in adapting back to Baby’s school schedule inspires a real dread of the return to ‘normalcy’ in the fall. Do I need to work out this summer, just to be in shape for my ‘normal’ life? That’s not likely to happen. I plan on employing my tried and true strategy of pooling all general anxiety into a reservoir for future nightmares and panic attacks. That works for me every time.
Gentle Calendars
The sheep are back. They’ve cycled through the chance plots of grass between here and Schiedam Centrum, and they’ve turned up here again, on a kind of organic schedule based on how fast the grass grows and how quickly a herd of sheep can eat it up. It is surprising how thoroughly they can crop the new growth. There’s no mistaking the path they’ve followed. On one side of the bike path I take every morning, the one that winds up the hill toward the Metro station, the sheep are reclining in the early morning chill, watching my slow progress up the incline. On the other side, the grass is uniformly pared down to yellow nubs.
The progress of the sheep around the neighbourhood form a friendly sort of calendar, nicer than the cruel work calendar, which milks the end of the school year with long days and prolix meetings. It’s nicer than the civic and news calendars, counting the nightmarish days since the corona virus hit and the hellish days until the American election.
There’s another sense in which the calendar has started up again for my family. Now that the Netherlands has the virus pretty well under control, primary schools have been back in session. We kept Baby home for a while longer because I was still getting my lungs checked out. Now she’s back, and I’m back on Papa’s bike duty every morning, lifting Baby up into the bike seat and chugging on that heavy bike all the way to the school in Delfshaven.
I’m afraid I have to report that I’m in horrible shape. How did that happen in just a few short months, since March, when the shutdown started? I look back at my schedule in the fall and winter with some awe. How did I maintain that routine, cycling kids to schools, cycling to work, sometimes cycling downtown for lunch in between classes? On top of all that, I was training for half marathons!
Now that all my road races have been called off, I don’t run much. And until Baby returned to school, getting on the bicycle was to leisurely pedal to the store, no more than a kilometre away. My experience in adapting back to Baby’s school schedule inspires a real dread of the return to ‘normalcy’ in the fall. Do I need to work out this summer, just to be in shape for my ‘normal’ life? That’s not likely to happen. I plan on employing my tried and true strategy of pooling all general anxiety into a reservoir for future nightmares and panic attacks. That works for me every time.
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