Travelogue 927 – August 30

What’s the Score?

 

There’s the sound of a crowd on the wind. It’s not so common a sound as it once was. I can hear their cries hundreds of metres away.

 

The clouds have cleared, and I’ve decided on an evening walk. My usual route takes me by a set of community pitches. And there’s a match on. I can see their uniforms, yellow and scarlet. I can see the modest grandstand mid-pitch, where plenty of seats are still empty. These spectators have powerful lungs.

 

I circle the pitches in my usual way, passing close to one team’s net. I stop to watch, and it happens that I’m fortunate enough to see a goal. It’s the yellows, looking like bees with their black stripes, who swarm down the pitch to score. It’s not the prettiest goal, a ball that the goalkeeper gets a piece of and then quickly bounces among the players to dribble into the net. But the fans are happy, letting loose another surprising volley of sound.

 

I carry on with my walk, accompanied by the echoes of the cheering and jeering of the football crowd. Evening walks are made for trivial thoughts, and two lines of meaningless inquiry compete for the floor in the parlour of my mind. One is topical. I wonder at the vehemence of their enjoyment. That they’re excited is not surprising, considering the enforced general hiatus from sport. What I wonder is how much of their exuberance may be a show for the benefit of the community, which they may feel still disapproves of their gathering in this way. I wonder, also, how much might be attributed to unconscious fear, fear for their health and fear that this match might be one precious bit of joy between waves of illness and shutdown. In short, how exceptional is this occasion, and, looking deeper, how sincere?

 

My second line of thought is less topical. The sight of the match, small league play on a local pitch, strikes me as the essence of sport. It is exciting. And it’s timeless. The spectators know the teams, know some or all of the players, and their dedication to one of those teams may match their dedication to Manchester United, or whoever they watch at the bar. That’s how it should be. I notice, walking by again, there’s not even a scoreboard. Everyone just knows the score. It’s among the best forms of entertainment, a kind of theatre. The local theatre company doesn’t need to tell you which act of Hamlet they’re in. You remember, or it doesn’t matter. When the first image to come to mind of European football is one from a multi-million-euro match broadcast around the world, I think the sport is done a disservice. The local is the real.

 

I walk on. The skies have opened up. The clouds are glowing with sun. These are the skies I was encountering in early April, when the crisis was new, when we were beginning to wonder how serious all this was.

 Travelogue 926 – August 29

Windy Speeches for the Stable Genius

 

It’s still August, but it feels like the winds have blown summer away. Or maybe that’s the onset of the school year blowing away all leisure for teachers. It doesn’t take long before those two elements of a successful summer, lazy heat and lazy behaviours, seem far in the past.

 

Even though the Roman temperatures have been blown away by this week’s winds, I’m still pursuing my Roman reading. I miss the Emperor, the thoughtful and earnest and solitary Marcus Aurelius, who wrote to bolster his confidence with thoughts of virtue. I’ve moved on to reading history and drama.

 

The plays of Seneca are appropriate reading for stormy weather. By day, Seneca may have been a prominent Stoic philosopher, preaching the importance of a cool head and a cool heart, but, by night, he dashed off florid melodramas. The plays are all high rhetoric and wrenching emotion. There is no stage direction and little action. There is some debate about whether these plays were written for performance. If they were performed, it was probably at court, where Trump’s historical twin, the petulant Nero, lay on his side in a sumptuous room and watched a small set of actors sweat through their long monologues and their mortal fear of the critic.

 

In “Medea”, the protagonist writhes in jealousy and fury and self-reproach, finally resolving to call upon all dark powers in an impressively comprehensive manner in order to punish her husband’s new lover, the lover’s father, and finally her own children. This performance would have demanded extraordinary stamina from any actor, and perhaps Seneca the director counted on the actor’s fear for her life, performing in front of the stable genius who was emperor, for that extra shot of energy. In “Trojan Women”, the pervading emotions are horror and grief. There is plenty to go around, so no one actor would have been forced to carry the whole eight of Troy’s mortification.

 

It’s hard to reconcile the various sides of Seneca, the ambitious courtier, the sage philosopher, and the writer of grotesque stage plays, but no one can dispute his influence. I can’t read Latin. By all accounts his style was powerful and beautiful. His writings have survived as models for authors through the centuries, and even had their influence on Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre. You can find Seneca in the five-act structures, the charged rhetoric and the general doom and gloom. There is in much of that era’s writing the feeling of the proud student mimicking his don.

 

Seneca survived well through the centuries, in part because Christian scholars believed Seneca was pals with Saint Paul. I might have chosen other representatives of Roman culture to survive this well, but there’s something valuable and instructive to this man’s repellent complexity. He was a man of his time. I look forward to tasting from other Roman drama. I’d like to travel back into the happier times of the Republic, take a look at the comedian Plautus.

Travelogue 925 – August 22

Some August Heat

 

Summer effectively ends for me on Monday, but today I’m registering a mood that is something like optimism. That might be because I had the kind of good night’s sleep that has been rare in summer. And that might be because the temperatures are suddenly not so summer-like. The winds have blown in, heralding a change of season.

 

Riding my bike to the store this morning, I rode under blue skies and among cool breezes that could have belonged to autumn. I enjoyed that short ride. The skies were wide and bright, and the clouds high and noble. The bike ride could have been a moment of inspiration. Autumn always did awaken a sense of hope in me.

 

I’m not complaining about the summer. Days are supposed to be hot, especially in August. In recent years, summer has waned before August had fairly begun. We were fortunate with our August this year. And still, here it is, as though on cue: school is set to begin again and the winds pick up, carrying their teasing suggestions of chill and damp. The timing is uncanny. It makes one think that tradition was always a product of nature.

 

This year’s summer heat has meant a few more trips to the beach than usual. That’s been great for the family. It’s also meant a kind of atmospheric accompaniment to my readings in Roman literature. I’m not really sure why I continue to be drawn back to my writers from the days of polytheism and marching legions, but it’s nice to have something like the Roman climate as backdrop.

 

I finally finished my long and slow sojourn through the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius. I would be hard-pressed to say what wisdom or consolation I derived from that study. I might understand something more of Stoicism than I did before. I learned very little about the history of his time. But it’s not time regretted, any more than the time invested in good conversation would be. One doesn’t need an inventory of improvements to his character to give merit to an evening spent with a friend. And ultimately, it did feel a bit like a conversation, the confidences of someone I was getting to know.

 

I have my doubts that there was any real intention in the order of the thoughts in his book. I can’t be sure who determined the order given the editions that we know now. But I did think the last passage had a bit of class to it, in light of the thoughts already shared, beginning with, “O man, citizenship of this great world city has been yours”; and carrying on until its close: “Pass on your way then, with a smiling face, under the smile of him who bids you go.” There are a few little gems in even these two sentences for those who have participated in the conversation.

Travelogue 924 – August 11

Duindorp

 

Sun and sand are the two main ingredients for this summer’s magical formula. We have them both today. The morning sun is a miracle, hot and unrelenting, ready to burn my sensitive skin. We’ve brought along a little, blue paraplu, and I spend much of my time finding ways to gather all my limbs comfortably under its shadow.

 

We’ve returned to our new beach, the one at the western end of Den Haag. We’ve travelled here with some trepidation because the weather report was ambiguous. Will it rain on us or would the sun shine? We’ve been fortunate. Amorphous clouds gather just after midday, but then they disperse.

 

It’s not a journey to be taken lightly. It includes transport on three separate conveyances, one or all of which may be having issues with air circulation. During this heat wave, already one week long, train rides can be tortuous. It’s not uncommon to be trapped in a stifling train car during a delay, feeling as though your lungs have finally found their gasping capacity. And this is a journey we undertake with two children at the ages of maximum duress. Yes, we do take the weather report seriously. The trip had better be worth it.

 

The sand is plentiful. It rises in piles that are higher than those at Scheveningen. The sand rises steeply from the water and undulates from there toward the dunes that line this long stretch of sea, and that give the nearby Den Haag community its name, Duindorp. The dunes themselves are high, and on the other side of them lies a spacious park with many paths among the lush seaside vegetation. The first valleys among the dunes are green with low-lying shrubs and flowers. Beyond that are cool forests, which allow us to keep a promise to Little Ren, who has wanted to search through a wood for T-Rex eggs. We haven’t found any yet.

 

It’s high tide, and we set up our paraplu just above the surf. The waves are strong, and the shallows extend far, so the swimming is especially fun. I’m usually the seawater sceptic, hanging back, afraid of the cold water, wading before swimming. Today, I’m the first one in. The girls are becoming brave. They stand in the water now and battle the waves. Baby waves her hands high, and she sings to the sea, meeting the sound of the surf with her voice.

Travelogue 923 – August 4 Long Strand 

Distances are deceptive here. I hardly need reminding that the Netherlands is a small country, but standing there on the sea, it’s driven home. Looking one way, toward the north, the coast curves out toward the sea so we can see a long way. At the farthest reach of sight, there is what looks to be a small city skyline on the shore. I haven’t been able to figure out what town that could be. But the most conservative option puts it halfway to Amsterdam’s nearest coast. Looking the other way, we see all the way to the port. It looks like an industrial Emerald City, oil tanks and cranes and magic castles. It’s disorienting for me because in the map in my head the port near Hoek van Holland and Rotterdam and where we are now, near Den Haag, is a triangle encompassing a good deal of territory. We expended quite a bit of energy travelling along one side of that triangle today: the Metro to a train to a long tram ride. I’ve been cycling, spending hours on paths well within the confines of that triangle. Then we’re on the beach, and there’s the Hoek van Holland looking like a casual stroll away. It doesn’t seem right, even though I am enjoying the opportunity of long views.

It’s like it takes the sea to force some perspective on the mind. Like human roads are mazes, and we’re perpetually scurrying in tight little switchbacks, escaping the big minotaur of our small spaces.

We’re trying something new today. Every year, we make a trip to the beach at Scheveningen. It’s a family tradition. That mission has already been accomplished to everyone’s satisfaction, last week. It was a beautiful day when we went to Scheveningen, and we did a lot of swimming. It was high tide, and the waves were high and crashing. The girls were screaming almost constantly, running away from every new wave.

Today, we’re trying a new beach for the first time. It’s south of Scheveningen, though still within sight of it. We can see the Ferris wheel on the pier.