Travelogue 1024 – December 30
The Sounds of Lockdown

We’re deep into holiday break (and lockdown) and the city is quiet. I enjoy getting on the bike during holiday breaks. The city seems calm and human. There are some exceptions, of course. There are the kids and forever pre-teens who are setting off bomb-like firecrackers from Poland in the dead of night. And there is the weather. Even when the people of Holland are still, the sky is not. There is a rushing wind under the grey sky that actually pushes me uphill on my bike when I’m crossing the Beukels Bridge. Pedalling up the other side on my way home is another matter. I’m pushing against the wind at a pace that I could beat by walking. But in a perverse twist on laziness, I don’t want to bother dismounting from the bike.

After doing some shopping, I stop by my favourite café. It’s owned by a young couple, half Brit and half Dutch. The Englishman is manning the front today. There’s only the front to man during the lockdown. They’ve had to let everyone go, and they run the place themselves. They’ve blocked off the whole space beyond the front counter. In the back, you see that he’s set up a tee and a chipping net so he can practice his golf game. It’s one of the few outdoor activities still open.

We talk about the pandemic, and we talk about the new year. He thinks the lockdown was a good idea. It’s nice to talk COVID in reasonable tones. 2021 has been a year of shrill voices. Maybe we get to be tired of wild-eyed ranting in 2022? That would be nice. He’s planning for a quiet New Year’s, as much as possible among the fireworks. He has a rooftop garden, where he and his wife will share some champagne and watch the adult fireworks shows.

Down below, the rest of us will be hiding behind locked doors with pillows over our heads, while the streets are surrendered to the communal lizard brain. The police have been clear that, though fireworks have been banned, chasing down incels with explosives will be low among their priorities. Fair enough. We wait to feel the hope of a new year dawning until the sun has risen and the smoke has cleared.

Travelogue 1023 – December 20
If We Had Been Saved
Part Three

It’s easier to imagine a world in which Hitler won the war than it is to imagine a world in which Hitler never was born. That’s fascinating. Why would that be so? I’m guessing the answer is a simple one. There are tangible measures for the first case. Hitler is a known quantity. The war is a familiar narrative.

If it’s ‘easier to imagine’, does that lend it some moral value? No, it’s clearly easy for our species to imagine dystopias and nightmares. It’s almost a specialisation of the human psyche. As much as historical speculation can be made to serve a moral purpose, it is neutral at its core. The what-if game can be quite a callous one. Concept exists in its own sphere, free of values. History is an objective study, in which the human experience is reduced to a series of formulae.

‘High concept’ is popular in fiction these days. Speculation, whether about history or future, has become a ubiquitous confection for readers and film audiences. Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes fears the collapse of Western Civilization, but the hero prevails, and disaster is averted. Reality then becomes the counter narrative: August 1914 is an anomaly. Sherlock Holmes has already saved us from that. If every what-if makes of our reality its shadow, then by now we are living in the counter narrative removed many, many times from the intervention of the first what-if.

Speculation becomes a habit of the mind, leaping right over the obvious. If the world wars had been averted, the most salient effect would have been that some sixty million more people would have been alive in 1945. Our minds may run to the playground of big ideas, but the graveyard is still plainly in sight.

Is this the symptom of something deeper? One needn’t look too far to see other signs of our callousness toward human life. I think of the recent Rittenhouse trial. Whatever the reason, there is no dispute that this kid shot two people dead in the street. Who remembers the victims’ names? Who expresses remorse for the lives cut short? I’ve had to remind myself who they were, so seldom were they mentioned in the international press. Neither victim was armed. Both were concerned that a teenage boy was moving freely among protesters with an assault-style rifle. Every so often the term ‘death cult’ is applied to the Trumpistas. I wonder if it’s confined to them. Maybe they’re just the dumb kids who say it out loud, and, feeling dumb when we laugh, say it louder and louder.

Human life has never meant more to me than since I became a parent. It’s a miracle. We are blessed when we grasp this simplest principle. My girls teach me every day. We have so little of real value to cherish in this short existence. We manufacture silly placeholders when we feel empty, things like religious or nationalistic dogmas. We search for justification for the gift of life: a god’s design or success according to various yardsticks. But life is its own value. When we show ourselves careless with that treasure, we reveal something truly ugly in our nature. No pretty idea disguises it.

Travelogue 1022 – December 19
If We Had Been Saved
Part Two

We’re back in hard lockdown. I had no idea it was coming. My doctor friend didn’t see it coming, either, so I don’t feel too out of touch. Suddenly this morning we’re locked down until mid-January.

“Mensen worden moedeloos,” declares a local story. People are down. Yes. I have less reason than most to feel down. Lockdown has very little effect on my lifestyle, sad to say. We don’t go out. I don’t work in a market. The promulgation of a hard lockdown should be of little consequence to me. Instead, I find it depressing. As a public health measure, it’s an act of hope. As a government pronouncement, it’s like an admission of defeat.

It finally feels, two years in, like history. It feels like the Battle for Britain, a battle of endurance and attrition. It’s a dark time, months of deprivation sandwiched between Trump-Brexit and … God knows what. With the supply chain meltdowns we’ve seen, we may even see rationing to complete the World War II analogy.

Is this the collapse of civilization that Downey Jr as Holmes warned us about? Seems rather delayed if it’s a result of the world wars. But I’ve already been forced to admit that I have little notion what the difference between a saved world and an unsaved world might be. Professor Moriarty tried to plunge the world into total war in 1891. Holmes saved the world that time (according to Guy Ritchie,) but apparently was unable to in 1914. As it happens, Holmes himself did survive the war. As much as we like to think of him as a nineteenth-century character, he did appear in stories until 1927. Therefore, he and Watson entered with us into the fallen state, the dreamy historical miasma we optimistically called post-war.

My imagination failed me when I attempted to visualize a world that had been saved from Moriarty’s evil machinations and had avoided all world war. Would we have been free from climate change? Probably not. Would we have avoided the spectre of nuclear war? Probably not. Would we have been spared K-pop? Not likely.

Then I realized the premise was wrong. In the same way that Guy Ritchie’s movie (innocently) makes something of the Holmes canon that it was never meant to be – Arthur Canon Doyle had never dreamed of steam punk, – the brand of historical speculation that (not so innocently) forces nature into shapes it was never meant to hold (high-concept what-if propositions) has another purpose than accurate portrayal. It’s fun to entertain grandiose schemata of civilizational glory and decay, punctuated by once-in-a-millennium events, and suggesting Boschian scenes of disaster to the imagination, but, of course, few are privileged to live through tectonic civilizational shifts, and fewer realize it’s happening. Those who lived through the decline of Rome would have only dimly been aware of that decline. Those alive during the sacks of Rome in 410 and 455 A.D. were shocked, but they lived in a world in which Rome had already been lost in every sense but the final one, its safety behind ancient walls. Rome was no longer even capital of the Roman Empire in the fifth century.

Travelogue 1021 – December 12
If We Had Been Saved 

Part One

Now I use our Netflix accounts to watch cheesy old films, films like the old Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies. They’re like candy to look at, and the humour is just as sickly sweet. The dark sets are Gothic, and so are the villains. In the second Holmes movie, Professor Moriarty is planning to ignite the First World War a generation early, in 1891.

At one point, Robert Downey Jr is declaring that they need to stop Professor Moriarty and avert the collapse of Western civilization. It’s just a movie and just a throwaway line – these days, no villain worth their salt aims for anything less than the collapse of civilization. Why bother with a bank heist? We hear about the civilization’s demise every few hours on average. It’s somehow integral to every group fantasy of ours. But this spin on the old trope made me think.

World War I was destined to come, despite Sherlock’s genius. So … has Western civilization collapsed after all? It certainly would be a relief to know it was over and done with. Villains might be left without a sense of purpose, but the rest of us would be happy to get on with our humble, medieval existences, bowing to our half-witted leaders and watching the televised jousts from the UFC.

But what if the world wars had actually been averted and civilization saved? What would a saved Western civilization have looked like? Science and industry were already developing quickly. Population was ready to boom. Culture was overshadowed by Freud and Einstein, well before 1914. Would the post-colonial world have looked any different? Would it have been post-colonial at all? Would China have become any less of a juggernaut? Would Europe have retained more power, more dignity?

Russia might have retained its empire. Maybe there would still have been some Romanovs lingering on, celebrities with no power. A young Vladimir Putin might have died protecting a minor Romanov prince from anarchist bullets. Or perhaps perished in a skirmish with the Bolsheviks, who resurge every few generations in a wild run at the government in St Petersburg.

Assuming my mother still found my father attractive without his uniform, and assuming I still found my way into this tired old world, what would I have found? Being an American would have meant something different. No doubt, without being called upon to lead the “free world”, America would have been both lesser and greater, less noble and less corrupt, frivolous without needing to be self-righteous. Where would MAGA be without the narrative of a ‘great’ America? Sleazebags like Gaetz and Greene would have been free to be the offensive real estate agents they were born to be, chasing money instead of MAGA glory and bullying minority parents at PTA meetings.

This is a fun what-if game to play, but I’m surprised to find myself struggling to come up with tangible ideas about how it would have been different. It’s a game that seems easy to play until you try. I’m not even sure how to interpret the challenge it presents.

Travelogue 1020 – December 5

How Baroque

It’s hard to resist thinking back to our trip to Rome in October. It’s probably the last time we saw the sun. To say it’s been rainy here would be to insult Holland’s genius for gloom.

One sunny morning in Rome, we ventured across the Tiber to see the Vatican Museums. Though it’s been years since I visited, it was all so familiar, those astounding halls with all their wonders, and the peculiar exhaustion that creeps up on you and embraces you. That place demands a very specific sort of stamina.

COVID had made some changes. The biggest difference was our unregulated time in the Sistine Chapel. The last time I visited, we were marched in in groups and given fifteen minutes to enjoy. This time, the crowds were thinner, and we were allowed to freely enter and leave. In fact, we passed through the famous chapel twice, after I spaced out and led my family right past the Stanze di Raffaello. We had to circle back, seeing Michelangelo twice in order to see Rafael once. I would say that was a fair trade.

For me, Rome was the city of Michelangelo. Invariably, I visited Michelangelo when I visited Rome: the Pietà, the Sistine Chapel, the Campidoglio, the tomb of Julius II.

After some time, as though from the periphery, there entered another artist to contend for the soul of Rome. That was Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bernini came a century later, and he never cut the romantic figure that Michelangelo did, but his claim to the Eternal City is undeniable.

Bernini is everywhere. He’s at the Vatican. He’s scattered here and there across the centre, perhaps mostly famously at the Pizza Navona. He’s in museums, most prominently in the Galleria Borghese. Bernini was the son of a sculptor, and he was a prodigy whose talent was recognized early. He was the favourite of a string of popes, and he spent the majority of a long life contributing to the beauty of his city, in sculpture, paintings, architecture and monuments.

Unsurprisingly, as I’ve grown older, I’ve become drawn to the artists with long careers. I have a new regard for those survivors, the Berninis, the Rembrandts, and the Shakespeares, the artists who lived undramatic lives and who produced huge bodies of work. As much as Michelangelo is regarded as a brooding outsider – and to a good degree he was, – he was also, like Bernini, spotted early and favoured through much of his life by the popes of his time. He lived to be 88 years old.

Bernini’s art isn’t to everyone’s taste. He is father or midwife to the Baroque style, and to the extent that the centre of Rome stands as a monument to Baroque, we owe a tip of our hats to the overwhelming genius of Bernini. You may not like the drama and the grandiosity, the anguished faces and the gilded rays of Holy Spirit, but it was the art of its time, and Bernini was the master.

Travelogue 1019 – November 28
Santa Maria in Trastevere

The story of our food experience in Rome unravels quickly after its humble beginnings. We’re increasingly in the thrall of two overpowering forces, parenting fatigue and the charms of the city. These forces combine to make daily planning nearly impossible. By dinner time we are fine finding somewhere nearby for ease. We also want something more local and less touristic. Our solution is to cross the river and stroll around Trastevere. This is how we discover the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere.

This is a lively area of Rome. It wouldn’t be fair to say it was “Roman” in the sense we hoped for. There are just as many non-Italians here as in the Campo de’Fiori, but in Trastevere they are expats living or studying in Rome. In that sense only, we’ve graduated to something more local. We return there for dinner several nights in a row.

The piazza is old. The fountain in the centre dates back to the eighth century, though what you see is the work of Bramante. The basilica on the piazza was first founded in the third century. Much of the current building dates back to the twelfth century, notably those mosaics along the top of the façade. The church is long and squat, in the style of many basilicas in Italy, offering a somewhat blank face to the piazza, despite its embellishments, with a tall and square campanile in the back. The weight of so many centuries settles on this square with a sobering effect. Despite the piazza’s reputation for nightlife, the spacious square, laid with fanning cobblestone and lined in Renaissance colours, still feels a bit forlorn and quiet.

In the piazza, or along one of the nearby lanes, we tried pizza al forno and tried more pasta carbonara. We sat outside when we could, watching the night overtake our new little quartiere. We watched lovers sitting on the steps of the fountain. We watched the young lady chase a purse snatcher across the piazza. We watched the police van lazily pull into the piazza some ten minutes later. We placated our restless little girls, promising them gelato if they would sit still a few moments longer.

Travelogue 1018 – November 21
Rommel

I’m grading papers, digital piles of digital papers. Students are reporting their research findings, drawing conclusions, and making recommendations. I’m reading with an evaluator’s eyes, judging language, capturing errors, and tracing the arc of thoughts in flight, like the darting of starlings in mid-air. Perhaps it’s more like turkeys taking flight in some cases. But it’s quite a task, when you think about it, this construction of cases, this logic by numbers, this raising of towers with bar magnets and steel balls. It’s a kind of miracle. How do children manage this? I mean, developing to this sophistication of thought?

I turn away from essays for a moment to watch my girls. I wonder at the journey ahead of them. I imagine them consulting with me about argumentative essays and rhetoric.

Baby Jos was recently reciting to me a silly rhyme she learned from a friend, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.” I laughed with her, enjoying her pride in having acquired this verbal toy. She repeated it all evening. Little Ren, meanwhile, was insisting that I call her “sensei”. She showed me how I should bow to her. Her big sister had helped her craft a black belt from paper. How long will I be able to share these small triumphs with them? How long will they include me?

Can it be possible that these thoughts experiments, my girls’ rhymes and their playacting and the three-letter words in their little books, will compound over time and evolve into essays for teachers like me?

Baby’s teacher recently posted a video of their classroom. Overnight, everything had been overturned and the room was a mess. The children entered with their mouths open in wonder. Clearly, the school had received a visit from Rommelpiet. Rommelpiet is one of the more entertaining of Dutch Christmas traditions. Sinterklaas comes to the country at this time of year. (Sinterklaas is NOT Santa Claus. Santa has a closer analogue in the ‘Kerstman’.) And when Sinterklaas travels, he does so with a retinue of ‘Piets’, who, unfortunately, are conventionally portrayed as black sambos. The Piets are tricksters, but none more than Rommelpiet, who likes to sneak into schools and turn everything upside down. ‘Rommel’ means mess in Dutch.

I wonder if Rommelpiet requires an ‘inside man’ at each school. I would like to volunteer. Imagine the hallways littered with essays. If only they were still on paper.

Travelogue 1017 – November 20
I Made This

Just a block away from the Caffe Sant’Eustachio is the one of my favourite sights in the centre of Rome. You come upon it quite suddenly, because this part of Rome is really the medieval city, where buildings crowd in and huddle against the cold centuries between ancient and modern. These are the streets north of the Palatine and Capitoline hills, where, during the Roman Republic, armies were called to duty and were trained. The fields there, collectively called the Campus Martius in those days, lay outside the city walls. Once the Western Mediterranean had been conquered, and Rome’s wars had become long campaigns fought far away, the armies were encamped and trained outside the city, often outside Latium. During the Civil Wars and Augustus’s reign, the Campus Martius became a place to build. Pompey built his theatre there. In an ironic stroke of fate, this would be where Pompey’s greatest adversary would be assassinated four years after he himself had been called to Hades. Years later, Augustus Caesar’s great general, friend, and son-in-law Agrippa would build the Pantheon in the old Campus Martius. No one is quite sure of the original function of the building, beyond it being a temple, hardly a novel purpose for structures in ancient Rome, where gods and goddesses abounded.

Walking from Sant’Eustachio, one approaches the Pantheon from behind, the first sight of the building offering hardly a clue to the significance of the place. One is positioned too close to recognize it. The wall could almost be the side of an old prison. There are a few small, irregular barred windows. Otherwise, it is blank, solid brick, old, eroded and reworked many times. One sees the remains of archways, filled in with brick. One sees the remains of mysterious walls and floors. One sees square peg holes where supporting beams must have been wedged. People are sitting on the low wall that surrounds the base of the building. The original level of ancient buildings is significantly lower than the streets today. Inside that boundary wall is a kind of dry moat surrounding the Pantheon. A narrow alley runs along the back wall, where tour groups shuffle along, blocking foot traffic, oblivious to anything but the voices in their ears. One eventually finds one’s way round to the imposing façade, where an ascending piazza allows for perspective. It’s a dramatic sight, high columns holding up the pediment of the temple’s portico, the pediment engraved with Agrippa’s name: in letters that can probably be seen at half a kilometre. “M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT,” it says. I made this thing.

As it happens, the Pantheon we see was probably not made by Agrippa. The original was likely wholly destroyed in a fire. It was restored by Domitian and then later by Hadrian. It’s even possible that the amazing dome that tops the Parthenon, still a model for architects more than a millennium later, was Hadrian’s innovation. It’s hard to say what the first temple looked like, aside from the awe-inspiring façade that proclaims that Agrippa lived and built.

Travelogue 1016 – November 13
Deer in the Headlights

I didn’t get far in recounting our food experiences in Rome. I started about our dinner in the Ghetto district, and then my mind was drawn back to the Tiber. But that’s how Rome is, city of distractions.

Let’s talk coffee. I was quick to ask Carolyn about coffee, and she recommended the Caffe Sant’Eustachio. That venerable establishment, open since 1938, is located in the Piazza Sant’Eustachio, just behind the Pantheon in the centre of the old town. The coffee is fantastic – they are famous for their secret blend, – and we enjoyed sitting lazily in the piazza. There’s nothing much to look at in the piazza, beyond the life of the piazza itself, and it wouldn’t be Italy without the beautiful chaos of the piazza. The place, the plein, the platz, the square, the piazza: warm images come to mind, whatever the culture. But the Italian piazza is a special one for me, informed by the taste of caffe and brioche and by the noise of a hundred conversations overheard.

A piazza like Sant’Eustachio would hardly seem a space worthy of the name. It’s more like the wide bend in a stream, where tiny rivulets converge. The space is irregular, uneven. Outdoor tables seem like awkward claims on space where the ‘stream’, as it were, eddies. There is no boundary between caffe space and the street among the fan-patterned cobblestone. And the caffe itself is as much a touristic sight as any ruin, a vestige of the mid-century Rome that showcased its unique cultural alloy of exquisite taste with the disarming disarray of the Italian street.

The one sight on the piazza, might be the church of Sant’Eustachio. There’s been a church on the site at least since the eighth century. In the back, off the piazza, stands its twelfth-century Romanesque bell tower. The façade on the piazza dates to about 1700, and includes a captivating deer’s head with a cross set between its antlers, high above the entrance. It’s a reference to the saint’s conversion, which involved spotting a radiant deer like this one while out on a hunt. Eustachio was an early martyr, a Roman noble who abandoned all to join the Christians.

Travelogue 1015 – November 10
Ghettoes

I want to report about our food experience in Rome, because our friend Carolyn was so generous with good advice about where to go. I’m afraid it will be a dubious homage to Carolyn’s good taste and her graciousness, though, because I am so underdeveloped as a foodie and because our schedule for fine dining was curtailed by the little girls holding our hands.

We made a good effort. We had dinner in the old Ghetto district, not far from our hotel, where we were able to taste some real Roman cuisine, including pasta Cacio e Pepe (cheese and pepper) and Carciofi alla Giudia (artichokes fried as ghetto residents apparently did). We ate outside, under umbrellas tilting on the cobblestones. The girls were more excited about the Fanta than about the Roman cuisine, I’m afraid, but we managed to keep them seated long enough to enjoy our own meals.

We had not arrived in the Ghetto district from our hotel, but from the direction of the river, just at the end of the Via del Portico d’Ottavia. We had toured the Forum Boarium and then walked along the river, beside the pretty Isola Tiberina. The Forum Boarium was a cattle market during the Republic, on a spot that would have been right next to the river. Located in the ancient market are two of the oldest standing temples in the city, dating to the two centuries before Christ. They are small but pretty. It’s a quiet spot, a pleasant opportunity to contemplate the ancient architecture.

Across the street, it’s not so quiet. There, tourists line up to take their pictures at the ‘Mouth of Truth’. No one is quite sure where this huge circular mask came from, though it probably served as something like the manhole cover it looks like, possibly originating in the floor of one of the temples across the street. Now it hangs outside the church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, parts of which date back to the 8th century. A superstition grew around this spooky mask that, if you uttered a lie while your hand was in the mask’s mouth, you would lose that hand. Standing together with all hands in the mask’s mouth is a popular family photo.

If you stop there, be sure to spend a few minutes inside the church. It’s lovely. You can spot decorative elements from a variety of eras, like delicate ancient columns, early medieval tile work and frescoes, and the Romanesque bell tower. There are suggestions of its Greek roots, as the church was founded while Rome was under Byzantine rule and set in what was then a Greek district of the city.

Travelogue 1014 – November 3
And We Protect Them

I’m looking at the disappointing results in Virginia this morning. The case against Trumpism has become so plain that making it begins to feel redundant and alarmist. It has become clear that this was never about principle. It was never about what was fair or what was right. It was never in question whether the Trump partisans in the public eye were anything but despicable. We were fools to argue it. All we communicated was that we were old school. That we were the real conservatives and the Trumpistas the (fascist) revolutionaries. I blush for people who still try to shame those operatives on Twitter. I blush a little even for the pundits who continue to deploy reason, though I admire their efforts to document the facts – fundamentally for future generations.

There was a moment, squandered by now, to suppress them. For decades, I’ve questioned America’s interpretation of free speech, as a protection for hate speech and sedition. We don’t feel shame for suppressing physical violence, but we do for suppressing the ideological kind. More people than we would like to admit respond to displays of raw power and disdain for the rule of law. By conceding legitimacy to the fascists, in the name of a false principle – that hate speech is protected speech – we have allowed them shows of power. People are excited by it, drawn to it. To people who think, it appears lemming-like, this crowding to the precipice of fascism. We reason that power for power’s sake benefits a very few people. Let’s be frank: the supporters of these fascists believe that the punishment will stop with immigrants and LGBTQ people and minorities. The police will beat on blacks. They will never beat on us. Those of us who reason things out realize that fascism has no boundaries.

I do believe in common sense. I do believe in reason. And some of us will continue to talk about these unfashionable tools of the human mind. It will be embarrassing in a world of flashy violence. But my optimism is long term. I think America will have to rediscover democracy, but I do believe it will. The question is only, how much suffering is required first? A depressing number of people need to be reminded that force and power for their own sake are thrilling only for a very short time. Power feeds on inequality. There have to be a lot of people under that thumb. ‘Minorities’ will not suffice. Power needs millions and millions of shoulders to bear its weight. It requires all their money, all their words, all their physical vitality. Ultimately, it needs all the last resources of a failing ecosystem, the system that provides food and water and air. All must be sacrificed for the pleasure of watching other people wield power with impunity.

Travelogue 1013 – November 1
The Campo

After our delays in Paris, we arrived in Rome late at night. We were exhausted, so we opted for a taxi ride into town. That was terrifying, a shot of adrenaline to wake us. It was a reminder of our many travels in Ethiopia, when our lives were in the hands of crazed taxi drivers, kilometre after kilometre on unlit highways at night, the headlights turned off to conserve the battery. But the trip into Rome was a short one, and we did in fact arrive, clasping our children to us in gratitude.

I was the first up in the morning. I went out for supplies. It was a sunny morning, and I was immediately struck by the casual grandeur of the place. We were staying a bit south of the Campo De’ Fiori, so I headed toward the famous piazza. It used to be one of my favourite spots in Rome. But it wasn’t as though I needed wait until the Campo to see the beauty of Rome. It was everywhere, the cobblestone alleys winding among palazzi and churches in every direction. This was exactly what I wanted to share with Menna, who hadn’t been to Italia yet. And I was rewarded a few hours later, once the girls were up and washed and we’d had a little snack. We stepped outside, and Menna was instantly enchanted. We needed no ambitious agenda of sights to see. The city of Rome was itself the sight, lane after lane, piazza by piazza. She hasn’t stopped talking about Italia since we returned home.

One theme for the trip was going to be coffee. Our first coffee was there in the Campo de’ Fiori, at an outdoor table where I could sit in the sun and the ladies could all sit in the shade. We have lots of specialty coffee in Holland, but there’s something special about coffee in Italia. I had been anticipating that first taste, and it didn’t disappoint. We sat for a while, watching the activity of the market in the square, regarding the lovely buildings surrounding us, some with rooftop gardens, and commiserating with poor Giordano Bruno, sixteenth-century philosopher who was burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori and whose statue stands at the centre of the square.

Travelogue 1012 – October 30 

Dunes

I’ve stumbled upon my one degree of separation! The authentic quest for a true American is for his or her closest brushes with fame. We Americans love the famous, and we envy them. Granted, we envy fame in a lazy way, happy to let the famous do all the work. But we have a God-given right to the chance encounter or connection that might shed some reflected light upon us. We acknowledge that fame is a burden best borne by the famous, but, by God, the famous are duty-bound to share their glory. And at last, I’ve found my one degree!

The new movie adaptation of “Dune” has brought Frank Herbert back into the spotlight. The book is now acknowledged as one of the, perhaps THE classic science fiction novel. When I read it, I was a teenager. The book had yet to find its place in the canon. Only a few of the sequels had been published, as I recall. Hollywood hadn’t discovered it yet. It had its impact on me. The character Atreides and the ambience of the spice planet were printed indelibly in my imagination.

I’ve been tempted to pick the novel up again. Curious about Herbert again, I did some reading and discovered that he had paid a visit to Florence, Oregon when he was working as a journalist in Seattle. Florence is a town on the Pacific coast, and it boasts a gorgeous stretch of beach, notable for its huge sand dunes. In Herbert’s day, the sand of the dunes was threatening to engulf the town, and engineers were looking for a solution. Herbert was fascinated by this stand-off between man and nature. Man won that particular battle, and the beach is paying the price. But Herbert had an idea while he was visiting Florence. Imagine a desert planet, he thought.

My claim to fame is the overlap in our destinies, Herbert’s and mine. It seems that only forty years after Herbert had walked that glorious beach, I was destined to walk its length myself. I was inspired by no brilliant thoughts while I was there, but that wasn’t my job, was it? I was placed there simply to step unconsciously in the sandy footprints of literary celebrity. It was a simple task, and I performed it well. It was my mother who did the lion’s share of the work, settling on Florence to be her home during her final years. All I had to do was to visit my mother.

The seaside in Florence is a powerful place. I’m not surprised that Herbert was inspired. The ocean rolls in with majesty and thunder. The rocks that rebuff the waves are magnificent. And the dunes that suggested a desert planet are still high and wild. It’s a moving scene, and I was fortunate to have been able to see it in several seasons. It’s a remarkable location, with or without celebrity. But now it bears the touch of Hollywood, and it boasts a glow of immortality.

Travelogue 1011 – October 28 

Lucky Even So

 

During our autumn break, we flew south to Rome, finally using the vouchers from a set of cancelled airline tickets originally bought for the 2020 Bath Half Marathon. That race was to have taken place in March of 2020. It shouldn’t sound like that was so long ago. It feels like a decade ago.

The spirit of COVID still forces itself on those who are audacious enough to fly. We had two flights to make on Monday, and we made neither. The first flight required us to leave home at five in the morning, so we had little humour for the first entanglement. The airline clerk checking us in told us flatly that she was rebooking us for a later flight, then dispassionately explained that we had no “Passenger Locator” form on file for the end destination. I thought I had done my homework, checking airline and government websites, and yet somehow it had escaped us that this form was required for arrival in Rome. The staff person’s complacency informed us that, though we were insipidly foolish, we were not the first. She smugly refused any questions and sent us to the airline service office, where I sat for quite a while fuming and filling out a lengthy online form on my mobile. Thanks to this laughable form, I have collected one more black mark on my record as a father, falling very far short as a model of grace under pressure.

Even flying several hours later, we had some time to kill in Paris. We were determined to have an espresso in Montmartre. That should have required only a train ride from Charles De Gaulle to the Gare du Nord. It’s an expensive ride, and I hesitated before the ticket machine when I saw the total price for four. I steeled my resolve, I made the purchase, and, in the next minute, a new announcement came braying across the vast hall. Our train would no longer depart from Terminal 2. I saw heads swivel around me, as dozens of others processed the distorted French as best they could. Then commenced the dash. We made our way up a level and to the shuttle connecting terminals. The train would depart from Terminal Three. We pushed our way through the growing crowd to enter the next shuttle.

I had done my research. I had identified our destination if we wanted the best coffee in Montmartre. It was a tony café below the basilique du Sacré-Cœur, where tables were set up in an enclosure in the narrow little lane leading up to the basilica, where the church’s gardens overgrew the wrought-iron fence beside the road, where the people were far more relaxed than we were after our stressful trip to their door. The servers looked at us with some alarm. And they told us the coffee machine wasn’t working.

We never did get our espresso in Paris. Nor did we find the lovely croissants we imagined in anticipation of the trip. But we did stand for the first time as a family at the top of that magical stairway, looking out over the City of Lights. And we felt pretty lucky.

Travelogue 1010 – October 25
Quickly Turning to the Tudors Again

 

In my final thought in the previous blog, I was reminded of the concluding chapters of Hilary Mantel’s latest book. In the end – spoiler alert – the protagonist dies. Anyone with the barest knowledge of Tudor-era history knows it’s coming, and indeed that knowledge fuels the momentum of the work. Mantel surely writes with the reader’s anticipation well in mind, tapping it as a source of suspense. The political tides turn finally, and turn shockingly, on Cromwell, and we follow him into imprisonment. He is to be executed. Mantel has her opportunity to indulge the writer’s perennial wish to follow the mind into oblivion. She does just that, narrating to the point at which – quite literally in Mantel’s account, – consciousness flickers like a light going out.

Mantel’s books do haunt one. They are beautifully written, and they assert a Cromwellian voice so durable it is hard to shake. I’ve analysed that voice at unforgivable length in earlier blogs, but I have to add just a few more words. Who could blame either author or reader for wanting, after thousands of pages with Cromwell, to see the story to its gruesome denouement? But it should be obvious, at the minimum, that the rounding off requires a change in tone. To say more, it’s a strain on the method. The book’s narrative voice has been an uneasy compromise between observations made inside-the-head and outside, a kind of hovering above the crown that has sounded like documentation, or, more exactly, the rehearsal of a document: perhaps Cromwell dictating by rote a journal of his extraordinary life as counsellor to the king. Suddenly, with imprisonment, the options for a locus for this voice narrow radically. There is no one to report, no one to report to, and no reason to report. There is only a solitary man with no opportunity to speak. We have entered a living soul’s black hole; data does not escape his isolation. What is the privilege of our viewpoint? When he enters through the doorway of death and the voice still carries on, like the twitching of a limb, the question is pressed even further. Where does this voice reside?

Mantel is a masterful writer, and the book works. We want it to, and it does. Ultimately, that’s what counts, and I don’t mean to diminish the achievement. I broach the question of voice just as an interesting problem raised by choices forced on the artist and her readers by their own cathartic need.

I believe Henry VIII himself still haunts us. He’s in my thoughts again because I picked up a book about Tudor times in Utrecht. The book is a biography about the young Earl of Surrey, Henry’s final victim before himself passing away in 1547. Surrey was a prodigy, a free spirit and a writer who inspired generations of writers. The book is about Surrey, but it’s this capricious figure of Henry VIII that catches our eye, like a glint of light in a mirror behind him.

I find myself wondering about this man. It surprises me how often. He’s a riddle. How does one justify this power over life and death? How does one understand Henry’s choices? Does he have rules to guide him when he considers executing friend, wife, nobleman or courtier? I don’t mean to imply that he had no reasoning or that he was a sadist. What is perhaps most frustrating about Henry is the sense that he was a feeling and thoughtful man, motivated by strange (unfamiliar, mysterious) impulses.

As quite a number of people court today’s fascists with flushed cheek and shining eye, it seems important to question, what occurs in the soul of a man like this, who holds fragile life in his palm with such aplomb, such nonchalance?

Travelogue 1009 – October 23
Who’s Listening?

A final word about old Utrecht, before my geographic focus shifts dramatically southward. The history of the Netherlands is basically a story of water, and every location has its roots in some watery negotiation. Utrecht is no exception. While most of Holland (only two western provinces of the Netherlands) was a still a marshland, Utrecht rose from the wilderness as a northern anchor on the Rhine. The Romans under Emperor Claudius had settled on the river as their northern frontier, and the site of Utrecht became one link in that chain. The course of the Rhine has shifted since then, and Utrecht currently sits on a vestigial spur of the great river, a branch they call the ‘Crooked Rhine’. After Rome abandoned it, the place went dark for four centuries. When it reappears in the historical record, it’s as a fortress town for the Franks. Now Utrecht becomes the centre of a new kind of offensive, the one on hearts and minds among the Frisians. St Willibrord enters as lead evangelist, and in 723 Utrecht is made the seat of one rare Dutch bishopric. That launches Utrecht’s long reign as the Netherland’s most important city. It will take the county of Holland centuries to dig itself out of the mud, and Amsterdam to rise to prominence on the back of its commerce. Even then, Utrecht is not eclipsed. It remains important enough to play a role in the establishment of the republic, and to become the site for the republic’s biggest university, founded during the Dutch Golden Age.

This is the town I overlook as I climb the glass mountain of the event centre, a town that has been a vital religious, political and intellectual hub for the country for centuries. It makes sense that I would come here - from the bigger city of Rotterdam – to feel some intellectual connection to the wider world.

English author Max Porter has written a poetic little book about the last days of the painter Francis Bacon. He was invited to the Utrecht literary festival, and he was interviewed in one of the highest little alcoves in that alpine glass monument. He was warm and thoughtful and witty. The event was thoroughly enjoyable.

The book is something both more and less than the author event, as well it should be. The book is about many things, as well it should be. For me, it poses an age-old question, a question particularly poignant to writers: who is listening to our final thoughts? The true writer wants every thought and experience to be recorded, is haunted by those that escape. He or she is most keenly tormented by the final thoughts, perhaps the greatest, that go unrecorded. Porter imagines, probably justly, that most final sensations are trivial and thoughts gibberish. But the question outweighs our conjectures. The exercise only draws attention to the emptiness at the centre of it.

Travelogue 1008 – October 16
But There Was More

During the Utrecht literary festival, I attended two live author presentations, and I watched the videos of two other author events that were online. Each was framed as a discussion between a local writer and the visiting author. That structure worked well. It was more natural and allowed the author to be challenged. But I could have wished for more talk about books.

Authors feel like they have something to say. That is why they write, of course. The two authors hosted live in Utrecht had a lot to say. They were eloquent and what they said was truly moving. Relatively little was said about the writing process. There was much more to be said about philosophy, grief, shame and politics. I was inspired and exhausted by the time I left. In neither case did I have the energy to stay for the book signing.

I’m hardly a writer, I thought as I rode home on the train. I would never have the stamina for an event like that. Even in casual conversation, I don’t know what to say about my writing. I figure I’ve said everything “on paper”. I went to great trouble to phrase it the way I wanted. Why then dive in impromptu? These authors did not have my reservations. They were even more compelling live than on the page. They were unfailingly articulate, humble, gracious and correct.

I was inspired by them, proud of them, and then embarrassed for them, as well. It seemed a lot to ask of authors, this display of courage and virtue. Fortunately, each of them had a wealth of ideas, fully formed and correct ideas that motivated their writing and overflowed the banks of any one of their works. Their literary projects were a means to speak about those bigger things.

The audience hung off their every word. The hall took on a church-like atmosphere. The topics became esoteric, and these men’s stories became like the lives of saints. The topics became like theology.

I’m allergic to theology. Theology has a didactic purpose, just as preaching does. Theology was invented for debate, preaching for conversion and enforcement of conformity. These aren’t evils in themselves, but devices to make one wary. When it comes to church, I prefer mute ritual and the shadow talk of stories.

Sadly, I’ve seen the impact of this virtue-mining on authors who are less gifted orators. They become so circumspect and cautious as to drain the interview of life. Interviewers prospect for philosophy and politics, and authors retreat behind carefully worded deflections.

Travelogue 1007 – October 15
He Wrote About His Childhood

I had a birthday a few weeks ago. It was a big one, and so I needed to dream up a suitably big way to celebrate it. After you’ve seen enough birthdays, though, you run out of big ideas. What I really wanted to do was get out of town. It had been too long.

Usually, I go out of town when I have some activity to motivate me. In previous years, I had organized fun trips around road races. For a previous ‘big’ birthday, I ran a full marathon in Rome. A few years of COVID cancellations have soured me on the road race strategy, and, along the way, have left me in regrettable condition.

No, this year, athletics weren’t going to cut it. Given that the body wasn’t ready, it would have to be a celebration of the mind. I wanted a literary angle. The town of Utrecht came to the rescue. Thanks to a fortuitously timed literary festival, I got to travel to Utrecht and listen to a few authors speak about their work.

It’s fun to observe how places evolve in our lives, in our perception and our experience. Utrecht during my first years in the Netherlands was an enchanting town, built round a famous cathedral and along the winding river beneath it, lined with cosy pubs. Once the honeymoon was over, Utrecht became an ugly train station in the middle of the country, perpetually under construction. For a moment, it became a bookstore hidden on a busy lane by the river, full of riches. Rotterdam is not a literary city, and book shopping had become stale.

The train station is finished now. It’s no prettier on the inside, but much more so on the outside. What an impact on the visitor when he can simply exit the train station and emerge into a wide public plaza with fresh air and can see the town laid out before him; rather than, say, being shepherded through dusty warrens made of plasterboard for hundreds of metres, only to emerge inside a rather shabby shopping mall. The latter was the only experience I had known of arrival in Utrecht. The finished station was an epiphany.

The event centre is not far from the central station. It stands like Everest before George Mallory, a city block of high rooms and precarious stairways. We walked in, brandishing our QR codes for the vaccinated, and we found ourselves lining up with people in tuxedoes and evening gowns. This didn’t seem like our crowd. Downstairs, we discovered, was reserved for Bach. With a vague gesture toward the sky, we were directed up … and up. Stairway after stairway, rising inside the high glass walls until we overlooked the city like aviators. Near the summit, we found our small hall, exile for the literary types, come to see a French author who wrote about his childhood.

Travelogue 1006 – October 1
The Power to Surprise

It happens we have some family time before the girls’ school opens in the morning. We sit on a bench together in the playground outside, a playground that is an odd oasis of fun in a tightly packed little neighbourhood. The playground is a like a stage set among brick buildings, a platform of concrete between two lanes that veer away from the school.

I’m the family’s schedule-keeper, and I’m compulsively early. It’s not the kind of quality that wins anyone’s affection. I’m the one to wake everyone up and urge them to get ready. When we’re early, it appears as though there was more time to sleep after all. Though we’re never more than five minutes early, it translates into hours of lost sleep in the imagination.

It doesn’t help that it’s the time of year when light comes later and later in the mornings. By now, we’re waking as first light only just discolours the night sky in the east. Soon enough I will truly seem a villain, waking them when the stars are still in the sky.

It’s light by the time we arrive at the school. The day’s light is a diffuse, autumnal light, grey with clouds, a glow rather than direct warmth from the sun’s rays. We watch the other kids play, climbing, swinging, kicking a ball. Sometimes Baby Jos joins in, while Little Ren hangs back.

The two girls’ natures begin to diverge a bit, even as they grow more alike in looks. Little Ren is nearly as tall as her big sister, and even her parents mistake the two occasionally, when the girls are seen at a distance.

Ren takes this opportunity to share a few thoughts. I won’t pass them along now, as they are still so special to me. I’ll say simply that she’d taken it into her head to tell me what her two superpowers were. She did so in a distracted way, as she often does, speaking as she watches all the action in the playground. Her remarks were so creative, I just laughed in surprised.

That’s the “superpower” of art, and of wisdom, to surprise and delight. Little Ren has that. Baby Jos is more forthcoming, but she’s like her papa, in that her thoughts are well-ordered. She can be brilliant, but her thoughts follow upon one another in plain sight. Ren prefers to avoid conversation, but then she’ll blurt out the most stunning things. Immediately, a children’s story blossomed in my mind, based on Ren’s utterances. I hope to have Menna illustrate it soon!

Travelogue 1005 – September 19
How to Enjoy September Sun

The sun has been indulgent. We are experiencing a gentle late summer in the land of moody skies. I couldn’t resist stopping by my favourite pub on my way home one workday. The days are long enough still to catch some lingering sunshine in the early evening. I sat outside, at a table overlooking the brick lane that runs alongside a canal. You don’t see the canal itself, but the masts of the boats anchored there, the houses across the canal, the big sky opened up by the passage of the water.

At the next table sat a family of Brits, two sisters and their parents. They had spent the day touring the city and seemed underwhelmed. As far as I could tell, being underwhelmed was their default state. They kept up an impressive stream of negative chatter while I sat there. Anything or anyone that came up in conversation was efficiently cut down, and the violence was carried off in such bright tones and casual delivery that they might have been trading observations about the weather. The gossip about friends and family was particularly biting. No one emerged unscathed. Even the dead were fair game. The mother proposed some words for a note of condolence, and the others laughed at her sentimentality. One daughter reeled off the proper formula. “No reason to gush,” she said. The daughter’s favourite adjective was “boring”. Everything in life perpetually teetered on the edge of suffocating boredom. This woman was no teenager. No matter how lustrous the long hair she persistently touched and waved about; no matter how often perfect the painted nails she held up for view; no matter how restless the bobbing sneaker at the end of one long leg crossed over the other, she was securely past thirty.

The bored daughter had one redeeming moment. It was a moment of reminiscence. She veered suddenly from the excoriation of a childhood friend, whose fond memories of their times together had to be proven false and undeserved. She veered suddenly into heart-warming reminiscences of her father. The old man clearly didn’t know what to do with this outburst. He mumbled a few unemotional observations, and let it go. She wasn’t bothered and went on at length about how special those occasions were, the weekends when Mother was off on business and Father indulged his girls in all sorts of special activities and meals. I found myself liking her, despite first impressions.

It didn’t last. A Dutch friend showed up, and the conversation returned to observations about how dreary the walk to the pub had been, how disappointing. The Dutchman played along. Complaining is a Dutch sport, and they’re very good at it.

It's not fair to judge people based on their behaviour on vacation. These jaded vacationers in their yachting clothes may be saving the world at their day jobs. But who doesn’t wonder occasionally whether wealth isn’t wasted on the wealthy, touring on the tourists, education on the educated? In a life so short on privileges, how are they assigned? Shouldn’t they be apportioned to those of us who have demonstrated a talent for graciousness?

Travelogue 1004 – September 8
The Present Perfect
Part Thirteen

The transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance was a complex process, and it constitutes one of those complex historical puzzles that occupy historians generation after generation. But I’m always up for a quick and dirty summary to drive experts mad – not because I have a problem with experts, but because I think it’s instructive sometimes to paint with a broad brush. Details are accurate, and ideas not so much. They are tools for thinking. Historians should care passionately about accuracy, but it’s awfully fun to play with ideas. And as long as the ‘philosopher’ remains humble, what harm is done?

So: speaking (dangerously) in the general, we might simply say that the Renaissance began as an awakened engagement with history. Scholars rediscovered ancient roots and ancient sources and they drew inspiration from them. Alongside the excitement about ancient sources came a growing faith in the power of humans to make sense of the world. The ancients were avid scientists, after all. Quickly, Renaissance efforts to imitate the ancients (in art, philosophy, rhetoric, and science) became a movement and set of achievements completely unique. Their successes lent fuel to the fire of pride in the human mind and spirit.

Whatever we think of their optimism (and pride), this was the change in mindset that defined the subsequent five hundred years. Humanity believed in its powers. What followed led to all the great masters (in art) we know so well, to the Enlightenment, to medicine and moon shots, to modern industry and climate change. And somehow, to what seems its final ignominious demise.

If I’m right that human society can only tolerate a limited amount of complexity, then modernity was a project doomed to collapse under its own weight. The further removed citizens are from comprehending how the world around them works, the more alienated they become. The more alienated, the more they act out and the more they develop a lust for destruction. More importantly, I think humans search for alternative means of relating to and explaining the world. Inside those complex systems – systems that come to seem supernatural – humans look for a human definition of reality. What could be more natural in these conditions than the rise of psychology – and psychologism? Feelings gain primacy. With feelings comes a new emphasis on – even enforcement of – intimacy. Feelings become the basis of reliability and comprehensibility. How can you trust someone who refuses intimacy?

Sooner or later, feelings will ‘trump’ reason. In the face of all the evidence, Republicans feel cheated by the 2020 election. The feeling is the measure in our post-truth, neo-medieval world. A refusal of feeling will amount to blasphemy one day. That can mean refusal to respond to a feeling, but even the refusal to have a feeling. Ponder for a moment the images we had during COVID lockdowns of random maskless warriors shouting and spitting at meek maskers in supermarkets. Resorting to calm reasoning is a threat. It violates the agreement that many seem to think we have made to be intimate and emotional.

Rounding things off, this new enforced intimacy and immediacy is what I observed in language development: in the foreshortening of time, in the blunting of instruments for hypothesis, in the reduction of options for formality, and so on.

I’ve called this emerging world view ‘medieval’ only because I saw certain parallels during contemplations about literature and art. The new intimacy culture and the old medieval culture share a penchant for formulaic narrative, for caricature and typing in characterization, and for conformity and motif. It’s the diminishment of the unique and rational. In small ways, of course.

I’ve made generalizations, and generalizations are infamously hard to defend. I wouldn’t try. Truth is in the detail, and I’m not aiming for truth. I’m playing. I’m attempting to turn observations into ideas. Ideas are mirrors, like Greif’s observations about joggers that I referenced at the start of my latest dog’s leg in thought. I blushed to think I was the sweaty guy in the author’s story, presuming that civic space was exercise space. Ideas are real.

Travelogue 1003 – September 5
The Present Perfect
Part Twelve

It’s human to simplify the times of our ancestors, either to glorify or to disparage. The Middle Ages have been one era much maligned by the people who came after. It’s been rehabilitated somewhat by scholarship begun in the nineteenth century, when things medieval became fashionable, but some of the damage to its reputation has proven to be irreparable. It has remained the ‘Dark Ages’ in many people’s minds. In reality, it’s only dark through the prism of other times, just as our own age may well be considered the dark ages by times more sensitive to the environment.

One thing that I believe can fairly be said about the Middle Ages, one thing that might seem less than flattering, is that it was one of the more static periods for Europe’s peoples. They were less mobile and more insulated than ever. Reading Caesar’s accounts of Gaul, one is struck by how much the peoples of Europe were on the move. And, indeed, they always have been. The commerce of goods and ideas never drops to absolute zero in history. That’s true of the Middle Ages. But the Middle Ages were a time when people were tied to the land. Social and physical mobility were very limited. Education and literacy were limited. Commerce slowed. Generations matured and passed within narrow confines.

I’ve said that modern humanity is alienated from its world. You couldn’t count on any one of us knowing the name of the flower in the neighbour’s garden, knowing the name of their representative in Congress, or knowing the name of a random nation on the map. Further, there’s a growing contingent of people who would reject the bases of authority that might inform them about the things they don’t know. They know they can google the name of a flower, but the scientific tradition that developed the classifications is suspect. So, rather than Google being a search engine, finding pre-existing information, it becomes a source and creator of knowledge.

Similarly, the medieval peasant was far removed from sources of knowledge about their world. The peasant would have known the names of the things they saw around them. It was folk knowledge. For all greater things, their sources of knowledge were limited. Most people were illiterate, and books were difficult to come by in any case. Church rites were in Latin, and most people didn’t understand Latin. Knowledge was mediated. The primary source of knowledge in most communities was probably the priest.

Knowledge of our world is critical for psychological security. We need to feel the sources of our knowledge are credible. The mechanisms for determining that credibility are therefore foundational for our world view. In the Middle Ages, religion provided knowledge for most people. That’s a rock-solid source. I sense it provided a lot of security. If that’s true, why do I see parallels between the medieval and the contemporary, when our time is far from comfortable and secure in its world view? The answer, I think, lies in understanding the intervening times, the five hundred years of intellectual development that separate the two ages.

Travelogue 1002 – August 31
The Present Perfect
Part Eleven

In his essay “Against Exercise”, Mark Greif discusses the enforced intimacy of the modern exercise culture and health consciousness. His example is the sweaty jogger forcing his presence on innocent citizens anywhere and anytime, with impunity. It’s an embarrassing read because that’s me, basically, jogging half-dressed and sweaty through the other people’s space for forty years now. Standing outside it all a moment, you have to admit it’s a strange culture that has absorbed the jogger’s behaviour as a norm. Greif writes about a “liquidation of a sense of the public, and what can be made collectively in public, along with the last untouched spheres of privacy, such that biological life, good and bad, will be always seen, in all locations, and all we have.” What was private is public, and intimacy is a demand of the citizen of our time.

I’m returning briefly to my summer topic, language and history. You may remember, I had been leaping to grand conclusions with scant justification, as I’m obliged to do in a blog. I was cooking up a theory about the advent of a new medievalism, presaged by a widespread debasement of our language. Then I followed a long digression about historical fiction. It’s high time I return to my original wild theory.

I’ve based my observations about language on my experience as an examiner for language proficiency exams. One trend I’ve noticed is toward the familiarization of all language. Formal registers fade, and all experiences become concrete and immediate. Hypotheticals fade, as do verb tenses that remove events from the concrete and immediate. I’ll argue that these developments are a symptom of alienation.

Since the end of the Cold War, we’ve seen a groundswell of traditionalist and right-wing protest against the modern world order. Much of the cause is simple alienation. I’ve wondered whether systems have become too complex for the mundane human imagination. Specifically, hasn’t the complexity of the modern world far outpaced the capacity of the average human mind to understand the mechanics? In our grandparents’ era, it was still possible – and fun – to figure out the new technologies, learn how to fix the car and the appliances, build radio sets at home, build circuit boards in the playroom. That generation grew up to participate in school boards, PTAs and city councils, and not just to shout opposition down and ‘own the libs’, but to be part of the civic process, a process they understood and believed in.

Now there’s a sense that all systems have escaped our ability to assimilate and understand, and we’ve given up. Ironically, as the knowledge base of the species grows exponentially, the individual share in it decreases. There’s sense in that, but what if the knowledge base of the individual is shrinking absolutely? There are plenty of adults who couldn’t identify the trees or flowers in their neighbourhood park, couldn’t re-assemble a single device in their house, couldn’t describe governance or finance in any coherent way, couldn’t describe human anatomy in any coherent way, couldn’t identify Kansas on a map, and would be helpless in any crisis that robbed them of the support of their reviled government.

The world has become alien, a set of conspiracies in which science and technology perpetuate sinister, crazy-making narratives and in which a ‘deep state’ rules us by means of an inscrutable and oppressive technocracy. If I’m right, and humanity cannot abide systems – no matter how effective - that have grown overly complex, then we have entered into a struggle to maintain five hundred years’ worth of development. I’m not confident that progress will win.

If I’m anywhere near being right here, then I wonder what happens if we compare our current state of alienation to a mindset from the Middle Ages, before that five hundred years of progress that define the modern state?

Travelogue 1001 – August 20
Interlude: An Even Grand
Part Two

When I wrote the first blog, G.W. was President of the U.S., and it was still his first term. It seems like a time of innocence in retrospect. The past never knows what we know. We usually envy those in the past for their ignorance. I can’t think of a decade during my lifetime more worthy of oblivion than the 2010s, at least in terms of public memory. We naively thought G.W. was bad.

August has been a month our current president would like to forget. Little did he think Afghanistan would be the pie in his face. Here’s a man who always wanted to be president. He first ran in the 80s. If you’d told him then he’d be president one day, he might or might not have been surprised. He wouldn’t have been shocked. It was a goal he had visualized often. If you’d told him there would be challenges, he would have squared his shoulders and said that he would be ready. But what if you’d told him his presidency would largely consist of clean-up duty after one of America’s foulest demagogues, and that one onerous task would be to withdraw from G.W. Bush’s war in Afghanistan? Well, that seems like an objectively positive task. But then you have to inform him that the withdrawal will have to conform to an agreement reached with the demagogue and prejudicial to just about everyone’s interests but the Taliban’s, the terrorist organization that provoked America into war in the first place. You might have left the man speechless, this man who had had his eye on presidency since the 80s.

The old saw tells us “the devil is in the details”. It’s the devil’s world, then. Reality is made of details. Our desires are made of lighter stuff. They never account for details. That’s why a result never feels like a desire.

How could I have foreseen walking down the still streets of Nieuwekerk a/d Ijssel with this little girl? Imagine a fortune-teller telling me in 2004 that I would live in the Netherlands one day, and I would have two lovely daughters. That news would have been a pleasant surprise, but a mild surprise. Instead, O mysterious fortune teller, show me a picture of this town and this girl by my side. Imagine the shock as I try to assimilate all the detail.

If there were a science to prediction, it would begin and end with details. Without them, vague predictions are curiosities, little better than declarations of probability. They’re like chapter titles that excite little more than sighs or polite expressions of anticipation. If there were a science to prediction, it would be time travel. The concept reminds me yet again of the notion put forward by some physicists that time is not a stream but a series of stones (in the stream? I’m getting lost in my metaphor) all co-existent and given ‘life’ by our attention. Or maybe time is like a series of one thousand blog entries, all available to the reader at once, the life of a writer unfolding in outline, each piece a stepping-stone brought to life by … ah, but this stretches credibility too far.

Travelogue 1000 – August 19
Interlude: An Even Grand 

Part One

It’s the times you find yourself in the odd and unknown corners of the world that you realize how far you have come. It’s not the glamourous stops, the passages through Amsterdam, that give you real insight into your life. Those are the feel-good stops, the times you reflect on how grand you’ve had it. It’s the days you find yourself on the ‘Sprinter’ train, the local train, sitting with the truest sort of strangers, meaning people who are not tourists and have no reason to think they’re among tourists, when you’re passing through countryside at slow speeds, disembarking at stops you never could have predicted, when you’re walking along plain, lived-in streets that feature in no one’s Instagram page, no one’s coffee-table biography, places like Nieuwekerk aan de Ijssel, places where there’s nothing but apartment buildings along kilometres of roadway, even directly outside the town’s railway station, it’s when you’re off the beaten path that you realize how far you’ve come.

I find myself walking these preternaturally still streets today because I’ve signed up my Baby Jos for a three-day hockey camp. (That’s field hockey. In Europe, you’re obliged to specify ice hockey, whereas in North America it’s assumed that ‘hockey’ means the kind on ice.) The camp is taking place at the pitches in Nieuwekerk a/d Ijssel, and those pitches lie a good kilometre from the station. We take the train, and then we walk. This is one quiet town.

One thousand came quickly. At least from this end of the telescope. From the other side, from the blog’s point of origin, this distance would have been unthinkable. Propose to me in 2004 that I would write one thousand blog entries, I might have been dazzled. Propose that Number One Thousand would be about a walk across the Dutch municipality of Nieuwekerk a/d Ijssel, and I would have been stumped. What could that possibly mean? Propose that I would be walking my daughter to hockey practice, and that would have simply been beyond my ken. “Why would my daughter be playing ice hockey?” I would have asked.

Travelogue 999 – August 13
The Present Perfect
Part Ten

In McCullough’s novel, “The First Man in Rome”, Marius and Sulla advance upon their fates with calm confidence, their two fates intertwined. History documents their mutual history, even if only in outline. Sulla is a loyal lieutenant during Marius’s glorious wars. Later, the two turn against each other, and their struggle tears Rome apart. This first book in McCullough’s saga documents only the first part of their shared tale, Marius’s glory days and Sulla’s first rise to prominence.

The plot and cast of characters are determined. Open the stage curtains on Republican Rome. This is old-style historical fiction, in which the setting is panoramic and in which the reader is to be schooled. That tone is set in the pages and pages of notes and maps and glossaries at front and back of the book. The language is clumsy at times. The characterizations are crude. Marius in his virtue and competence can seem wooden. Efforts to draw Sulla’s perversity can simply be embarrassing; any writer should know the risks involved in attempting a shorthand for depravity. And yet, the McCullough advances on her project with calm confidence. (The parallel with her characters is irresistible. She is Marius dreaming of seven consulships. “No bibliography is appended,” she writes with characteristic bravado. “My scholarship will be obvious enough to those qualified to judge ….” Far from resenting this statement, I smiled. I found it perfectly suited to the mood of the book.)

Forward the narrative goes, from its first awkward moments through the ungainly mass of its pages, and, far from tripping over itself, it gathers a mysterious momentum and charm. Will I read the next book in the series? I probably will. I enjoyed the story, and I learned quite a bit. It was easy enough to separate McCullough’s improvisations from the facts as we know them, even if she hadn’t detailed them in her voluminous notes. She indulges some of the darker speculations about Sulla’s successes, speculations that have existed for centuries, actually. And she postulates some tactical marriage alliances for which there’s no evidence. They are not likely – she invented an additional aunt for Julius Caesar, for example, - but they’re not unreasonable, either, given how important family ties were in the Republic. And it adds some humanity without requiring grand architectures about motive and personality.

What have I learned from the juxtaposition of the two authors, Mantel and McCullough? How important are factors like authenticity and the integrity of voice? McCullough’s characters are barely believable in any century, let alone true to Roman voices a few thousand years old. And yet, the book is engaging. Mantel’s voice is so much more crafted and believable, and yet the scope of the character’s viewpoint is so circumscribed as to make the reading feel like an austere practice, the tone putting me more in mind of a writer’s (idealized?) life than a courtier’s, being so hushed and reflective.

McCullough’s characters collect just enough psychological coherence to sustain the narrative. Ultimately, readers don’t need much in a story to hang some sentiment upon, and, despite their occasional two-dimensionality, Marius and Sulla capture ready sympathy. We root for Marius to show those darn senators what he’s made of and for Sulla to reform himself and take the honourable path. Ironically, given the better writing and more thoughtful characterizations, Mantel’s characters win less sympathy. There’s dread. There’s a longing for things to turn out differently. There’s the cold shadow of fate, overtaking the good with the bad. But these are cold responses, compared to the more inviting world of McCullough’s Rome.

How does that happen? Could it be that simpler characters invite more sympathy? Does realism leaves us cold, implying that we don’t really want to read about ourselves? Maybe the voice is more pessimistic in Mantel’s book. But I’m quite sure that Cromwell was every bit as confident and driven as Sulla. Mantel doesn’t suggest anything different, though admittedly the tone of her books is darker. Could the more active narrative style in the Roman series invite participation? As I’ve noted earlier, Mantel’s Cromwell speaks to us sotto voce, in asides, almost offstage. The scandal and the action happen at a distance. This must be a conscious effect. Mantel wants us to live inside the sense of doom that she imagines to pervade Henry’s court in the 1530s. Certainly, any rational counsellor to the king must have felt the edge of the axe tickling his neck in the dark of night. But I wonder. Life is more colourful than that, no matter how radical the risks. I’m inclined to think our ennui is greyer than Cromwell’s fear.

In any case, I have no answers, but I do find the comparison fascinating.

Travelogue 998 – August 9
The Present Perfect
Part Nine

It seems fitting that I came back to Hilary Mantel after a several-month detour through the thousand pages of Colleen McCullough’s first volume in the ‘Masters of Rome’ series. McCullough’s style is something of a blunt instrument next to Mantel’s subtlety. Despite my doubts during the first pages, the book proved hard to put down, and, by the time I finished it, I was a big fan. I can’t say my original doubts were proven wrong; I was simply won over by the enthusiasm of the project.

The book is about Marius, first man in Rome, consul seven times, military man for the ages, and reformer of the Roman army and state. The book reviews the ten years or so of his pre-eminence, around 110-100 BC. There’s little subtlety in any of the characterisations. Marius is noble and brilliant. Sulla is depraved and brilliant. There’s no room, even in a thousand pages, for nuanced character in this book.

It makes me question whether they are always necessary, these fine etchings of complex personalities in historical fiction. I stress the ‘always’ in my statement. They are fun, sometimes necessary. We benefit from an alternate read of characters who, at a distance, seem fairly monotone, and from alternate reads of events that, at a distance, seem inevitable. The latter pertains especially to the English Reformation, Mantel’s era, the course of which turned one way and then another according to the most capricious winds. Events could easily have turned out very differently.

That said, does deep psychology sustain a lengthy historical narrative? Can any epic gain traction with wheels warped for realism? Aren’t thought experiments in complex characterizations in history better suited for short pieces? Positing that Julius Caesar was bipolar, let’s say, or that Thomas Cromwell was a mensch really only requires a scene or two to pose the question and offer a few proofs. Seeing Caesar all the way through Gaul and Egypt with one or another chemical imbalance would be excessive. Epic can turn on the axis of a classical tragic flaw, like Achilles’s pride, but it stumbles over psychoanalysis.

Classical tragedy is essentially what McCullough attempts. Marius and Sulla are ambitious, and both of them find their paths to power blocked. Marius has had a modest career already in war and in politics, fighting in Spain and serving as tribune, amassing a fortune, but, according to McCullough, has risen to his ceiling as a ‘new man’, an Italian but not a Roman born. His ambition will brook no opposition, though, especially after prophecy promises him seven consulships. The character sketch here is simple. Marius is capable and proud. He advances upon his fate with calm confidence.

Sulla comes from an ancient patrician family, but he has no fortune. He grows up poor, and he grows up among a debauched class of dancers and theatre types, even singing and writing bawdy plays himself. The character sketch here is simple. McCullough’s Sulla is coldly brilliant, calculating and amoral. He is driven to gain the status in the Senate and in society that he believes is due him, and he is not above murder to attain the financial resources that are required. Once he has achieved his proper place, he deliberately reshapes himself to become a model of Roman leadership, and he pursues his dream of dominance. He advances upon his fate with calm confidence.

Travelogue 997 – August 1
The Present Perfect

Part Eight

There’s an episode about halfway through “The Mirror & the Light” in which Cromwell joins a meeting between King Henry and some French merchants who are showcasing their wares for the monarch. The purpose of the scene is to highlight Henry’s frivolousness and Cromwell’s good sense. Henry is titillated by the sumptuous clothing. He has his guard down. Cromwell assumes that one or all of the merchants are spies. Other courtiers are looking to Cromwell to break up this awkward gathering. This he has to do with no appearance of interference and without exciting the king’s ire. He smoothly manages to do so, awakening the king’s healthy scepticism. Together, they playfully feed the French merchants some misinformation to scare their king, and Cromwell shoos them out of the king’s presence. Outside the king’s chambers, he haggles with them for a far better deal than the king was ever going to achieve. It’s a fun bit, a subtle farce to show up Cromwell’s indispensability.

As fun as the bit is, and successful in its small way, I found it a frustrating reminder of the shortfalls of Mantel’s process in these books. Her close third-person voice is uncompromising. It doesn’t allow us a tourist’s view of the colourful meeting in the king’s chambers. It has to be said that, by this point, hundreds of pages into this third book, we understand the dynamics of the court and we have a good feeling for the king’s and Cromwell’s relationship. The scene has value, but the variety it endeavours to bring falls flat because it cannot elbow past that ruthless narrative perspective.

The fact is the French merchants are the most interesting figures in the scene. We want more: what are they wearing, how do they act, what are their mannerisms, how do they speak? We get nothing because, of course, for Cromwell this is a regular occurrence, and it would be out of character for him to suddenly be reciting for his own edification the merchants’ items of clothing or their courtly bows, commenting on their accents or their moustaches. What he does note is their flattery and their not-so-subtle probing for military information. It makes perfect sense, given the iron-clad rules of perspective, but this reader regrets the missed opportunity.

Mantel’s books are beautiful in their own merit. If I criticize, I only do it in the context of my question, what is historical fiction? There is no perfect formula. Mantel made her authorial choices in favour of creating a common experience of humanity. Other approaches focus on the more alien aspects of our past, the element of difference. Mantel chose a narrative method to bring her character alive for us. It serves that function well, while inhibiting some of the other pleasures we expect from historical fiction. How does one achieve the best balance?

Travelogue 996 – July 17

The Present Perfect

Part Seven

The Tudors have always captured the imagination. They have been especially popular in recent decades. Because we are so familiar with the characters and events, Mantel is free to abbreviate her descriptions and background. We don’t need one more full-length portrait of big King Henry bursting at the seams. We don’t require more descriptions of ruffles and hose. Mantel has the freedom to indulge her tightly circumscribed narrative voice: most of us don’t stop to marvel at the details of our world as we move through it. We don’t start every encounter with a mental description of our colleague, boss or mate. Reading Mantel’s book, we are free to assume many of the details that Thomas Cromwell would naturally neglect and instead focus on our immersion, through his eyes, in the conflicts of the age.

A disadvantage to this method, in my opinion, is that the work is rather cool and detached. The world we explore, the world of this worldly man, is rather shadowy. A character as colourful as Henry VIII is rather muted in the circle of chiaroscuro drawn among Cromwell’s thoughts.

It makes sense that this sort of book about the Tudors was necessary, a book in which the passions are relegated to the royal chambers and to distant battlefields, while we listen in on the discussions of the adults left in charge. In this depiction of events, the events themselves must be positioned at a remove. Our attention will be on the dread and the remorse that attend history. In tumultuous times, the people with intellect just do their best, and they suffer.

The consequence, in my opinion, is a portrayal of a man of action that is comfortably devoid of action. The “Wolf Hall” books describe a writer’s world, don’t they? It’s a world of reflection and refraction, a world I well understand. This is certainly how I am most comfortable describing action, from a vantage point afterward, examining the quiet ripple of effects, surveying the wreckage. It’s something in the character of the writer, this impulse to quietly tread from still stone to still stone in the stream. That’s fine, and it makes for a provocative depiction of a historical figure who, by most accounts, was rather brutal.

A writer likes to see him or herself in the mirror of history, seeing the same fragile light of intellect in the eyes of Holbein’s portrait. But does that serve as a true guide to the age? Isn’t it likely that Cromwell was only what he seemed, a very capable and willing administrator, and a man who was, in fact, content with his duties and free of the impulse to philosophize? Isn’t it possible that people of action, in an age of action, are quite happy with the life of action, like football players who live from game to game without needing justification?

I enjoy Mantel’s work, and, believe me, I’m personally much more at home in her worlds than in many alternatives. But I do feel at times as though the “Wolf Hall” books were written by a book club as a kind of philosophical proof that the world has always been a Platonic dialogue. Mantel’s Cromwell spends a lot of time in discussion, sitting in gardens, strolling with colleagues and family, meditating over an aperitif. Is it Cromwell’s London we are invited to see, or the author’s? There’s little question which is comfier. But ultimately, I do think we need to be put a little more on our guard; we need a dose of the alien that lurks in history.

Whether we like it or not, it’s action that moves history. Commonly, historical fiction builds sympathy by access to thoughts and emotions, which we assume, rightly or wrongly, are constant. Then the narrative turns to action in order to break the bond of sympathy. Why is that? What is alien about action? It’s the concrete expression of difference. It’s true that Mantel doesn’t hide it. We are drawn close to blood and violence. There are heads on pikes; there is the beheading of Anne. But they are primarily offstage. And they become aesthetic pieces, in the final analysis. Exposed to the moments of shock, we withdraw into the breathable atmosphere of mood and thought for many subsequent pages.

Travelogue 995 – July 15
The Present Perfect
Part Six

I’ve returned to Wolf Hall, finally reading the third book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy. I came to it with great anticipation. The two previous volumes had revolutionized my thinking about historical fiction. They were intelligent and insightful. Events of the Tudor era, usually portrayed in breathless style, were humanized and lent some gravity. Sure, it’s fun to indulge in the scandal of the time, but the issues were serious, and the stakes were high, not only for the players in the Henry VIII’s drama, but for all the souls affected by the tumults of the Reformation, down to the present-day Irish. It was refreshing to enter into the quieter moments of the time and to be convinced of the dread that pervaded King Henry’s court.

I’ve had time to build up anticipation, so it would be natural that I felt some disappointment once I started reading. Moreover, Mantel’s style is not the type to stun or overwhelm in the first pages. It builds in its effect. As I started reading, I had to accustom myself again to her cadence, slow and stately. I had to get used to the narrator’s point of view. Mantel adopts that unsettlingly intimate third person, according to which Cromwell is rarely referred to by name. Instead, ‘he’ is so often the subject of sentences that it can become confusing. Every so often, the voice shifts into ‘we’, as though voicing Cromwell’s thoughts. Quotes begin in quotation marks and then continue without them, as though narrative about Cromwell becomes Cromwell’s notes. There is consistency in it; Mantel is precise. It creates a sense of seeing through Cromwell’s eyes while still maintaining the detachment of a third-person narrative. The question isn’t about Mantel’s execution but whether the effort was worth the effect. It’s always interesting; it’s occasionally annoying. I’m not ready to judge it yet.

My questions are broader. What does the point of view tell us about Mantel’s goals? What is she revealing about Cromwell and his times? Is her focus on Cromwell or his times? Is her focus more on the specific or the general? Are we meant to finish the book feeling satisfied with what we learned about Cromwell and Tudor England or satisfied with story and character and the wisdom between the book’s covers? (Both, of course! and all of the above. But most books do tilt in one direction or another.)

Mantel chose a dimly perceived figure from a dramatic time. Thomas Cromwell, the king’s troll and executioner, who has had so little to say to us across the distance of time, suddenly has a voice. It turns out to be a finely modulated voice, giving shape to surprisingly refined thoughts and feelings. Mantel’s goal to humanize this obscure historical figure is achieved: Cromwell emerges as a sympathetic and coherent human being. It turns out he’s surrounded by people with adult voices. The past is not so alien. We might be surprised, as though most of what we read makes children of the people in the past.

Travelogue 994 – July 13

The Present Perfect

Part Five

Whatever I may say about medievalism as a concept, the actual ages we call medieval were populated by real individuals. And the shades of interpretation I’m applying to evolutions in grammatical usage pale in the light of that simple fact. It’s fun to play out thought experiments that no one lives long enough to see validated. It’s another thing when we discuss history itself. Accuracy means something when dealing with real people and real events. We owe that much to the human beings, the great and the unsung alike, who have shared our greater story. They themselves are not thought experiments.

Historical fiction seeks to bring people from other ages alive again. There are a variety of impulses motivating authors to do that, some motives at odds with others. Do we want to honour historical figures or to entertain ourselves? Do we look to increase our understanding of those people or to stress-test versions of ourselves in extreme circumstances? We might understand our motives better by answering the question, how alien do we find characters from the past? It’s a profound question. It’s one thing, for example, to understand in an academic sense why the slave trade flourished in the seventeenth century. It’s another to place yourself within the skin of a slave trader. When we revile the slave trader, what are we expressing? It’s the easiest sort of moral statement, of course. At a deeper level, isn’t it an expression of our alienation from the past? An honest answer to the question of alienation can tell us a lot about ourselves.

In any case, I think it’s safe to say that Hilary Mantel is one of those who find sympathy with historical figures. She’s been open in lectures and interviews about her agenda, wanting to explore the common humanity of figures in history. A figure like Thomas Cromwell presents a special challenge. He’s a man who emerges from the historical record as something of a riddle, a commoner who came to rule in Henry VIII’s name and rule quite astutely. He was reviled by many for his low birth and for his ruthlessness (which differed little from others’) and for his part in England’s breach with the Catholic Church. Contemporary portraits are not flattering and tend to be caricatured. We’re left with little but the bare facts of his policy and official acts. How to draw a human portrait?

How do you make someone real to a modern reader without compromising authenticity? How to emphasize similarities among human beings while honouring the difference of their culture and time? We start with small things: point of view, speech patterns, and scene construction. The tough decisions about details will have a lasting impact on the portrait.

Travelogue 993 – July 11

The Present Perfect

Part Four

What is unique about my terracotta artist at the Oude Sluis, or about my local bits of folk art and decoration, the things that seem to make their walls, corners or plazas so special? Why, not so very much, of course. It’s folk art, and it looks an awful lot like folk art everywhere. The irony is how special they make us feel, these small flourishes by generous souls. As art – the way critics may judge art, – they don’t amount to much. As creations, or as gestures, they are great. What does that say about art? Does the refinement that separates individual pieces from the majority also separate them from our sentiments?

It might seem like the moderns had exactly that program in mind. At the least, sentiment was to be flouted. At most, the entire artistic program had to go. Central to the old program was the individualism that defined Renaissance thinking. It had to go, the baby in the bathwater. Might not, then, if that is so, have modern art been the harbinger of a new medievalism?

In its anonymity, my local art may have more in common with medieval art than with the productions of the Renaissance, during which artworks sought to distinguish themselves from the rest. Realism and individual character were the currency that Renaissance artists traded in, and they strove to create unique identity in themselves as much as in each creation. As a new type of culture hero, they launched a five-hundred-year quest for glory.

It took the eccentric twentieth century to challenge the hegemony of Renaissance priorities. Look at Bauhaus as one influential example. It stood for style over statement. Or the statement was the style. Or the idea stood over the art, or the group aesthetic over the individual. In just about any sort of analysis, it turned the model of art that they had inherited on its head. The Romantic-era heroic artist was benched. Name a Bauhaus hero.

The medieval artist, similarly, worked in anonymity. Art was produced collaboratively in workshops, master with apprentices. Art was created on order, and creating art was a job.

Returning to my grammar question, having considered the withering away of forms that cater to abstraction and speculation, that serve conditional and causal thinking, that facilitate the flow of logic and longer utterances, might we just conclude that these are the language geek’s parallel signs of a shift? Have we determined that in this brave, new world experience will be flattened and individualism (of circumstance as well as person) will be stripped of priority?

I’m seeing phantoms. This is my conspiracy theory. While other loonies complain about being Fauci’d; I see monks moving into the libraries and priests installed in the multiplexes. We are discovering some new medieval state, I postulate, just to scare the children, something hinted at by the Chinese experiment, perhaps: a strange model of market autocracy that requires the absolute submersion of the individual circumstance.

My conspiracy theory turns up signs in superhero motifs, where every character is a type. Types are a characteristic of medieval thinking (castle, knight, bishop, queen, and ... pawn). It shows up in television series, where characters are often types. And, yes, it shows up in literature, too. Genre works are particularly susceptible to the new world view of types over individuals. Scifi, westerns, romance and thrillers could hardly exist without typing. Then there’s historical fiction.

Travelogue 992 – July 9

The Present Perfect

Part Three

Hilary Mantel writes in passing about the famous sarcophagus commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey and never finished. Wolsey was Thomas Cromwell’s protégé, and an early casualty in Henry VIII’s struggle for the annulment of his first marriage.

“There is a sarcophagus of black touchstone,” Mantel writes, “in which the cardinal never lay … Benedetto worked on it year after year, but as soon as he put in his account, the cardinal thought of something else. There are twelve bronze saints, and putti bearing shields emblazoned with the Wolsey arms. There are sober angels who bear in their hands pillars and crosses, and dancing angels with curly hair, their garments floating about them as they caper and skip.”

The sarcophagus sat at Windsor for nearly three hundred years. Some pieces were lost. Some of the angels have only recently been recovered. In 1806, King George III declared the sarcophagus would host the body of Admiral Lord Nelson.

Funerary art is one of the more tangible forms in which the Renaissance (and each era immediately following) reaches out to us. We discover it in many the great churches of Europe. We recognize the format immediately, the raised sarcophagus, the layers rising from base to heights, the rich Baroque elaborations, the stunning realism, and the frightening memento mori, in the form of skulls, dancing skeletons, and Death figures. These sepulchral displays are among the only art forms from the era that we get to see in their original form and in their original positions.

Reading Mantel’s passage, my first thought is not of the tombs of great men, but of the terracotta sculptures in the Oude Sluis in Delfshaven. This is a homey little pub set right above the waters of the old lock in Delfshaven where, centuries ago, village fathers settled to trade and build ships beside their little canal that connected Delft to the river and to the sea; where rich merchants from Holland’s Golden Age built the houses that we still enjoy today. I don’t know how long the Oude Sluis has been open, but it’s been at least a hundred years. It’s been a century that those relief sculptures have adorned the pub’s walls. They were a payment made by some Italian workers on their drinking debt. The pictures sculpted are scenes from Frans Hals or one of his contemporaries. Rude figures get up to rude activities in medieval taverns, and the effect is a very cheerful one. The scenes are quite large, more than several metres per side, and there are at least three of them to meditate on while enjoying one’s biertje.

One legacy for me from COVID times will be a new appreciation for local art. I spent months confined to my neighbourhood, inspecting all corners of my side of town, and developing a quick eye for bits of local decorative art, often art deco style from mid-century, which was when this area was developed. It’s nice to see things created close to home, and made for residents of the area. Not so polished as, say, the Rodin or Picasso pieces downtown, this art is still expressive, perhaps even more so for being raw and accessible.

All art was local at one time. The great Renaissance artists rose to prominence within the same late-medieval system that created tonnes of decorative art that we don’t find nearly so affecting. Art was commissioned by local churches and local patrons with a distinct end-purpose in mind: to be installed in one’s hall or one’s church in order to inspire Christian devotion and to emphasize the status of the patron. Even Michelangelo, famous as he was in his own day, worked on commissioned projects. The idea of international art treasures, belonging to the people as part of a universal human heritage, etc, is very recent.

The wealthier that patrons became and the larger their communities, the more intense their competition to show off their status, taste and wealth. This encouraged the emergence of individual style among artists. The difference between one generation of artists and the next was not superior skill so much as a change in the art market.

Individuation was the call-to-action during the era we call the Renaissance. We see it in the art, but it was emerging everywhere, in philosophy and governance and literature. That quality, that priority, can be said to be one hallmark of the European civilization that was emerging and that would last for five centuries.