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.