Travelogue 1176 – 30 March
Sunday Morning

This morning, the cloud cover has returned, and there is a wind rising. The temperature is up, the day starting at 10˚C. The first birds that I hear are crows. That’s neither a good sign nor particularly cheering. But behind them come the distant cries of seagulls, reminding me that the beach is still out there. It’s probably as quiet as the city. People are desperate for sleep; you can feel it, like a fog over the region. Ramadan is entering its final days. The day’s earliest sun, especially on a Sunday, strikes with withering force, even in misty Holland, when spring fever combines with Ramadan. People are shrinking from it, turning over in bed. The night was all too short. Shorter still because the clock changed last night. One hour of sleep evaporated into Daylight Savings Time.

Yesterday was sunny. The city was lively. The cover story from February’s Atlantic magazine has been telling me that we’re lonelier than ever, but you wouldn’t have observed it yesterday. The centre of the city was crowded with people promenading, shopping, gathering on terraces to have a drink. Here in our apartment complex, one couple sets up a pop-up café on Saturdays. Outside the window where they take orders, there is a terrace with half a dozen picnic tables. In the afternoon, that terrace was full. No one sat alone. The cheerful buzz of conversation carried across the broad plein at the heart of our complex, and I wondered that this was the same place that grey winter had rendered so dreary.

But that is the Dutch way. Anywhere, if the café has enough space – often when it doesn’t, there is at least one table where strangers sit together. They may never do more than greet each other as they open their laptop, but they share the space. More often than not those tables host some lively chatter, even in winter.

Travelogue 1175 – 23 March
Blind in One Eye

My daughter made a cheerful observation yesterday that I found strangely chilling. We were descending on the roltrap toward the Metro platform. Apparently, she had been mulling over a quick conversation that we had had days earlier. The topic had been, “How would a blind person describe blue?” Now Baby Jos asked me, out of the blue, “Can someone be half blind? Can they see with one eye?” I answered that it was possible, and she asked how that happened. I didn’t really know how to answer. “Can they be born that way?” I guessed it was possible. She happily came to her conclusion. “Then that person can know what colours look like with one eye and what nothing looks like with the other eye.”

I was stunned by the thought. Taken literally, the statement may not stand; once a person has seen colours, they cannot unsee them. But I didn’t refute the thought because the moral truth of it was overwhelming. Yes, we could both know and not know the colours of our world, and, in fact, it wasn’t just true. It was the overwhelming truth of our existence. We are able and unable, wise and unwise, and we indulge ourselves in elaborate play between our two natures. I gave Baby Jos a big hug, and praised her, but I didn’t say much. The thought stood complete. She was proud of it, and I was oppressed by it. The image captured our misfortune as a species, the stubbornness of Nature, the stark brutality of existence.

I woke from a dream this morning. In the dream, I had been standing at the window of a vacation rental, overlooking a beach. Scrolled over the beach scene was the word Peace. Inside, the roses had wilted from lack of water. The ceilings were stippled, and among the patterns there were scribblings of regrets. Tears were coming to me as I stood at the window with a view of the sea. I had only to move to the door and leave, take a walk along the beach, but I stood at the window.

Travelogue 1174 – 15 March
I’m Not Your NPC

If a Dutch student is especially adept at English, if their accent is near perfect, if their vocabulary is impressive, I’ll ask them how they became so good. The most common answer is a surprising one: video games.

The video game world is so alien to me, I can’t imagine how language skills factor in. I imagine kids sitting at consoles for long stretches in trances. But the answer I get is that they develop international communities via the games. They make friends around the world, and English is often the lingua franca.

When video games became popular, we sensed there was something amiss. The way it took hold among the young was scary. We all wondered what ill effects might manifest in tender psyches nursed on the violent fantasies there, in the games. Debates and studies ensued. Conclusions and cautions were issued and forgotten. Some advocated for the games, saying they enhanced intelligence and motor skills. Other still felt ill at ease.

It reminded me of the debates about violence in the movies. In the action movies of my own youth, unnamed thugs and cops were gunned down by the hundreds in a single movie. The victims were the very image of dispensability. People wrung their hands about the violence back then, too, reaching no clear conclusions. Common sense just suggested that it wasn’t healthy.

We may have arrived at the moment in which answers are provided. The gaming dweeb who would be emperor of the world is making of himself a live chyron on the state of our cultural id.

Most revealing might be his weird metaphysics. Heather Cox Richardson writes, “ … political writers have called attention to the tendency of billionaire Elon Musk to refer to his political opponents as ‘NPCs.’” NPC, she has to explain to me, “refers to a nonplayer character, a character that follows a scripted path and cannot think or act on its own, and is there only to populate the world of the game for the actual players.”

“If you don’t think there’s at least a tiny chance you’re an NPC … you’re an NPC,” Muisk has tweeted. Disregarding the adolescent tone of the stunted boy trying to mansplain, the assumptions behind the statement – the programming, if you will – is troubling.

It was never the violence that was the problem. It was the consistent, unvarying reinforcement of the notion that other people are objects. There is something in the primitive mind that reduces people to obstacles and threats in a black-and-white struggle for survival.

It’s a very natural impulse, difficult to abandon entirely, even for the best of us. And yet, it is, almost by definition, the enemy of civilization. We expect our thinkers and artists and leaders to fight against the impulse to objectify people. We expect it from them for a reason: we need civilization. We believe in it. We expect them to protect and advance it.

There are dark, Lethean historical moments in which we falter, lose or even reject our humanity. But our impulse toward civilization also runs deep. We sense that something is wrong. Even in the grip of wild selfishness, the diminished voice of conscience is trying to be heard.

Travelogue 1173 – 8 March
Hope is the Thing with Feathers

I awoke at 5am, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t think the songbird woke me, but I didn’t mind if he had. He was close, perhaps perched on the roof above our window. He was loud, and he was enjoying himself. He scarcely took a break for the next hour.

The songbird made my thoughts sweet, lulled my mind into a few shallow dozings threaded with pleasant dreams. The song became accompaniment to light imaginings: meadows and street fairs, places my daughters would have enjoyed.

Baby Jos is a chatterbox in the mornings. On the way to school, she voices all kinds of musings. One day she was curious about feathers. Why were they so light? What were they made of? Would they float forever if they were light enough? I tried to explain the Emily Dickinson line, “hope is the thing with feathers,” but the sense of it was elusive. She wanted something more concrete. Poetry might have to wait.

Is spring a time of hope, or a time of fatigue? If the bird is a metaphor for hope, is it a metaphor for spring? Or would mine be rather a fox at dawn, having dashed here and there all night, blinking in the new light? It’s hard for me to tell anymore, whether light brings dark or dark brings light. The line of shadows turns upon itself, and I get turned around.

The songbird is helping me to figure things out.

Travelogue 1172 – 6 March 

Make Me Again

It’s been sunny. Near freezing in the mornings, but warming up to 15˚C or better in the afternoons. People are stumbling around like they’re dreaming. Comfort feels like a guilty pleasure here. And one treats it with either abandon or the delicacy of trying not to break a charm.

Still it is chilly in the mornings. I wanted to stay warm in bed a few extra minutes. I dozed again, and I had a brief dream. We wanted some photos for some reason. In my dream photography became “ridefia”. I was delighted when I woke: such a beautiful word! I broke it into pseudo-Latinate pieces and interpreted it as the art of being God again, God the Creator. Photography was, in fact, a re-creation, a re-imagining, a re-making.

Swipe the phone carelessly, and I get the “Siri Suggestions”. Among the apps offered automatically is the camera in selfie mode. It’s hard to get rid of that screen. Inevitably, I end up recording a shot of my hairline trying to get rid of it. Just like that, I am re-imagined. Without a nose, or a chin.

Selfies are a routine for many people. It’s stunning how integral the mechanism is to millions: focus and shoot. Include the many who use the camera as a mirror on the train in the morning; it’s a rehearsal for the big click, the re-imagining, the Great Awakening – every morning, – the Great (re-)Shuttering. Make me again!

I’ve been indulging in some photographic browsing. I like street scenes. The algorithms give me more and more, and I always stop to admire them. Cities are conjured, re-imagined in a flash, and one can admire them as new things, while they are nostalgic for old things. Interestingly, these street scenes are almost always sterilised of people. The streets are quiet and abandoned.