Travelogue 943 – November 1

The Resistance

 

Among this morning’s headlines were a story from Hong Kong and a story from Texas. The news from Hong Kong has been jarring in recent years. On the one hand, it aligns so well with stories of oppression from all over the world, but there’s an otherworldly quality to it, a cognitive dissonance. It comes down to the ferocity of the resistance. Here is a population that has been fighting for democracy for years now, and their energy never seems to flag. It’s astonishing, particularly when you consider the regime they are up against. These aren’t drunk guys with Confederate flags in their trucks led by a flabby real estate salesman. This is the steely Communist Party of Xi Jinping. I’m afraid for the opposition every time I read about them. But they are an inspiration. I feel sometimes like the American resistance is exhausted and no longer entirely sure what they believe in. They can agree on hot-button issues. And most Democrats will agree that the Trump movement is ‘threatening democracy’ But I’m not convinced that a ready majority opinion could be found about democracy itself. I sense most would lose patience with the question. A good number would prove as suspicious of democracy as the opposition, certainly of traditional American democracy. The right finds democracy distasteful but loves the Constitution. And the left? Well, as they are currently being beat about the head and shoulders with a rolled-up copy of the Constitution, I’m not sure they’ll flock to its defence. I really don’t know.

 

Though the country was founded in a fight for democracy, I think many people find the idea quaint. Democrats are compromisers. You fight for Marxism. You fight for nationalism. But democracy? That’s what is astounding about Hong Kong’s fight in our time.

 

In Texas, Biden and his team were treated to a Trump-style welcome after Don Junior sent out a social media call to action. It was one of those wink-wink, chummy messages that pretends to naiveté. A bunch of goons in trucks surrounded Biden’s bus and delayed it until it missed an engagement. At least one of the Biden entourage was nearly run off the road.

 

It’s this casual relationship with violence that I find most unsettling. I’m quite sure that Don Junior would have felt nothing if someone had died in a car accident. And I mean nothing. From the Trumps, I can imagine a cold Communist Party fury no more than I can imagine regret. They lack all affect. That is why they are so cherished by their base. These people are fatigued. They are tired of moral choice. They are tired of so often finding themselves on the wrong side of the age’s moral questions. They want the relief of mocking the sincere and the suffering alike, and they want the relief of being told it’s okay. These people don’t have the courage of their cruelty. They don’t stand at the bars of the cages at the border, smiling to see the children’s misery. They must consume reports by fellow travellers that assure them it’s all a terrible exaggeration. That exaggeration somehow proves they were even more right about the dubious policy than they had thought. There’s no room for the slightest hesitation: “Gee, what if there were even a small chance that children were suffering?” Just as wearing a mask is intolerable. “Gee, even if one person were saved, wouldn’t it be worth a moment’s slight discomfort?” Nope.

 

It will take generations to figure out this fatal nihilism. It’s a riddle. I believe there’s one conclusion that’s unavoidable: you don’t aspire to nihilism. It happens to you, when all the cocaine has scorched the natural receptors for serotonin, for example. It leaves one with a flattened sensation of life. With no cognitive measure of the value of life, there’s no measure of the significance of death.

Travelogue 942 – October 31

Weimar Days

 

As Trump and his ilk send their anonymous troops off to the battlefields of COVID-19; as Trump’s anonymous foot soldiers fight for the right to carry guns to polling places; as Trump’s raises a fist in oblique support of the Michigan hillbillies caught plotting the kidnap of their state’s governor, we are reminded that Americans are in a rather serious struggle for power over their nation and their future. Some old-time Democrats, like Senator Feinstein, who admitted defeat in the battle over Coney Barrett’s confirmation before it began, who hugged Lindsey Graham after losing, seem confused about the tenor of the times. They still find comfort in rhetorical bipartisanship and a collegial spirit that died when Republicanism became an experiment in feudalism. The lord of the manor is a bloated old fool, but obligation is iron-clad among the nameless. There’s no debate among equals in Washington, but staged pronouncements of the lord’s interests, a reading of proclamations in the town square.

 

Trump knows very well that every time he voices sly insults of Representative Omar or Governor Whitmer his nameless minions will issue death threats. Because he knows, it is a tactic. If I became aware that a thumbs-down gesture in public resulted in someone being killed, I would stop making the gesture. I wouldn’t stubbornly carry on, perversely arguing that I never asked anyone to interpret my gesture that way. Given that Trump is threatening public officials; given that his nameless foot soldiers swagger around with guns; given that his nameless legislators and judges openly advocate for a permanent rule of the minority; given that that rule threatens the lives of immigrant children, women, gays, and minorities; given that Trump’s nameless officers of the law are empowered to kill in the streets without cause; given the violence necessary to the rule of the minority, what remains for those in opposition, those who are losing votes to the machinations of the regime’s courts?

 

We lionize heroes of the resistance movements in countries conquered by Hitler in the late 30s and 40s, and well we should. But I wonder sometimes why earlier instances of resistance are comparatively forgotten. Could it be because many were leftists? I was looking into the years before Hitler gained power in the election of 1932. It was a bloody time. The Nazis were vying with the Communists for rights to put the poor Weimar Republic out of its misery. (A sad experiment, indeed. I feel for those early republicans with a small r. Timing was everything.) Between 1918 and 1922, there were 376 politically motivated murders. 354 of them were committed by the radical right, 22 by the radical left. This has generally been the breakdown through recorded history, and it’s likely to be what leftists in the U.S. will experience. I don’t think I’m endorsing German Communism by pointing out that adherents didn’t deserve to be murdered. Neither do BLM protesters deserve to be mowed down by moving vehicles. But as long as the police are willing to take off their nametags to support the minority party, we can’t expect much better.

Travelogue 941 – October 29

Pro Patria

 

Reading Caesar’s account of his campaigns, it’s easy to forget that people died fighting those wars. Battles are described in short order, a few short paragraphs to describe the strategic unfoldment of engagements. Individual casualties recorded by name are generals or patricians, or they are model soldiers, whose fates are somehow instructive.

 

This is common in ancient histories. Casualty numbers are a form of boasting, indicators of how resounding the triumph and how miserable the other’s defeat. The ancients were sticklers for the burial of fallen soldiers. It’s the one sign of respect accorded to all fighting men. Beyond that, it’s hard to say how the death of soldiers was looked at by society and the soldiers themselves. Was it romanticized? Was it anticipated, as the individual’s chance at glory? Was it shrugged at, given the generally short lifespans? Few are the Enkidus, Patrocluses, or Hectors, the fallen soldiers in ancient literature who existed to be grieved.

 

Since Mussolini, fascists have often made simple-minded appropriations of bits of ancient cultures: the spare monumental architecture and statuary in white marble, for example. In reality, the Greeks and Romans probably painted their statues in bright colours, and their architecture symbolized other values than the ones represented by fascist buildings. But they were symbols based on the symbols of symbols. Similarly, the fascists sought to assemble their own ranks of anonymous soldiers, armies of men who sought nothing but the glory of the state.

 

A few months ago, Trump took to calling people going to work during the pandemic ‘warriors’. Culture war is as close to combat as most Trumpistas want to come. The traditional foreign enemies of America have become summer bromances for Trump. Better to fight battles of righteousness against the Democrats, and when Democrats wear masks, the troops must cross en masse the minefields of disease.

 

Only days ago, the White House signalled it was giving up on combatting the COVID pandemic. The pronouncement was delivered in a predictably offhand way, in a TV interview with the White House Chief of Staff. Case numbers are mounting into a third wave bigger than the first two, but Trump recites in every appearance now, ‘we’re turning the corner’. These are signals that the populations is to be expendable. Anonymous death in the culture war is the new glory for those attending Trump rallies.

 

Next we’ll look at casualty numbers of a different sort from a different time.

 Travelogue 940 – October 27

We Admitted We Were Powerless

 

So another Supreme Court Justice is sworn in, while Mitch McConnell crows. As a reminder that this matters, two Trump Justices wrote opinions yesterday in a judgement that denied an appeal to extend Wisconsin’s deadline for accepting mail-in ballots (during a pandemic). A similar decision in April’s primary would have denied 80,000 citizens their vote. If they are successful with this effort in my home state, I’ll likely be one of those disenfranchised.

 

We all know this is minority rule. The Republicans don’t deny it. McConnell’s judiciary campaign, helping Trump appoint over 200 federal judges, is all about being the minority party in charge. What would be the urgency otherwise?

 

The writers of the Constitution were concerned about protecting the small states. The Republicans have deftly turned those constitutional protections against us - the senators from a minority of the U.S. population, for example, forcing an extremist Supreme Court Justice on the majority. They’ve also attacked the unwritten norms that protected people from abuses of power for generations, in displays like Rose Garden campaigning, norms that one might be forgiven for thinking shouldn’t have to be written down.

 

At the beginning of the confirmation process, Dianne Feinstein, the lead for the Democrats in the Senate hearings said there was nothing the Democrats could do. It was no Democrat who said that politics was the art of the possible, but I can think of a few Democrats who made a career of demonstrating it was true. I can’t imagine LBJ or Roosevelt (famous again for his court-packing episode) endorsing Feinstein’s position and standing idly by. The Democrats opted for delay tactics that were more theatrical than calculated for practical effect. This is the Clinton-Gore party, one that concedes, one that worries about keeping its hands clean, one that finds solace in being gracious losers.

 

As Republicans gloat more brazenly with each passing week, as they publicly speculate that the founders never intended a democracy, as they openly discuss plans to disenfranchise people, the question of resistance does arise again with more urgency. The opposition party’s complacency doesn’t seem to be founded on much: a strangely out-of-touch belief that people can’t be subjugated (despite 99% of human history as evidence to the contrary); a sentimental belief in decency and dignity; a short-sighted excitement in the game.

 

What does it mean to fight back?

Travelogue 939 – October 24

Which Way to Pharsalus?

 

I wonder about Caesar’s education. Like other boys of his class, he was probably taught at home first, with a focus on moral education and physical training. He would have been taught young how to swim and ride and fight. He would been shown how to receive visitors with dignity. At some point, a tutor would have been brought in. Ironically, we do know that one of the tutors for the future conqueror of Gaul was a Gaulish slave, named Marcus Antonius Gnipho. Gnipho also provided some lessons to Cicero, critic and rival to Caesar. As a young man, Caesar studied rhetoric in Rhodes. This was the final touch for a young patrician with political ambitions. Imagine if there were educational requirements for politicians in America. At times, it seems quite the opposite.

 

Notable how education began for the Roman child, with rigid moral and physical training. I wouldn’t know who to trust with a child’s moral education these days. I suppose that’s the brainstorm behind most home schooling. It’s not a comforting thought. Roman moral education, whatever we may think of it now, provided unity. It seems as though the motive for most organized moral instruction these days is quite the opposite, to create isolated communities of special people.

 

We are raised to value principles like equality and peace. That’s a sort of moral education, though not rooted in family, nor rooted in religion, nor accompanied by strict rules of behaviour, as the Romans would have had it. Our moral concepts are free-floating, non-denominational. We learn them in cartoons.

 

I find this combination of vague idealism for the young with an aggressive and racist capitalism in adult life to be a toxic brew. It makes for a brand of chaos that must be unique in history. Caesar may have been a dangerous man, but it was always clear who his enemies were. If his tactics could be surprising, his larger goals never were. If he killed Romans, it wasn’t at random. He hardly needed to resort to conspiracy theory and untargeted, general intimidation. His army pursued Pompey’s. War took place on the battlefield.

 

The Romans prioritized military virtues. There was little nuance in their world view: the Romans were born to dominate in a hostile world. They were surrounded by (in their eyes) effete older civilizations, like the Greeks, and aggressive barbarians, like the German tribes and the Gauls. Both types were constant. We forget sometimes that Roman history began with wars against the barbarians, much as it ended with them. Rome was sacked by Alaric and his Visigoths in 410 AD. That was the first time in 800 years. In 390 BC, the city was sacked by the Gauls. Circuit complete.

 

Is the world safer than it was in Caesar’s lifetime? There are Americans who are looking to foment civil war. Their disgraced candidate threatens to set aside the results of the election. Democrat Dianne Feinstein gives Lindsey Graham a hug, while Trump loyalists gather with guns. Who exactly are they proposing to shoot with those guns? Maybe we should consult QAnon. There’s no clear Rubicon. There’s no battlefield. There are barbarians, but there’s no gate.

 Travelogue 938 – October 20

The Colours of Reason

 

I’m forced to watch a lot of children’s TV. I can’t say I resent it. Some of it’s pretty funny. There’s much more variety than when I was growing up. One thing that’s consistent with my time, that long-ago era, is the colour scheme, speaking literally and emotionally. The mood is upbeat and always cheerful. The colours are fantastic: bright worlds are painted for our children in glowing rainbows and pastels. One watches and one feels wonder that there could be worlds like that out there, in the ethers, in the imagination, in the art studios … somewhere.

 

Those colourful panoramas have the power to trigger something in me, something so old and so buried under worldly experience that the feeling survives only a second. I puzzle over those fragmentary sensations, trying to preserve a remnant of them, like a sweet aftertaste. It’s bittersweet, awakening a wistful sadness.

 

The colour schemes correspond to an air of hope in those imaginary worlds, hope like oxygen. In those worlds, love conquers. Kid-like characters learn lessons about the world, learn about the power of cooperation and the power of knowledge. Every character is unique and has apparent potential. Resistance and conflict exist in order to be overcome. Even as we advance into YA fiction, and some battles are lost, the characters are ennobled by every setback.

 

I wonder sometimes if we do our kids any favours with these stories. Children’s stories were notoriously dark before the modern era. If you count classical mythology as pedagogical in nature, then we can say they were extremely dark.

 

I grew up in an era of unprecedented optimism. There were reasons for it, I suppose: the defeat of the deadly Axis regimes, which were rather easy to label as evil; the establishment of the United Nations; the dazzling advances in science and technology; the seemingly limitless growth of world economies. Even with an abundance of reasons for optimism, the frame of mind is a choice, and, with some hindsight, I don’t wonder that a generation that had suffered unduly made a deliberate choice, and with the power of a grit and determination strengthened by years of struggle. I think of my parents as I write this. We were going to be happy! Reason and the rule of law would guide this planet forever more! Children would be raised to be cheerful and hopeful and ready for a peaceful world.

 

I’m a product of this superabundance of hope. Have I been ready for the world as it turned out to be, for the world of international terrorism and diplomatic chaos, for conspiracy theory and Trump? I haven’t been swallowed up yet, but I have been trailed through life by disappointment. The world was consistently darker than I had anticipated. My childhood was dogged by this dissonance between conditioned expectations and experience.

 

As a boy, I thought I’d discover a world outside like the one reflected in the TV screen, where kids were sweet and eager to learn; where schools were sunny and cheerful; where everyone tried their best and worked together in earnestness; where everyone revered books and the teachers who explained them. I never quite overcame this handicap. It held me for years. I entered work environments expecting smarts and polish and sweet dedication everywhere.

 

Alas, humans are jokers, barely domesticated apes. I’m one myself. There’s a beauty to be found in that, of course, unless you were raised to believe in reason, and to see the manifestations of reason everywhere, like lambs with their lions and fruit on the vines. My father was an engineer. His devotion to science and reason would be hard to exaggerate. It was a sign of his generation, a generation who foresaw the dawn of an age of reason, heralded by a world burning in its passions. They had seen the destruction; they were believers in hope.

 Travelogue 937 – October 16

Voting by Fetish

 

And so Americans choose between the personal vs the rational, much as the Romans did in Caesar’s time. Do they vote according to personality or reason? The difference is that Caesar’s constituency was largely made of soldiers and the urban mob, people who understood their interests, people who didn’t have many advocates. The ruling classes in Rome had devolved into competing personal interests, much as the real rulers of the Republican party have, (think Koch brothers and their ilk). And what is Trump’s constituency? We’ve seen them at Trump rallies, seen them in candid TV interviews, the interviews that seem like satire. We’ve been introduced to the inbred minutemen who plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan. We’ve seen the ghoulish couple who pointed guns at protesters from their manicured lawn. We watch them now, setting up fake ballot boxes in California with winks to the camera, as though life really were a never-ending frat party. We see the inoffensive white woman they want to size for Justice. Her brief at the moment is to say nothing about her intentions to attack civil rights and public health. Her agenda captures the right’s intellectual position neatly: cloak your motives, get set to attack people’s rights. The program is entirely negative. Immigrants and women and anyone that Obama helped, they must suffer. Anyone vulnerable, they all must suffer. Why? Purely because strength demands it. Their cynicism is like the sleep of Lethe; it can’t be bothered to disturb the sleep of reason. They reach for a principle once in a while: we protect the unborn; we protect the American worker, who is threatened by immigrants, threatened by China. But their attention wanders when the child is born, when the white worker is safe in her low-paying job that won’t cover expenses or healthcare. Those are complexities best left to the cruel ministrations of libertarian wizardry. “Life is harsh,” they say with a shrug. And we’ve circled back to their default position, which is a fetish for shows of strength. This fetish for strength makes the mind lazy. This fetish for strength doesn’t need reason. It is nihilistic and renounces hope. Catalogue the fetishists’ positions: relentlessly negative and founded on fear, relying on grievance, relying on ready hatred. They look to a fantastical past, as an ideal to protect. They don’t arm to protect people. They arm to protect delusions. There can be few more cynical movements in history. Their favourite conspiracy theory was dreamt up by a grifter who moved to the Philippines to design porn-sites. There is nothing of real value to find here, just the grotesque aping of strength, like the cartoonish gestures of the villains in silent films. The children cry. The teens applaud. The adults smile indulgently. It’s just a film.

Travelogue 936 – October 12

Clementia

 

Imagine Caesar shouting to his troops, “Make Rome Great Again!” Gauge the absurdity of that image, and you have a handy measurement of how far off the rails we’ve gone. If the comparison seems needlessly macho, be aware that this is Trump’s criteria. Everyone is a weakling or a loser, while he is the winner, and he will tell you in just those words. His magic power is the inability to be embarrassed. To those who are bankrupt in character, that shamelessness looks like strength. And that’s truly the extent of it; that’s Trump’s brand. He’s the guy at the party flexing a bicep. Those who question their impulse to laugh stick around and become followers.

America’s power would have staggered Caesar, even in its decline. Just as staggering would have been the court jester taken as king. Caesar’s adversaries for ultimate power were brilliant and fearless. The Late Republic bred a special kind of killer. Sure, the Empire had its crazies and fools, but the Republic burned its chaff thoroughly.

 

Trump would have held a particular cat-and-mouse fascination for Caesar, much like he does for Putin. I imagine the two of them brainstorming slogans. “Make the Sky High Again,” Caesar proposes. “Make the World Turn Again.” “Make Tigers Roar Again.” Try this experimental treatment, Donald, and we’ll start over.

 

That Caesar was tough was never in question. And it was certainly never his brand. Rome was great. There was little need to say it. Caesar was strong. So were dozens of others. That was not the case for supporting him. The branding was about other qualities. Caesar’s case was presented in many ways, and one way was the publication of his canny Commentaries, written to be his reports on military campaigns for the benefit of the Roman public. This was not “The Art of the Deal”, a bubble gum gossip column extended to dance length. This was a sophisticated piece of propaganda artfully composed for the ages. He showcased his brand, and one key element of that brand was Clemency. He portrayed himself as cool-headed and rational. He was the gracious winner and the calm loser. And, above all else, he was humane. He was humane with the barbarians. He was humane with the Romans who plotted his downfall. This was his most important message, perhaps more so than even “veni, vidi, vici”: “I am humane”. Examine this single chess piece for a moment, and you’ve travelled miles higher than Trumps’ escalator.

 

Next, we consider the quality of hope.

Travelogue 935 – October 10

The Strong Man

 

We know about Julius Caesar’s achievements, but do we understand his motives? It’s hard enough to understand how a contemporary Dutch person thinks; I’m not sure we’ll figure Caesar out. But I do think it’s safe to say that Caesar didn’t set out to be dictator for life and imperator. He was Roman patrician, and he pursued the cursus honorum faithfully. That was the traditional ladder of offices to reach high office. He imagined himself consul and proconsul one day, winner of the fierce competition among Roman aristocrats. One doesn’t imagine becoming grand master in chess by overturning the board, (fundamentally the Wonderland promise of almost every Republican since Reagan). The fact that Caesar did overturn the board doesn’t mean that the upset was his life’s ambition. That was a measure of his passion for the game that he felt was rigged against him.

 

Contrast Caesar’s example with the current president. Yes, I mean the one who registered as a candidate as an afterthought, as a tactic to gain leverage in his negotiations for a TV contract.

 

Caesar was no civic saint, driven by selflessness. He was proud and corrupt and greedy. He demonstrated he would stop at nothing to gain power. What we should find interesting is that behind that hunger for power were some ideas for what to do with that power. He had a sincere interest in governance. He was curious about the people he governed. He had ideas about how to make people’s lives better. He had ideas how to make the Roman government run more smoothly, even if many of his reforms were part of a campaign against the Senate. (Even his reform of the calendar was inspired by instances of senatorial corruption, exploitation of the ambiguity of the old calendar to manipulate elections and terms of office. Sounds a little McConnellish.)

 

One strong man is not the same as another. In a perfect world, we can do without all types, but let’s be clear what sort we’re dealing with. Let’s begin with a look at MAGA as a political program.

 Travelogue 934 – October 7

Commentaries on the Civil War

 

Though our Roman summer in Holland is long gone – it’s been raining for just about three weeks now, - I’ve carried on with my Roman literature project. Now it’s Julius Caesar. I’ve read ‘The Commentaries on the Civil War’; I’ve started re-reading the ‘The Gallic War’; I bought a textbook full of articles about his writings. This has turned into a big project.

 

Caesar is a fascinating historical figure. Years ago, I was challenged, as the history major at the party, to name the person who had had the biggest effect on history, and I came up with Caesar. I spent an inordinate amount of time in the days and years afterward thinking about that spontaneous, drunken answer to what is really a senseless question, and I’ve found my answer surprisingly defensible. So are dozens of others, of course. But here’s a truly remarkable character who did change the course of history. (And even changed the calendar.)

 

Studying Caesar seems appropriate while America struggles to deal with its wannabe strong man. But, in my humble estimation, there are more disparities between Caesar and Trump than there are similarities. And I don’t mean the toga. By extension, a lot might be said about the different historical moments they represent. I’m an amateur historian, at best, and so my opinions are probably worth about as much as Trump’s on the virus. But here goes.

 

Beyond the staggering vanity and ambition that both men manifested, I see very little to compare in their characters. Caesar was an intellectual and an accomplished orator from a noble family with an old and respected name. How many points of departure have I charted already? At age 40, he turned his attention to military glory and became one of the greatest military leaders in history. No draft-dodger. After fighting three years of civil war, ranging across the entire Mediterranean empire, Caesar took the reins of power and pursued reforms based on the populist agenda he had consistently pursued since he was a young man. For centuries, Roman leadership had generally fallen into two camps, one for aristocratic and senatorial power and one for more decentralized power. Caesar belonged to the latter camp. No doubt this path suited his ambitions as much as his ideals, but it appears his convictions were real, given his actions once he had power. ‘Convictions?’ Yes, that’s a word that has gathered some dust.

 

There’s more. It’s hard not to be astounded by the sheer energy and stamina of this man, if all the chronicles are accurate. This leads, in my mind, to the question of motive. What moves a person like Caesar?

 

"Nobody that's a leader would not do what I did," Trump said the other day. Aside from the tortured syntax, it’s a maddening statement, not least because it’s not entirely clear what he thinks he did. He contracted COVID-19. He left the hospital early. It doesn’t require Julius Caesar to provide a contrast. Maybe only the guy in the next bed, the one listening to his doctor and the one concerned about his family.

 Travelogue 933 – October 5

The One-Thing-After-Another Kind of Wisdom

 

Fall advances quickly. The sun’s retreat is perceptible day by day. It’s darker when we wake, and soon enough it will be dark when Baby and I go downstairs to get on the bicycle and head to school. I’ll need lights on the bike. Still there’s sunlight. We chat about the autumn as we cross to the bicycle. We count how many leaves have fallen so far, and we reflect on how chilly the air has become. I remember discussing the advent of fall with her last year, and still - even at her advanced age, - the seasons are mysterious.

 

An understanding that one thing follows another takes time to mature in the human mind.

 

My daily rotation of funereal lectures in the Zoom zone continues apace. Now advancing fall has carried us through the first of four terms, almost to its completion. Students fade even further from us among the ethers of remote learning, their voices arriving as though sent from across the galaxy. The communications are as garbled. They respond to simple queries in blunt utterances like ‘What?’, meant not to clarify but to challenge. In deference to all the light-years between us, I respond diplomatically. ‘Correct answer!’ I say, and I move on.

 

In truth, we teachers of teens understand that the most valuable wares we trade in are not the ones advertised in the name of the course, but are in fact those gathered under the repellent rubric ‘soft skills’, a group of qualities and skills that seem as depleted in the human character as ozone in the air. Those ‘soft skills’ centre around critical thinking and communications. They are as often cited by business leaders at job fairs as they are pushed aside by curricular committees because they are so darn difficult to measure in multiple-choice exams.

 

So here we are. I design lessons to be revolving review sessions. Course requirements must be reviewed relentlessly. Just today, six weeks into the term, a student interrupted an exercise to ask when the final exam was. I pass the question to another student, who had the privilege to recite for us that there was never a final exam for this course. They would be grade according to portfolio. Most of my feedback on writing assignments consists of rote repetition of the assignment instructions. Most protests on exam questions are rebutted by a review of the question instructions. It’s an odd sequence: we finish with instructions. We draw circles to the beginning.

 

A true understanding of sequence takes a long time to mature in the human mind.

 Travelogue 932 – September 28

Lecture in the Cemetery

 

The cemetery, I call it. That’s the Zoom environment when students won’t activate their cameras. Admittedly, that’s a grim moniker during a pandemic, but that’s what it feels like.

 

It’s class time. I open the Zoom session and start admitting students. Most pop up during the first three minutes of class. Stragglers will continue to request admission until the final three minutes. Once admitted, the students appear in my gallery as black tiles with their names in white. Occasionally, one or two will politely say, “Good morning”. The majority file in in silence. A few burst in with music or with a shouting match with their roommate. I mute them, and restore the peace.

 

I know my colleagues harangue students about cameras, drawing a line in the sand. I understand how they feel, but it does seem rather arbitrary. I agree that video is a sign of respect in the new age; it shows that the meeting or the class is worth putting clothes on for; it’s a way of demonstrating attention. But signs of respect should have mutual value. They don’t get it. They’re signing in for a lecture; they don’t see the relevance of video. We would like to teach them that you don’t act this way in a business meeting, but it’s not a business meeting. I’ve had this discussion frequently with my colleagues in the business program. I don’t think telling students to treat school meetings as business meetings imparts any real learning. It’s the usual dilemma in role play.

 

And so I start the lecture, speaking into the void. I have asked for video. A few have obliged. It makes little difference, really. It’s lonely for us all in the cemetery.

 

I have sympathy for this generation. Recently I had to go to the hospital for some tests. I stopped at a nearby café afterward. I sat by the window. Across the street from the hospital is a gymnasium, a secondary school. There was a group of kids sitting on the bus station bench, doing their best to goof around on a rainy day. For this generation, that means gathering around someone’s smart phone and laughing. It also means having masks at the ready, hanging off their ears. It seems strange. Teens should be careless and annoying. It feels wrong that they should have the spectre of illness hanging over them.

Travelogue 931 – September 24

The Me Game

 

Young people adapt quickly to new conditions. My students are entering their second school year with online learning, and that’s already a long time. They have internalized the pattern of online learning, made the routines their own, found their bad habits, and forged their online personae. They know how to enter the classroom just late enough to avoid attention. Too early, and the teacher engages them in hello’s and chit-chat. It really doesn’t matter what time of day it is, teenagers are still waking. They are groggy and irritable, and they can’t endure any pleasantries. If they come in late, the teacher has to admit them, and that teacher is likely to torment them with in-class questions, as just desserts for being late. They know how long to keep the camera on before surreptitiously switching it off, drawing minimum attention. They know how many times a teacher will insist on cameras back on before his or her will is broken.

 

Students have learned a hundred effective ways to be annoying. If they interrupt someone in Zoom, their voice drowns out all others, so they know they can stop a lecture cold with a question. The teacher can’t talk through them. They know that if they don’t speak for a long time, they will sink down into the gallery and be forgotten. That has its own rewards, but it’s also a great platform for the ‘me’ game. That’s when a student issues some brief, random comment and then responds to the teacher’s query about who that was with ‘me’. When the teacher calmly explains that ‘me’ doesn’t help, the student is indignant that education has become so impersonal. Another silly game adopts a very different strategy. The student keeps his or her camera on and giggles through the lesson with the mute on. The teacher naturally calls on this person often, in order to break up the competing conversation, but all that that accomplishes is to keep that student high in the gallery so that the perpetual giggling distracts everyone far longer. For many students, the simplest strategy is to keep camera and mic off, answering ‘I have no idea’ whenever a question comes their way, in a voice dripping with ennui. The teacher shudders with aversion and never comes round again. It’s often one of those students who invites the power struggle in the final minutes by shouting a question about something covered weeks ago, like when the exam will be. The teacher replies in a polite voice with his or her finger hovering over the mouse, cursor suspended above ‘End Meeting For All’. The politeness confuses the jester just long enough to make a quick exit.

Travelogue 930 – September 15

The COVID Cityscape

Part Two

 

There’s more construction going on in the city than I’ve ever seen, and it’s been a growing, vibrant city since before I arrived, a lively city within a culture that loves things in good working order, loves modern design and neat lines. Though I had been aware that construction plans for 2020 were ambitious – some urgent modernization that would require ripping up streets almost comprehensively through the city, - I couldn’t help but speculate idly that the COVID slowdown in traffic in spring might have encouraged a spike in road works that hasn’t been allowed to dip.

 

Meanwhile, the Dutch people persist round roads like mazes redrawn daily or weekly; they persist round the barren and antiseptic spaces indoors; they persist in putting on a show of normalcy, as though December 2019 represented a sort of gold standard in human behaviour; they persist, as new cases have reached totals nearly doubling the highs reached in April, and no change in summer public health rules is even on the table.

 

It’s odd to think that few had foreseen this twist in the over-population of our planet, that density would equal personal space in some inverse proportion; that the more there were of our species, the more we would be forced to isolate, physically and emotionally. We would be pushed into abstract boxes of space by regulation; we would be forced to live sedentary lives, experiencing the world through computer screens.

 

Well, we were having fun. After our ballet class, Baby and I stopped at our favourite café. The place retained some seating, but the space in the middle of the bottom floor was cleared, as though for a dance party. And so, dance we did. As the Ramones were played in the sound system, Baby showed me her ballet moves on the café dance floor. A set of young people sat at intervals around the long table by the windows, tapping away at their laptops. A few smiled to see the girl dancing; but even those tuned us out quickly. No one joined; no one clapped; no one sang along. The young barista, herself a picture of a generation’s downplayed hip chic, raised her eyebrows as she passed; not necessarily in the usual tight-lipped Dutch judgementalism, but in a kind of amused surprise. What seemed most silly to her was Papa clapping out a beat to the Ramones. I wondered whether she thought they belonged to her time. I wondered if she thought I was being undignified. I wondered if she thought it was too much a concession to enjoyment. It didn’t matter. Nothing much was meant by it. Baby danced, and I was happy for her.

Travelogue 929 – September 14

The COVID Cityscape

Part One

 

As hard as Dutch people try to treat the COVID-19 virus like they treat fellow passengers on the Metro or fellow shoppers on the Lijnbaan, willing it out of existence by the power of the averted eye, the cityscape and everyone’s daily experience still bear too many signs of the public health battle to support even the most stubborn Dutchman’s assessment that everything’s fine. Masks are compulsory on public transit; signs about social distancing proliferate; interior spaces are scarred, more or less irreversibly, by the mandate to keep people apart. The ad hoc has become permanent. Once pleasant waiting rooms and lobbies that were hastily emptied and rearranged six months ago now have the haggard air of the basement room quickly furnished for the prodigal son and finally abandoned to squalor. Seats are blocked by makeshift, laminated signs advising social distance. Cashiers mumble behind hanging plastic; customers are separated by small, hanging plastic windows at breathing height. Floors that should never have been bared have been exposed for months and given up on. Café and restaurant play areas for children have been cleared and left barren. All this was supposed to be temporary. Now, fatigue has made it all okay, the patchwork and the unadorned and the awkward.

 

The girls attend different ballet classes on Sunday because of the division made at age four. COVID rules allow only one parent inside, and so now we handle ballet day in teams. Yesterday was my Sunday with Baby. Parents aren’t allowed inside the class, so mamas and papas sit in the waiting room, avoiding each other’s eye in good Dutch fashion. I worked on a short story idea, scribbling notes in a notebook. I’ve returned to writing by hand whenever possible because I spend so much work time in front of a computer, and, thanks to that small diversion, I’m realizing how much society has been changed by its technology. There’s one parent in the room reading an actual book, and she looks odd. Who reads a book in public anymore? But me, the guy using a pen? In a ruled notepad? That is really beyond the pale. I feel very self-conscious. I worry it seems affected, as though I think I’m making a statement. Or it seems precious, as though the pad were my diary and I were cataloguing my failures to execute a worthy midlife crisis. Or it seems suspicious. If you see someone typing on a laptop, it would never occur to you to wonder what he or she is writing. See someone with a notepad and you wonder what it is they’re recording. Is it about me? Is this a police agent, a deep state mole? But I go ahead. On the rare occasion someone looks at me, I wink, just to fuel their paranoia.

 

The story I’m working on, by the way, is my shot at fantasy writing. I saw a call for stories about monsters, and I thought, why not? Monsters are fun. Why else are so many children’s stories devoted to them?

Travelogue 928 – September 6

The Wallabies

 

We started with the wallabies, and we finished with the flamingos. These are the two exhibits flanking the entrance to the zoo. We started the day heading left into Australia, and rounded off the afternoon in Asia, emerging by the flamingos.

 

We entered the zoo with tickets bought months ago for Baby’s birthday. It took us three months to find a suitable weekend, neither too hot nor rainy, when everyone was healthy. But the day finally came, and it was a beautiful one, pleasantly cool with scattered high clouds to take the edge off the sun.

 

The wallabies didn’t seem too energized by the weather. Maybe sleeping was their celebration. But morose wallabies didn’t get the girls down. After three months’ build-up, the girls hardly seemed to care about the animals at all. They were excited to be at the zoo, but not for the central attractions. The fun was in the opportunities to run and climb. I think Baby’s peak moment was climbing around in the big tower in the playground. The big tower is three storeys tall. You can only enter it by ladder or rope, and you can only exit by one of the high slides.

 

I was surprised. In earlier visits, Baby was entranced by the giraffes. They were her favourite animals for years after her first visit to the zoo. During this trip, I had the impression suddenly that my toddlers had become kids.

 

The flamingo pond was a good place to decompress. It’s peaceful. You can space out very effectively watching these oddball birds. Even hypnotizing: one of the colourful birds stood on one leg and swung his lowered head back and forth. I could have slept, if Little Ren hadn’t had mysterious reserves of energy.

 

Ren’s mission as a three-year-old has been to log as many miles as she can, running ceaselessly from one thing to another without apparent purpose, running without ever looking back. If your attention lapses for more than a moment, you might lose sight of her. I’ve had enough frights with her to know I must stay alert. But I’ve also had lots of practice describing small circles inside her larger ones. Conserving energy seems to be a priority among parental skills.

 

Predictably, Ren’s battery runs out once we’re out on the street. One strange lacuna in the admirable public transit plan in Rotterdam is the zoo. There is almost no way to get there without some walking. I have to accomplish that with Little (growing) Ren in my arms. It’s a beautiful day for a very slow walk.

 

The highlight this time was the aquarium. That exhibit never gets old, watching the fish glide across enormous windows or overhead. The diversity of them, the colours, the dreamlike motion, they’re always engaging.

Travelogue 927 – August 30

What’s the Score?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 Travelogue 926 – August 29

Windy Speeches for the Stable Genius

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Travelogue 925 – August 22

Some August Heat

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Travelogue 924 – August 11

Duindorp

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Travelogue 923 – August 4 Long Strand 

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 922 – July 26
Dawn Ride

At 5:30 in the morning, the clouds are grand in scale, drifting quickly across the screen of the sky. Maybe it’s the framing of the bedroom window that exaggerates their size. Everything is early morning grey. The background of the sky is pearlescent; the clouds more the shade of San Francisco fog rolling in off the Pacific, making only idle threats. With every day, the summer gets older, and sun’s light gets a later start. This was the tint of the sky half an hour earlier just a month ago. I’m going to get up. My mind gives the order a few times. Each time it seems to me the body obeys, but then I wake up in the same position. Finally, the order takes, and I’m out of bed.

The catalyst for rising this early is my new bicycle. My guy at the local bike shop put it together from an old frame and bits and pieces. It’s light and fast, but nothing like a high-end racing fiets that would cost thousands and excite all kinds of anxiety. No, this is purely for fun. I throw on the first old running clothes I can find, and I’m outside. The new bike rolls along so lightly and smoothly compared to my day-to-day omafiets with the child’s seat that I’m surprised how quickly I reach the outskirts of town and can look out over the open fields.

I’m rediscovering bike paths I haven’t seen since I first moved here. I had a lot of time for exploring back then, before Menna arrived. There are a lot of narrow little roads and even smaller bike paths that criss-cross these green strips of pastureland that almost float among a grid of little canals. These fields stretch west into what’s called the ‘Westland’, the lands lying between Rotterdam and the ports and the seacoast.

The peace and the chance to speed along under glorious skies are all I care about. The clouds have retreated to the horizons, and they are white with the day’s new light. These flat stretches of land make the skies seem vast, seem more than their hemisphere of space, seem like our true domain, seem like a domain of spirit and joy. The exercise hormones are obviously kicking in. The space and the pace are intoxicating. No stop lights.

Travelogue 921 – July 24
Hard Workers

It’s summer vacation at last. My last day at work for the school year 2019-2020 was last Friday, and it was rather anti-climactic. I was just cleaning up small tasks. That’s good time management; I had no pile of unfinished work; I had no disasters to resolve. I’ve earned a right to brag about that, since much of my work life here has been messy and poorly managed. I’m fortunate in my colleagues’ patience.

Speaking of messy lives, I watched an interview with Jim Carrey last night. He’s about to publish a memoir, which seems to be a crazy fictionalization of the truth. Should we be surprised? It’s a daring move for the actor and comedian. A book like that has to be genius to rise above the initial gotcha. His motion picture magic is sometimes genius, sometimes bathos, but always memorable. It’s likely the book will be a similar mix, leaving the reader unsure how to judge it, unsure whether he or she should have spent the time reading it. Just watching him in an interview provides that same kind of stress, the anxiety you get watching a tightrope walker. What’s missing is the grace or the sense you get with a tightrope walker that, well, he’s a professional and will not fall. Carrey pushes it every time. Watching him is to squirm with discomfort.

The self-own in the interview is his admission that a character in the book, named something like ‘Laser Eyes’, is in reality Tom Cruise, who he criticizes for his calculating intensity. The truth is, these are two men I admire quite a bit, and for the same reasons. They try hard. They take risks. Dial up both of those qualities, and you have the near-insane intensity that Carrey criticizes. The two of them don’t just take risks; they never stop taking risks. They don’t just try hard; their lives are continuous effort. I really admire them for that, and I enjoy the strenuousness of their performances. I know that isn’t a popular opinion, but I do think the intensity and commitment do pay off. They have made themselves into artists. And both of them, consciously or unconsciously, benefit from the high-wire tension of tempting failure.

I think people prefer artists who achieve their effects effortlessly. In many cases, that is an illusion, but some just have natural grace. Unfairly, the most careless artists are often the ones that achieve the sublime, a quality that a labourer like Carrey visibly yearns for all his life. If he did attain the sublime, it was early on, in his Fire Marshall Bill days, or maybe in “Dumb and Dumber”. I shouldn’t comment on comedy greatness.

Anyway, all that occurs in a realm far above mine, where corrected papers, quickly forgotten by author and teacher, have all been filed away; where the work email account has been programmed with an automatic reply; where purposeless time has urgent purpose. I have four weeks or so, just enough time to lose track of time. I wish the summer were more summer-like. The Dutch summer is already over, as far as I can tell. The weather has reverted to never-ending spring, intermittent cloudiness and cool breezes.

Travelogue 920 – July 5
Hard Lines

It doesn’t help that the winds are back. It puts me in mind of February, when the winds were hard and constant, when the winds were exhausting me. And ultimately those winds seemed to bring the virus in their malevolent persistence. Significantly, when March brought calm rains, the disease took hold and spread among those ominously cloudy and quiet times. What are these winds carrying?

I struggle on my bike against June’s winds as I take on February’s responsibilities again. Baby is back in school. Little Ren is going back to day care. The spring’s calm agenda is chopped up into rushes of activity.

It’s time to practice my Stoicism, practice humble (and uncomplaining) observance of duty. I am still reading Aurelius, by now in Book Twelve of the “Meditations”. I should derive strength from his guidance. Maybe I do.

But it happens that I’ve also picked up the latest book by Michel Houellebecq, “In the Presence of Schopenhauer”. Schopenhauer, in the English translation of Houellebecq’s translation, says of the Stoics that their ideal, “the Stoic sage, is described in a way deprived of any life or poetic truth; he remains a stiff, inert manikin.” Schopenhauer was Houellebecq’s hero when he was young. I certainly don’t see restraint and ‘submission’ appealing to the French author as philosophical principles to live by, especially as a young man.

There is some truth in what he quotes Schopenhauer as saying. I’ve reflected on the flat quality of Aurelius’s moralizing, mistaking it, as I think Schopenhauer does, for a world view. That would not be fair. I do believe these were the emperor’s notes to himself, whether they were published or not. Meaning, they were applied philosophy. His thoughts reference existing metaphysics; they don’t present new systems. Schopenhauer, heir to Kant, wants an explanation for everything. Aurelius wants a moral system that gets him through the day, a notion discredited among the Romantics of Schopenhauer’s day.

The times were very different. Schopenhauer’s call for ‘poetic truth’ gives it away. Nineteenth-century philosophers craved personality and passion, things that a Stoic would have found irrelevant. Perhaps the latter weren’t looking for Zarathustra or C.G. Jung so much as the measures of a good man, which could be applied to all manner of personalities. The Stoics talked a lot about the ‘indifferent’ things, the possessions, qualities and experiences that had no impact on human virtue. It’s tempting to say the indifferent things were the only ones nineteenth century writers were interested in. Think of Flaubert and Hugo and Dickens and Carlyle. So much detail, so much colour and personality. And these became moral principles in themselves.

Travelogue 919 – July 4
Gentle Calendars

The sheep are back. They’ve cycled through the chance plots of grass between here and Schiedam Centrum, and they’ve turned up here again, on a kind of organic schedule based on how fast the grass grows and how quickly a herd of sheep can eat it up. It is surprising how thoroughly they can crop the new growth. There’s no mistaking the path they’ve followed. On one side of the bike path I take every morning, the one that winds up the hill toward the Metro station, the sheep are reclining in the early morning chill, watching my slow progress up the incline. On the other side, the grass is uniformly pared down to yellow nubs.

The progress of the sheep around the neighbourhood form a friendly sort of calendar, nicer than the cruel work calendar, which milks the end of the school year with long days and prolix meetings. It’s nicer than the civic and news calendars, counting the nightmarish days since the corona virus hit and the hellish days until the American election.

There’s another sense in which the calendar has started up again for my family. Now that the Netherlands has the virus pretty well under control, primary schools have been back in session. We kept Baby home for a while longer because I was still getting my lungs checked out. Now she’s back, and I’m back on Papa’s bike duty every morning, lifting Baby up into the bike seat and chugging on that heavy bike all the way to the school in Delfshaven.

I’m afraid I have to report that I’m in horrible shape. How did that happen in just a few short months, since March, when the shutdown started? I look back at my schedule in the fall and winter with some awe. How did I maintain that routine, cycling kids to schools, cycling to work, sometimes cycling downtown for lunch in between classes? On top of all that, I was training for half marathons!

Now that all my road races have been called off, I don’t run much. And until Baby returned to school, getting on the bicycle was to leisurely pedal to the store, no more than a kilometre away. My experience in adapting back to Baby’s school schedule inspires a real dread of the return to ‘normalcy’ in the fall. Do I need to work out this summer, just to be in shape for my ‘normal’ life? That’s not likely to happen. I plan on employing my tried and true strategy of pooling all general anxiety into a reservoir for future nightmares and panic attacks. That works for me every time.

Travelogue 918 – June 27
The Price of Sugar

The heat is muggy and oppressive. Sleeping is difficult, and so is work. The humidity stifles ambition. Last night, the sky was flashing with lightning, and I was wishing for a hard, cleansing rain. But the heavy clouds never offered anything but a drizzle.

My little family sat together in the living room with the TV on and the window open, half lying on the couch in a torpor. We snacked on mandarins and cherries. We’re constantly thirsty these days, and so we eat a lot of fruit. Especially now that we’re trying to be healthier. Baby has been lecturing me about my chocolate habit.

Last week, Papa was groaning about terrible toothaches. They came on every evening during our family time and made Papa very grouchy. That’s when Baby started with her lectures about chocolate, and Papa has taken her point. Now we have bowls of fruit everywhere. I’m not sure the dentist would approve. Sugar is sugar, natural or refined, right? Maybe I have to eat plain oatmeal for the rest of my life.

Dutch dentists waste no time. Within minutes, he had produced an x-ray. Within two more minutes, he was pulling on the offending wisdom tooth. Not ten minutes afterward, I was ejected onto the street with a wad of cotton in my mouth. That was after paying sixty euros, by the way. I questioned the woman behind the counter. “Really, that’s all my wisdom tooth is worth? That was a part of my body. That tooth was attached to my jaw for many, many years.” She wasn’t interested.

I wandered down the Nieuwe Binnenweg in a mournful state, my cheek numb and my mouth full of cotton. I could think of no better way to honour the tooth’s memory than to buy some pastries as Jordy’s the best bakery in town, placed strategically near my dentist’s office. I couldn’t eat anything yet, so I carried on with dejected walk, bag of goodies in hand. I would end up passing most of these treats on to the girls.

The girls went to bed, and the long, slow summer evening dissolved into darkness behind the flashing clouds There was still no relief from the humidity. I opened the front door, desperate for some air. I sat outside a while, watching the lightning. A number of neighbours were doing the same. It was kind of pleasant, after all. The storm did bring with it a cooling breeze. There was nothing else to do in this heat. At least there was no pain. My tooth was gone, and there was peace.

Travelogue 917 – June 19
All the Questions

It was a lovely day spring day, the last spring day. The weather was intermittently sunny –intermittent often being the best we can hope for in Holland – and so I promised the girls they would each get a ride on the bike. Baby Jos I took across the river to the bakery for treats and to the Zeeman’s for socks for both girls. They burn through those little socks very quickly.

Baby Jos is so big now, she barely fits into the bicycle seat. We have to buckle her shoes into place so they don’t get caught among the spokes of the wheels, but she’s such a tall girl her knees rise high above her lap and swing back and forth as we ride. She’s so heavy, the back tire provides little cushion against the bumps in the road. This summer I have to teach her how to ride a bike. I didn’t expect her to grow so quickly; or perhaps it’s the time that’s grown so quickly.

They have their similarities, Time and Baby Jos. They are both incessantly asking me hard questions, ones I can’t answer. That’s Baby’s conversational style now, insistent questions. Her goal in conversation is to be heard. She wants to hear her words fed back to her, and she gets upset when someone is too distracted to do that. That aggressive note seems familiar. Ah yes, it’s the unrelenting bray of American political discourse. How could I have missed that? In a child, it’s a stage. In adults, it’s the desperate shouting of bullies. It’s the sad cry for help of the morally deficient.

Baby Jos is no bully. She already has her moments of being uncannily perceptive. She hears what you say. She notices what you’re feeling. She can be surprisingly sympathetic. Papa has been experiencing another round of tooth pain, and Baby Jos gives him a hug sometimes and says she wishes she could give him a special present. The present would make everything better.

Baby’s questions reflect her intellectual and moral growth. She’s constantly acting out stories during the day, stories populated with cats and butterflies and dinosaurs. She needs to figure the world out. Her urgency is the hunger for life.

The urgency of political bullies is the urgency of arrested development, adults who need to be heard though they have nothing to say. Society has failed to come up with mechanisms to care for people like this. Instead, our society keeps parroting the false notion that all opinions are valuable and confusing that notion with the much more sacred rule that tells us every person is valuable. My wife values me as a man and as a partner, but she does not value every opinion of mine. I have learned that I am not as smart as I thought I was, and I have been able to do that without being discounted as a human being.

I have a feeling that Baby Jos will play a similar role in my life. She corrects me all the time. She is the big sister through and through. She knows how things should be. “You need to share, Pop.” Yes, Baby. “If you don’t share, then your babies won’t have any, and we will cry.” I’m sorry, Baby.

We have made it across the river, Papa pedalling hard up the big hill and coasting down the other side, pointing to the pretty river below. On the way back, we watch a boat emerge through the narrow passageway underneath the same bridge. Baby Jos corrects me. “That’s a ship. Like what Sinter Klaas comes on.” Oh yes! She’s remembered the December school activity, in which the class went to the pier to watch Sinter Klaas’s arrival. She has a great memory.

And she continues to jabber some more, and she continues to ask her questions. I turn to tell her I can’t hear. She’s behind me, and the wind carries her voice away. But she keeps talking anyway.

Travelogue 916 – June 10
Jurassic Dreams

At breakfast, I asked the girls about their dreams. Little Ren answered, like she had before, that she had dreamt about baby dinosaurs. She’s been fascinated with dinosaurs for a while. She loves cute babies, and she loves dinosaurs, and so she dreams about baby dinosaurs. Even a baby dinosaur can be cute.

I went through a dinosaur phase as a boy. It’s fun to learn about them again. What a wonder that these monsters existed, wandering the whole planet as some sort of alpha genus! What a wonder to think it was so long ago, and that they lasted for so long! Dinosaurs flourished for something like 160 million years. It boggles the mind. Humans have been around for three million. And they’ve been writing for only about five thousand. That’s one two-hundredth of one million years. It took them a tiny fraction of that five thousand years to develop industry and threaten the planet with a mass extinction. And we look at dinosaurs with horror!

It’s also strange the hold that dinosaurs have over us. We dream about them. They star in our films, TV shows, and theme parks. They inspire us and frighten us. It can’t be entirely coincidental that the first great age of paleontological discovery overlapped with the triumph of Darwinism in science and culture. The dinosaurs seemed “survival of the fittest” in blood, bone and teeth. They were the embodiment of brutal nature. We loved them. The metaphor of “Jurassic Park” is apt; they’re more real, more present, than they’ve been in 60 million years. It’s odd to consider that for most of humanity, living through their brief five thousand years of ascendance, there was no awareness at all of these great monsters from the past. Aurelius, firmly convinced that time provided no surprises, might have been surprised.

For some, the idea of dinosaurs, so wed to ideas of evolution, is oddly threatening. I think the religious right finds dinosaurs the moral equivalent of Democrats. Maybe they are fallen angels, like Obama or Pelosi. Maybe Democrats are essentially figments of our imagination, too: fever dreams to make believers toss and turn at night.

Little Ren wasn’t frightened by her dream, even though the story sounded as though it might be. Two baby dinosaurs followed their mother into a cave. There were two raptors hunting them. The cave shrank, and so their mother shrank, too. She was a baby, too. I think this is the gist of the dream. I admit, I’ve had to interpret some of Ren’s language.

Baby Jos is more into dogs now. She received the gift of a mechanical puppy for her birthday a few days ago, a puppy that yips and whines, walks and sits, eats and sleeps. Jos and her puppy Sparkle are inseparable now. I’m afraid this can only lead to uncomfortable eventualities, like the burden of living pets, real puppies and the hair they shed, the food they quickly process, the needs for baths and walks and training. I might prefer a baby dinosaur. Let him loose in the neighbourhood, and he fends for himself in Darwinian fashion.

Travelogue 915 – June 5
Our City

I carry on with my reading of Aurelius’s “Meditations”. (Would the emperor have objected to that title? The term wouldn’t have carried the same baggage for him as it does for us, its vaguely eastern flavour, or perhaps its suggestion of parallels with essay writers like Montaigne, who Aurelius might have found effete. Would he have understood the kind of packaging he and his writings have been subjected to, making him a viable literary product?)

Reading the Meditations during the various crises of 2020 has thrown some of his principles into interesting relief. Take passage 33 from Book Ten, for example: “In short, never forget that nothing can injure the true citizen if it does not injure the city itself, and nothing can injure the city unless it injures law.”

On the face of it, this sounds like a naïve, or even primitive formulation, but right away it confronts us with Aurelius’s emphasis on social identity. While ideas about interdependence are not too challenging, we’ve drifted so far toward individualism that Aurelius might have been astonished. Imagine his reaction to images of gun-toting demonstrators gathering during a pandemic, shouting they needed a haircut.

What’s a haircut without other people? What’s writing without readers? What’s public health without the public? What’s policing without a society that trusts you? Aurelius would take it further. Inherent in humanity’s purpose is service - to each other and nature and the gods.

Key to understanding purpose was reason. Human reason was created by nature in nature’s image, and it provided the link between service as purpose and service as action. It guided us in the moment. Staying to true to reason and nature would supply purpose. And this purpose was given meaning by service. Nature, in this way, served as law. We interpret nature’s law with reason. And thus we arrive at another sacred principle in the Roman mind. It’s axiomatic that Roman law was critical to the success of the Republic and the Empire. It became a world view. Divinity and law would have been difficult to untangle in the Roman mind.

Noting that the words citizen and civilization derive from the Latin word for city, (and the word police from the Greek word for city,) we begin to see familial relationships among the concepts. We begin to realize how important the city was to classical cultures and how far-reaching the metaphor. As classical culture fell into permanent decline, the concept survived in Christian theology, St Augustine writing about the ‘City of God’, extending the metaphor further. Aurelius was not writing about the physical city of Rome, but about the community of humanity. In this context, we note that, in the quote above, he refers not just to the random citizen, but to the ‘true’ citizen. Does that mean true by definition or true by loyalty? I don’t have the original in Greek at hand, so I’ll guess that it amounts to the same thing. The human loyal to reason and service can never be injured in his essence. Only through lapses in reason can the member of the human community be separated from purpose and compromised.

What can this tell us in 2020? Is it possible that Floyd’s death awakened our own fear of ‘injury’ in a state that has fallen from grace? The police have proven – even more so during the demonstrations – that their perceived purpose has drifted far from service. Are we owning the cognitive dissonance between how our police and government act and what reason tells us is decent and safe and corresponds to nature’s law? That’s a liberal interpretation, I admit. Aurelius spoke much more to personal responsibility than to political science. Maybe it explains better why someone, one among hundreds of thousands, might protest, perhaps seeing the protests as his or her true city. He or she risks physical injury but finds safety for the soul there. Rather dramatic, that interpretation. But it’s worth considering: how do we find that city of Aurelius’s vision?

Travelogue 914 – June 3
Comedy and Art

Movie 4 for my ten-movie Facebook challenge was “Being John Malkovich”. “The Apartment” (Movie 3) had wit. It had style. It was elegantly performed and produced. It was my inspiration to write for theatre. At the same time I caught “The Apartment” on TV “Being John Malkovich” was coming out in movie theatres. I was absolutely enchanted. Who wasn’t? It was bizarre and entertaining throughout. It was unique and also familiar, making you wonder why it hadn’t been done before. It was clever, but the humour was written deeper into the code of the script than witty dialogue. The premise was funny. The performances were great. Just Malkovich’s “Dance of Despair and Disillusionment” was worth the watch.

Watching it was one of those artistic experiences of possibility. This was a writer’s movie, and Charlie Kaufman was a kind of revolutionary in his time. The intellectual challenge here was ‘why not?’ Why not be this silly? Why not re-imagine celebrity this way? Why not imagine an evil puppeteer? And cast Cusack?

Comedy can be categorized in many ways. It has opened itself to me in three phases, I would say, as I’ve thought about it, written about it, tried creating it. The first is the witty, “Apartment”, sort of comedy. This would naturally be the sort that appeals to writers first. Witty comedy is playful, and it continually refreshes itself. It finds its own limited audience among those who have a love of and facility with language.

The second sort was the “Malkovich” sort, in which the comedy was in the premise. ‘In the architecture’, I want to say because the successful writer here is an architect. The concept itself is the joke. It’s daring, and it’s exceedingly hard to achieve because building a funny house means making it funny all the way through, from blueprint to furnishings. It takes more than populating a standard drawing room comedy with unusually funny characters, and manipulating them in very funny ways, as Oscar Wilde might have done. The imagination needs to be engaged in every detail of the structure.

The third sort of comedy to capture my imagination has been farce. I think it would generally be categorized as the basest and the easiest form of comedy. Why do I come to it last? I don’t know, but I do. Maybe it’s the joyfulness of it. There’s art to wit, but there’s less joy. And joy in a concept piece serves a higher purpose, which might be said to diminish joy, if you think joy is its own purpose. A couple years ago, I delved into the Commedia dell'Arte, inspired by my trip to Venice, to perform a farce of mine, as it happens. I started reading and thinking about the Commedia dell'Arte compulsively. I can’t say I broke the code - I sensed mysteries about art and psychology there, - but I did gain some perspective about the evolution of farce from simple street entertainment.

The fact is, since I’ve been in Holland, most of my theatrical writing has been farcical. I’m just wrapping up another silly project now, a serialized Zoom production that was a spoof on “Game of Thrones”. I wrote and directed, and our theatre group performed it. We spent two months on it. Why? It was a lot of work, and the story was ridiculous. We didn’t rehearse; each episode we read once and taped. These were not little gems of sophistication. It was a quarantine project to amuse ourselves. And still I love these videos.

What I keep secret is that I see great art in these little pieces. It isn’t the art of the polished sort. It isn’t the sort that speaks of mastery or that suggests the Sublime. It’s the sort that captures the kind of convergences that I think makes theatre so vital: just the right gesture for just the right word, timed just right and delivered with pleasure. It makes me think of that wonderful word ‘happy’, which, in its etymological roots suggests chance and luck. I’m in love with this kind of art right now, the kind that shows spontaneity, is uneven and imperfect, but every so often produces the radiant moment.