Travelogue 795 – March 30
Songs for Children

I’ve been listening to Dutch children’s songs. Sometimes Menna starts up a cycle of YouTube videos. We sing together. Baby dances, and Mama and Papa practice their rude Dutch. There’s a particular series we prefer. It’s a mix of cartoons with videos of teachers singing with their small students. The teachers are dubbed over with professional voices.

In one catchy tune, the cartoon boy starts with, ‘Ik ben ik, en jij bent jij.’ That means, ‘I am me and you are you’. The song introduces each member of the boy’s family. The cartoon boy is quite a happy little character. He runs into the arms of papa, mama, grandparents, sisters and brothers, all with manic smiles.

Baby watches with rapt attention. And so do I, for that matter. I’m finding the world of children’s art mesmerizing. The first objectives of children’s art are pedagogical, of course, and therefore peculiarly resonant. Since it is likely that all art, literature and philosophy is pedagogical in its roots, when we indulge in children’s art or song we are exploring the building blocks of thought.

Children’s songs name the things of the world. Here is your family, and this is your house. Here are cars and buildings. Here are the animals. This is the set, and this is the cast of characters for a lifetime, for a lifetime of lifetimes. The furniture of the mind is the mind itself. While I sing with Baby, it’s like taking a tour of the beams and girders and foundations behind the six walls of consciousness, before the room is finished and decorated, before we outline some story on the bare plaster.

If pedagogy is the first priority, form is still the first contact. It must be sweet as honey. The hooks are unflinchingly cute and alluring. Melodies are catchy. Cartoons are silly and the characters adorable. Stories are structured like songs, with beats and rhymes and refrains. In full stride, it is great art in its ability to captivate. After only a few viewings, ‘Ik Ben Ik,’ was imprinted in my mind, image and melody, indelibly. I am singing it to the rhythm of my bicycle. I’m am whistling it at work.

And children’s art must be funny. It’s surprising and how daring children’s humour is. We grow up and our horizons contract. Watching TV, it would seem as though penis jokes were the very cutting edge of humour, but this is more childish than childlike. Children’s humour cuts much deeper, challenging reality and society at their underpinnings with the lightness of immortals. It recalls the cruel pranks of the Greek gods.

I’m more convinced than ever that the most profound philosophy is the philosophy of things. The basics are the mystery. No matter what age, how old and wise, the human is forced to wonder at the simplest things, stare out the window at the mad city and wonder what each simple form could mean. Take the human form, ridiculous and beautiful at the same time. No evolution or physics can give it significance. The science of colour doesn’t make green less wondrous. It doesn’t add a thing to the joke and the subversion of Green Eggs and Ham. One does no justice to the thing, abstracting it into Platonic form. ‘Suffer little children.’ The gods always put wonder and humour above all else.

Travelogue 794 – March 25
Elections

Last Wednesday was election day for municipal councils across the Netherlands. The Dutch cast their votes for council members in 355 municipalities, choosing among dozens of local and national parties. Party placards still litter the city, reminding everyone of their civic duty long after the races have been decided. Non-citizens can vote in these elections, though only after five years’ residence, so we fell just short of eligibility.

An actor in one of my plays was running. I should correct to say ‘campaigning’, since parties can run, but not individuals. He was principal founder of a new local party, so he probably would have been first to take a seat in the community council. They didn’t win any seats, as it turns out, but they did run a strong race.

This is the time to start a local party. The last decade has seen a sharp rise in the success of the local and the new. The post-war party system has seen significant decay in Western Europe. This was perhaps best dramatized by Macron’s victory in France, winning the presidency with a party of his own making. In a country where political traditions are so strong, this was remarkable.

In Holland, the template may have been set by the GroenLinks party, or ‘Green Left’, founded in 1989 during the Green Party craze and still going strong. Wednesday they won more seats in Amsterdam than any other party. The party polled well in the national race just last year, under the leadership of a charismatic young man named Jesse.

These days, new parties crowd the ballot. One of the most popular is the Party for the Animals. It may sound comic to an American ear, but they have a complete platform of left-leaning policy statements and are taken very seriously. Founded in 2002, they have five seats in the national legislature, and Wednesday captured 33 council seats.

Rotterdam is a conservative town. The biggest winner was the party that has dominated for some time, Leefbaar Rotterdam, ‘Liveable Rotterdam’, a populist party founded by a controversial figure, one Pim Fortuyn, who was an early example of a type that we are so familiar with now, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim. Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002 by a Dutch environmental activist, a non-Muslim. Fortuyn’s party carries on, stronger than ever.

One very new party is named ‘Denk, or ‘Think’. It was founded in 2015 by two Turkish-Dutch members of the House of Representatives who left the Labour Party to found a group more directly committed to the issues of immigrants. They have done well, winning seats in 13 cities. They won three seats in Rotterdam. It shouldn’t be surprising that there has been some grumbling about this party. It is rumoured to be an extension of Erdogan’s political machine, keeping tabs on the Turkish-Dutch community, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, including many who can still vote in Turkish elections.

My friend didn’t win his seat, hut he’s optimistic. The new party will go on. He’ll campaign again. He’s very young and has a lot of energy. I’m still not sure what his party stands for, if not simply for youth. He speaks like a 90s third-way centrist. He questions the EU, but in thoughtful ways. He questions the role of government. He mocks Trump. These are the times.

Travelogue 793 – March 17
Pursued by the Machine

Yes, it’s time to start selling tickets for my plays. But things aren’t that simple anymore. Once upon a time, I would have visited a printer and walked out with a roll or a stack of paper tickets. I would have accepted cash money in the palm of my hand, and with my own fingers I would have passed one entrance ticket to the eager audience member.

Now everything is cybernetic. Tickets exist in the ethers. I’m supposing those are the same ethers as those that harbour our money. Access is granted by one machine or another. You type in codes, or you produce plastic cards that are meant to be swiped across magical surfaces or inserted into magical boxes, and then entrance is granted you. You may never touch a paper ticket, but the gatekeepers will know it’s you.

I’m superstitious. I want to take cash and give a paper ticket. I mention this to my cast. The twenty-year-old just stares. ‘Why?’ she asks. To her, it must sound like I’m going to translate the play into Klingon. As it happens, there’s no easy way to get paper tickets. Because Matteo has signed up for online sales, he has to request and print tickets for me. He has to drive to Rotterdam on the weekend to drop them off for me. Once I have tickets, it’s in no way easy to sell them. When I pitch to colleagues, they search for cash in their bags and wallets as though it were an old coffee-drink discount card. ‘I was sure I had it …’

I’m just wrapping up a short run on a cold day. I’m stretching and pacing in the courtyard of my apartment building. The familiar face I see belongs to Matteo. He’s been pacing the grounds of my complex seeking entry. The first floor is accessible by intercom and buzzer only.

He looks me up and down in disbelief. It’s not the shorts in the cold. It’s the fact that I would run at all. There’s an old-world Italian courtliness to him, the kind that may believe in duty and hard work but still finds exercise distasteful. He produces from his rucksack a folder with twenty printed tickets. I’m embarrassed that he had to deliver these by hand.

He tells me he was looking for a mailbox, somewhere he could drop off the tickets. ‘How does mail get delivered?’ he asks. I say the mailman drops it through the slot in the door. ‘He must have a key, then.’ I hadn’t thought about it, but yes, he must.

In good Dutch fashion, the mailman delivers on a bicycle, outfitted with saddle bags in the colours of the Dutch postal service, orange and blue. He’s friendly enough, shy and soft-spoken, looking a bit beleaguered, as no doubt anyone would delivering mail in this weather. And still, nice enough as he is, I flinch a bit at the sight of him. The mail he delivers is never good. Most of it is invoices. Those invoices might be from utility companies. They could be from any of the myriad government agencies who collect taxes. Said agencies have each a signature coloured envelope, and the sight of those colours is likely to give me hives as time passes and debt compiles. They pursue me with the coldly efficient persistence of the Dutch temperament, and their threats are never idle. They are quietly executed on exact timelines, and there is no escape from enforcement, as residence here is allowed only on strict terms of accessibility in your profile. One must be plugged in to be Dutch. Bank accounts, addresses, wages, insurance, visas, taxes, and government benefits are all wound tightly together in citizen identity. It’s an effective system, and we are easy prey.

Still, it’s a benevolent system, better represented by the mailman’s deferential manner, really, than by the stern and unadorned language of Dutch bureaucracy. If this bewildering network of governmental agencies hadn’t proven to be more forgiving than first appearances, I would have been bankrupt and abandoned back in Minneapolis by now.

Travelogue 792 – March 10
Change in the Machine

Nobody has change. We’ve stopped at the grocery store, at the café, and at several bars. No one can break the fifty.

It’s funny how few Dutch people actually use currency. I know I don’t. I rarely have cash on hand. Even small change. If I want to leave a tip, I have to remember to ask the cashier to add it into the charge on my card.

Living on electronic money certainly makes life easier. Transactions are fast. Everyone has card-readers. And most are the kind you can simply swipe. Once in a while the machines will reject a swipe and ask for a code, just the occasional check against fraud.

It can trigger anxieties. Your heart might skip a beat when the machine rejects your card, especially when you are new to the cashless economy. Have you been hacked? Are you bankrupt? Has the account finally been emptied? Somehow spending money with a card exaggerates the sense of burning through money. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe that’s unique to those who grew up spending cash.

I only wanted to sell a few tickets to my upcoming play. I wrote two one-acts that I’m directing and producing in April. And the old-style promoter in me wants to sell paper tickets in advance, to make sure we fill seats - or at least to try to break even early. Friends are willing, but they have no cash.

I accompany Teresa to the grocery store at lunch time. She buys a sandwich with her card. She withdraws a fifty from the cash machine. We walk from storefront to storefront trying to break it. Finally, we give up. She leaves the fifty with me, good friend, and leaves it to me to break.

Later in the day, I pay for coffee with the fifty. It feels awkward. The barista stares at the bill a moment. She has trouble counting the change. I’ve embarrassed myself presenting cash.

If I feel vulnerable without paper money, it’s probably only my age. Was my money safer when flesh-and-blood bank cashiers counted it out for me? Were the cashiers or bank managers more responsive in crisis? Isn’t that the core anxiety in a world of machines, that there is no one to hear you scream – in rage or in distress?

I am curious about the story of the failsafes that were developed before banks set up their first ATMs in the mid-1960s. The procedures and tests must have been extensive, trusting money to unmanned machinery.

Now I realize if I want to accept cash, I need some sort of mediating machine. I will need to invest in a card-reader. It’s an odd accommodation, a form of cybernetic adaptation. My hand is no longer adequate equipment for receiving payment.

Travelogue 791 – February 27
Darkness in the Machine
Part Three

The new computer is fine. Data darkness recedes. But it will never abate. That’s clear. There are files I grieve over, photos and documents. Projects are still on hold because I don’t have the heart to start over. Not quite yet.

It comes as a sobering realization how fragile data is. It should. We need the occasional check on our powers, the reminder that darkness is the prevailing state. ‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away,’ and all that. It was ever that way with knowledge and our projects. The darkness is shocking when it comes, no matter our strength or wisdom.

A corollary of darkness is contingency. It isn’t something we humans like to admit, how much our lives are the product of accident and darkness. How many butterfly opportunities have flown because I lost letters and CVs, lists and thoughts?

The stark figure of contingency stands in every scene, in every story. That should be understood. We should pencil him in, like the skulls so ubiquitous in Renaissance paintings. He’s been president and pirate, Roman and Ethiopia. And yes, he was a Bolshevik. I find funny this belated hush about 1917. As though the Russian Revolution had let us down. As though it could have ever claimed to have been socialist, Communist, Marxist, or even a revolution. Russian, yes – though it indeed had to be imported.

History is fascinating and beautiful because of its contingencies. The revolutionaries lived in exile in London and Vienna and New York, and they dreamed about revolution. But they could not call the date. When the day came, it was in the midst of a soul-crushing war, and the exigencies of state overcame the dreams of utopia. In these conditions, every decision it came to the Bolsheviks to make as leaders led them away from the ideas of the Bolsheviks as thinkers. They were cornered by contingency.

In order to manifest their dream, the Bolsheviks needed a state apparatus. But the state, and the apparatus, they inherited was on the verge of collapse. Their first mandate was power. The state must function, that their program see the light of day. Way leads on to way, and we never see that first road though the yellow wood again. Ideologues argue. Politicians jockey for position. Lenin has his stroke. Fascists come to power in Europe. They hold forth on the menace of the Bolsheviks. More lines are drawn, more wars to come.

All of it is a fine fable. There was only ever contingency. And so, ultimately, it’s comical that we censor history. All real lessons are lost. They are heroes; then they are disappointments. It’s a silly game, and ironically, it only demonstrates our disregard for history. Observing and measuring humanity by its palpable responses to history, I find that history is an unconscious force far more powerful than a conscious one. In fact, the more that people have no idea how to process history consciously, the more powerful it becomes as an unconscious force.

Travelogue 790 – February 25
My Rabbits

I got a late start this morning, and still the temperatures were solidly below zero (Celsius). I debated my decision to cycle into town as I descended the stairs to ground level. The bicycle won, and I set out. Tears sprang into my eyes at the first cold wind. My fingers through gloves and toes through trainers felt the bite of the chill. But the truth is, though every day at my first exposure to the morning cold I question my resolve, the bike always wins. I enjoy this kind of cold. It comes with bright blue skies and rare sunshine. It’s brisk. It’s exhilarating.

February has been a sunny and a cold month here in Rotterdam. I admit that I’ve felt some relief, after months of clouds and intermittent rain. I’ve been cycling more. I’ve been running. My struggling training campaign for a spring half marathon has revived.

I returned from a run yesterday afternoon, and a neighbour had to comment. ‘Optimistisch,’ he said, not realizing I had already been out for more than an hour. He eyed the shorts, and I laughed. It really doesn’t bother me, the bare legs in freezing temperatures. It may be the dulling effect of age. It may be some genetic recoding I underwent during my years in Minnesota.

As a matter of fact, yesterday was the first occasion this year I felt like a runner. For months, I’ve had to ignore the rabbits, fellow runners placed by Providence to stir the competitive spirit. I haven’t had the strength of body or mind to rise to any challenges. Today, I couldn’t resist. I was passed by a young man who was huffing and puffing and dragging his feet. He looked fit, gym-fit, well-built, but no natural runner. I couldn’t countenance it. I found some reservoir of endurance, and, though I’d already logged a number of cold miles, I put this upstart behind me. A glorious performance. Surprisingly, I paid no heavy price for it. The new pace felt good, and I was mightily encouraged. The half marathon in May might just be within my reach.

At home, I tell Baby it’s time to run. She’s overjoyed. She tells me what needs to happen. ‘I need my jacket, Papa. Where are my gloves, Papa?’ Outside, we start right away. ‘Run, run,’ I say. She holds my hand, and we run a full lap around the whole building, along the first-floor balcony. We stop occasionally, and she blows noisy breaths to signal that’s she exercising. Then we start again. She never seems to get tired, and the cold doesn’t bother her at all. Once home again, she boasts to Mama. ‘Baby goes running!’ Wow! Mama says. One day I’ll be the rabbit, old man with the audacity to be ahead of her.

Travelogue 789 – February 18
Darkness in the Machine
Part Two

One hundred years ago today, the Germans launched their continued offensive against Russia, impatient with Mr. Trotsky’s strategy of high discourse and low delay. The German socialist revolution was not coming, but the German army was. The Red Army, the new Russian army, made semi-voluntary, was going to crumble before them. When Lenin decided there was no choice but to sign for peace with Germany, at the expense of extensive territory, Trotsky resigned as Foreign Minister, rather than sign the treaty.

Several weeks on, I’m still stumbling over gaps in my data, weeks on from the collapse of my own data army assembled in the cheap little netbook that suddenly went black. We hired a baby-sitter for date night, but we paid twenty minutes of wages just trying to buy our movie tickets. I had to retrieve three passwords from three different vendors just to be able to buy those tickets and transfer them to Menna’s smart phone. It’s frustrating to be hostage to such small details.

I’ve wondered why a figure like Trotsky would hold such fascination, particularly in a new era that prefers to downplay the Russian Revolution as an embarrassing bit of history. We still enjoy our Cold War stories, but I wonder how many from the younger generations can link that history back to the wild Bolsheviks of 1917. Myself, I remember quite well my fascination with 1917 during my university studies. I recognize the foundation level of the palimpsest that is my picture of Russian communism, a romantic picture, painted in thick impressionistic oils. The outlines were basic: the suffering, the idealism. Why did I find Trotsky so compelling? Why does the idealistic adolescent of our stereotypes always have a poster of Che on his/her wall?

Trotsky’s career was far from over once he retired as Foreign Minister. Having watched the Red Army’s collapse, he resolved to put Humpty Dumpty together again. He took over the Red Army, and he took it over just as another threat appeared, a threat more frightening than the Germans. In the spring, the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia rebelled when confronted by Bolshevik officials who were protecting enemy prisoners. The officials were bound by the terms of the new treaty to protect prisoners. The rebels overthrew the officials and quickly controlled an impressive swath of territory. Russian officers joined in rebellion against the Bolsheviks, and very soon much of Russia east of the Urals was lost to the central government. The Civil War had begun.

Trotsky has often been classified as the ideologue, set beside the cold pragmatists Lenin and Stalin. But re-assembling this broken army was not philosophy; it was compromise and calculation and hard work. He re-professionalized the army. He recruited leadership from the old regime. Rivals denounced it as betrayal of their ideals. He pressed on, often preserving individual units only by personal intervention, standing in the way of deserters, making speeches. He was true believer, even if only in his own abilities.

We marvel over the feats of our predecessors. We feel the anxiety of the late-comer. We romanticize the past and regret our own lack of opportunity – when our greatest adventure is a dying hard drive. I think it’s perhaps the shadow of the opportunity that has more power, the challenge implicit in the achievements of our ancestors. Would we survive what our grandmothers and grandfathers survived?

I have had occasion to question Freud’s improvisation of a universal death instinct. The theory is emotionally satisfying, particularly in a time of school shootings, but it seems simplistic. I find more potential in an exploration of this late-comer anxiety. How do we navigate our own age, so radically, so palpably different than any other age? How do we reconcile our histories? How do we reconcile our heroes – board room, lab coat, social media heroes – against the volumes of encyclopaedias full of Caesars and Trotskys?

Many ancient cultures had deep-rooted traditions of ancestor veneration. I remember finding that so strange and alien as a young person. I was typically naïve about it. ‘They worshipped their grandfathers?’ I could shrug it off when it was reduced to a formula like that. I didn’t much like my father. I couldn’t countenance someone worshipping him down the line.

But he threatens me. He has the power to speak out of the darkness. Down there is a reservoir of data much harder to re-assemble, a hard drive that hasn’t quite crashed, and yet is impenetrable.

Travelogue 788 – February 1
Darkness in the Machine
Part One

What I've started I've lost. My computer died a few days ago.

I remember I was writing about the darkness. I had read some time in recent weeks that this was becoming the darkest fall-winter season in a hundred years. I hadn't needed to be told; I had felt it like a damp wool suit. My Dutch friends denied it, but locals always want you to believe that the extreme is the normal.

Maybe writing about darkness had imported it into the system. It took over my computer and coated the circuitry like syrup, like coffee. Coffee was the repair man's best guess at what had been spilled on the keyboard and, from there, onto the mother board, extinguishing all life in the poor machine.

I wouldn't have minded - I had already begun marvelling at the long service provided by the inexpensive toy netbook, - but for the timing. But how can I complain? There's never a good time for loss. And bad luck wouldn't be particularly bad without its sense of timing.

Sunk into the syrup of night were also a few shelves of documents. I don't have any catalogue of what's gone. Among the casualties will be drafts of writing that I was lazy about backing up. Even the plays I'm currently rehearsing only exist in hard copy now.

Losing things can feel unexpectedly liberating, when it isn't a house key in winter or something you need urgently. Relief makes for an odd mix with anxiety, with the sobering reminder of human frailty. But there is something undeniably exhilarating about those show-stopping moments when the plot is suspended, and you have no choice but to regroup.

A part of the mind finds the strong language funny when employed about a cheap computer. Our dependencies are so various and many and surprising. These are interesting times.

I was writing about the darkness. And I was writing about the centenary of Russia's dark winter of 1918. The nation was in a precarious position that winter. There was a new regime, new to Russia and to the world. It had taken over during wartime.

Perhaps the most intriguing figure from that era was Leon Trotsky, writer and orator who was destined in the course of this year and the several following to become a battle-hardened general.

As the year opened, Trotsky was the Foreign Minister for Bolshevik Russia. He was on his way to join in the negotiations with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. He was going to bring discipline to the negotiation team. He was going to bring socialism to the table of generals and diplomats. His strategy was to delay, in hopes that revolution would be sparked in Germany, inspired by the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg.

Though he did miscalculate, it must be said that revolution was indeed to come to Germany, later in 1918. It was the change in regime that would finally lead directly to the general armistice in November.

Trotsky did miscalculate. An impatient Germany resumed their offensive on February 18th, and the Red Army folded. Within days, Russia had lost even more land, and Lenin was forced to accede to German terms. Trotsky abstained from the final vote on the treaty and resigned as Foreign Minister.

Travelogue 787 – January 18
Questions We Ask
Part Two

The water in the canal is choppy as the sea. The clouds are moving with drama. Ahead is the central station. The wind is high today. At the moment, I find it lifts my mood. I lean into it and look at the sky. I imagine Rotterdammers in past centuries leaning into the wind. I wonder how they managed. I contemplated their closer relationship with the cold, in days before central heating and insulation, before public transit and sick leave.

I’m taking a different route to work. That’s because my place of work has changed, and I mean place. Our old building was declared a fire hazard, and so now we’re working downtown. I have to cross over the canal and head east. The wind gusts sharply while I cross the pedestrian bridge. I have to lean. I have to plant my feet. I make it across, and then across the tram tracks on the other side of the canal, tracks set among healthy grass that separates the canal from a parallel street. I’m crossing the street, when the gusts roar with even more strength. Now I’m being pushed down the street. I brace against a car, and then work my way, hand over hand, to the sidewalk. I reach for a lamppost.

There was a woman following behind me on the bridge, pushing her bicycle. Now, she’s been pushed to the ground with her bike, on the tram tracks. Two men have stopped to help her. None of them can move, all three crouching beside the bike on the tram tracks. A tram has stopped twenty metres away. Further down the street, I see a woman thrown face down into the grass of the canal’s park.

Maybe it was the long tutelage as revolutionary, but Trotsky refused to acknowledge that the revolution ever ended. His and Lenin’s would be the first, and it was their responsibility to ensure it didn’t stand alone. He took his seat at the negotiation table opposite the German delegates convinced that the joke was on them. The socialist revolution would overtake them, and soon Trotsky would be making a deal with new, friendly government in Berlin.

There’s every chance that Lenin believed that the Russian revolution was a holding action. Marxist orthodoxy would have suggested it. The real revolution had to start in the most developed nation. That nation was Germany. These were the strange metaphysics of a Russian revolutionary finding himself at war with Germany.

We grow up with questions. We think through questions. The question occupying me now, during this time so fond of its many historical anniversaries, celebrating simultaneously seventy-year remembrances of World War Two and hundred-year remembrances of the First World War, my question has been, why have we been so quiet about the Russian Revolution, one hundred years on? The anniversary was only a few months ago, and I found the sudden silence disorienting.

Is the silence a new measure of perceived impact? At the fifty-year anniversary, in 1967, there was little doubt in the minds of world citizens that the Russian Revolution was pre-eminent among events of the century. Can we really revise significance? Are we setting mid-century European fascism higher in the history game than the Bolshevik Russian state? Is it simply a matter of simplicity? The war against fascism is simply easier to understand. One can assign values relatively quickly. The Russian Revolution is challenging in its bizarre contradictions. As such, I find it to be a sample of real history, something you can chew on.

Travelogue 786 – January 7
Questions We Ask
Part One

Vacation time is coming to an end. One of the joys of vacation time is waking late and then lying in bed, relishing the quiet mornings before anyone else is up. This is my last quiet morning.

In the mornings, the babies are slow to get going. And when they do wake, they are at their sweetest. It’s at night time that they like to terrorize their parents. The busier we are or the more engaged in a movie, the crazier the babies become. They have an infallible feel for where our attention has settled, and with how much intensity. When they want us back, they cry, they climb, they argue, they teeter dangerously on the edge of the sofa cushions.

They claim their turf. I’ve remarked on Baby’s early sense of possession. I still marvel at how quickly babies become territorial. I don’t remember speaking much in the language of possession, or encouraging Baby to label things as hers. But the impulse arises, like instinct. Now I find myself saying lame things, like, ‘You have to share, Baby.’ Because she has developed a habit of taking toys from the hands of her little sister, Ren. Ren looks up at us, her beautiful, round, one-year-old’s face screwing up into despair, and she howls. Baby also looks to us, with an expectant expression, awaiting our judgement. I find Ren’s disappointment heart-breaking because she follows her big sister around all the time with big eyes of wonder and admiration.

We new parents have questions. We ask the questions when we’re tired, and we struggle to concentrate. Babies change so fast that the answers don’t hold for very long. The stages of child development succeed one another at an unforgiving pace.

Just about this time of year, one hundred years ago, Leon Trotsky was making his way west to the frontier of what only months ago was the Russian Empire. He might have felt like a new parent. He had spent almost twenty years as a revolutionary, and suddenly he was one of a very few people at the top of a dizzying ladder of accountability, responsible for holding together a collapsing nation.

As noted, all idealism aside, the most pressing business for the revolutionaries at the end of 1917 was the German army at the door. The Germans kindly agreed to an armistice, ahead in the game of conquest on the Eastern front and grateful for the respite themselves.

Apparently, the negotiators in Brest-Litovsk had a pleasant enough time of it in December. They ate together and socialized outside negotiations. The Russians were cheered by promises by the Germans that they would not annex any territory. Cheered until, some time after Christmas, the Germans added the footnote that all areas in question, some 150,000 square kilometers of formerly Russian territory, were expected to become independent. This was only fair, the Germans argued, as self-determination was ostensibly a Bolshevik principle.

Trotsky decided he had to oversee the proceedings himself. When he arrived, all fraternization stopped. The discussions became philosophical, and the talks extended through the winter of 1918.

Travelogue 785 – January 2
Sounds of War

There is still debris in the streets from the New Year’s celebrations, the cardboard shells of rockets toppled beside their scorch marks on the pavement, wet piles of pink paper that once housed small firecrackers. All the glass at downtown Metro stations is still boarded up in anticipation of vandalism.

The night was a wild one, reminding all the mild peaceniks in this quiet country of the noise of combat. Everyone in our neighbourhood, Spangen, is a fireworks artist. We put the babies to bed well before midnight, but our own sleep was fitful. Outside, the sound of combat carried on for hours, the stormy crackling of the human libido, party lust, perpetrated on Nature’s night. Sadly, our flat is ill-positioned for watching the show. We are set between rows of buildings, and our view is blocked of all but the highest bursts of colour. So it is that all we can enjoy is the sound. Baby shakes her head and knits her brow. She says, ‘Noise!’ and it sounds like ‘No ease!’

One hundred years ago, the new year dawned on a devastated Europe and on peoples desperate for a cease to the roar of guns and cannons. Dawning over Russia, it discovered a brand new government there, a revolutionary government less than two months old, led by fierce exiles who, a year before, were scattered among a handful of tolerant nations to the west. Lenin made a daring journey from Switzerland, through Germany, Sweden and Finland. Trotsky, the revolution’s wild man, had travelled from New York early in 1917, after the first and milder St. Petersburg revolution in March. He spent his summer in jail, but was free in the fall to take a strong hand in the events of November. Where discussion about the Russian Revolution manages to survive, there is a lively debate to be had about whose revolution it was, Lenin’s or Trotsky’s. Lenin arrived for the final act.

Dealing with the war was pre-eminent. It had torn Russia apart. The country had made significant progress in catching up with the industrial powers, but by the time war broke out in 1914, it was still only five per cent of the labour force that was employed in industry and twenty percent of the economy that was industrial. By the second year of the war, the army was able to supply only one in three soldiers with a rifle. The army could supply one surgeon for every ten thousand troops. One in three Russian men was in the army, so agriculture slowed, causing food shortages and crippling inflation. Desertions were high: an estimated two million had left, a number matched by the number of dead.

Having taken control of St. Petersburg in November, the Communists had signed an armistice by mid-December. But discussions about a treaty had bogged down over territory. Lenin and Trotsky disagreed over strategy. Lenin thought any more combat would be too destructive; they could only lose more territory. Trotsky believed in revolution. He believed their own achievements would inspire the workers of Germany to rise in revolution. He fought to delay the signing of any treaty. In January, he took charge of the negotiations himself, travelling to Brest-Litovsk in present-day Belarus.

Travelogue 784 – December 26
The Three Johns

It’s the second day of Christmas, another quiet day of closed shops and families taking to the streets with their strollers. Now that I own a few strollers myself, I greet the holiday with some defiance. Whereas I was simply annoyed by holidays during my long service as a bachelor, now I inhabit them with some pride. And truthfully, a fair share of real appreciation. I was moved this year to essay some modest traditions – tree and gifts and stockings, -- a set of rituals that might withstand the pressures of our schedule and survive to the next year. This effort proved surprisingly successful, and even more surprisingly gratifying. The Scrooge in me suffered a severe blow.

It certainly is nice that there are two days of Christmas in Holland. It allows double the time to meet our obligations to this gilded feestdag, debts to family as well as to that monkey on our backs, entertainment. Either we must entertain or be entertained, or we must simply partake in some artificial entertainment. My wife and I like to make an appearance at a traditional Dutch pub and watch the old-timers surrender to their spirits and dance, if it’s late enough even weaving through the bar in a human chain. It’s not the carols that trigger them, but Dutch pop classics, still sounding to me like modern elaborations of oompah music.

I can’t say it makes much sense, two days in celebration of one birth. Perhaps it was a long labour. In the liturgical calendar, the 26th is also Saint Stephen’s Day. Maybe it became a comfortable habit, holiday after holiday. In England they call it Boxing Day, named for the small gifts for the servants on the second day of Christmas. I like to think of it as Boxing Day. The name has the right degree of obscurity mixed with English silliness.

England has been on my mind. I have one pressing reason for that, which is the approach of my half marathon in Bath. I am in distressingly poor shape, never getting the time for proper training. Though I worry about the race, it’s pleasant to have the calendar’s geography cycle around again. In a couple months I’ll be crossing the Channel again.

If I had the time to make it back to London, I would walk the map of the houses of the Forsytes, those infamous Victorians of Galsworthy’s books. The second volume came with a map, numbering the fictional family’s houses in districts of west London too posh now for Victoria herself, St. James, Mayfair, Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge.

I would also stop by a pub in Angel that I had the honour of visiting last time I was in London. I met Patrick there, along with some of his friends, classmates in his PhD program. We had a good time and the setting was this classic corner pub, one spacious room under a moulded tin ceiling, with wood panelling below brick walls. Inexplicably, there was a portrait of George Washington on one wall. I couldn’t help taking a moment to contemplate the image of that old statesman, the odd drunken meditation in London.

I was just reading about one of Washington’s portraitists, Mr. Charles Willson Peale. The painters of his generation were discovering a new subject, the contemporary revolutionary hero. Historian Joseph Ellis makes the point that painters of the era were influenced by an Enlightenment aesthetic that still colours our perception of the American Revolution, making it a gentleman’s conflict, fought by heroes in serene Acadia, as though war could be fought in stillness, with nothing but one’s dignity. These painters were pioneers in a genre that would become quite sophisticated, starting with Jacques-Louis David during the French Revolution, who could make of stout little Napoleon a hero the Romantic Period.

I had no idea of the history of the Three Johns pub that evening. As it happens, this old watering hole opened in the days of the French Revolution and was still open for business for a stubborn group of Russian exiles in 1903, a group that was meeting to define a revolution they were going to bring to the Romanov Empire.

Travelogue 783 – December 24
Why We Have Holidays

The grey skies herald a day of quiet peace. It’s Christmas Eve. There’s a gentle mist in the sky. The streets are quiet. The cafe is quiet. The Christmas music has been shelved, and we listen to jazz. The shopping frenzy seems to have subsided.

Work deadlines still haunt me, but their voices have withdrawn into the aural shadows, out of respect for the holidays. I’m able to breathe. I sit and listen to Baby tell me stories, recounting some cartoon she’s seen, recalling the characters and their words, and I am not beset by the nervous energy that every day urges me to hide somewhere with my computer and ‘take care’ of things.

I took Baby on our first walk together yesterday. No buggy and no destination. We just put on our shoes and jackets, and we went outside. We walked along the canal behind our building, and we took time to quack back at the ducks. Baby was fascinated by the gravel on the path. She picked up one tiny black stone and held it up for inspection. It’s a rock, I said, and she repeated. She bent over to find another, this time white.

I never tire of these exchanges, these short and essential dialogues, though sometimes I wish I could. They are so deeply satisfying that they are heart-breaking. Each is so brief, and each passes, as though time were looking over my shoulder. I want to hold each like I hold my child, with tenderness and a with a fierce sense of protectiveness, against age and decay. But time has an ally in my baby. She wants to embrace life and growth. So I let go.

We circled under the railway and by the school. There’s a small speeltuin hidden away there, a playground. We entered and found we were alone, a singular luxury in the crowded Netherlands. Again, I found my breath coming back to me, my lungs extending in the rare, relaxed full inhalation, enjoying the damp winter air. Standing behind Baby in her swing, I gazed into the cloudy skies to watch the birds charting their erratic courses. Baby caught sight of the black wings against the soft grey background. ‘Birds!’ she shouted and pointed. She likes naming things.

It’s approaching midday, and still the cafe is quiet. The tables are sparsely occupied. Couples murmur to each other, freed from the stridency of work days. I have some research I need to do for work. I follow a few links, and stumble upon a few engaging items. I read, but only lazily. It’s when the baying hounds of the office calendar are shaken for an interval that you find the fun in the work again. You taste of it, and you put it away. The sights out the window are inviting, people in their coats strolling together, the bikes in repose, the half-light of winter set with a whisper upon the old rooftops.

Travelogue 782 – December 14
The Blizzard

There remain a few vestiges of snowmen, much reduced globes of snow, just the bases of the sculptures assembled by exhilarated families during those two days of snowfall, slowly wasting away now in corners of the courtyard of the apartment complex. In the darkness of pre-dawn, they are mysterious patches of light, glowing with an elfin spirit of deep winter.

If Rotterdammers were once equipped to handle snow, they have lost it during a generation of climate change. Snow now seems to be a once- or twice-per-year phenomenon that consists of a light dusting, children quickly running outdoors to run in circles, look up at the sky, collect snowflakes on their tongues. If an inch falls they frantically collect as much as possible before melt starts, making anaemic snowballs and snowmen.

But this Sunday, it looked like Minnesota here. The snowfall was thick and constant. It left several inches on the ground. The next day, it snowed again. I haven’t seen this type of accumulation before in Rotterdam. The city was overcome. By Monday afternoon, most institutions had thrown in the towel. My school closed at 2pm.

There were no snow ploughs to see. There was very little salt thrown down. Before the first inch had accumulated, Minneapolis would have resounded with the scrape of massive ploughs against the asphalt and the crunch of salt underfoot. Not here. Once the snow turned to rain on Tuesday, the pavements became a lumpy mess of slick and hardened snow. People skated and crept forward toward their transit stations.

The date of our youngest’s first birthday party fell on the first day of snowfall, and by the hour guests were due to arrive the snow swirled outside the windows like another curtain, a kinetic screen of white and silent motion. Our intrepid guests did arrive, stamping feet at the door, folding umbrellas, sniffling and shaking. We did our best to warm them up right away, serving tea and sweets. The girls did their best to entertain. Big sister ran and danced. Once shy with strangers, she has developed a new tendency to ham it up. She performs her new ballet moves and waits for applause.

The birthday girl, by contrast, was peaceful as a judge, surveying the festivities with mild curiosity. She’s awfully cute, this little one-year-old, but there is something of the scientist to her at this age. She walks ceaselessly around the downstairs, picking things up and examining them. She smiles often, but rarely laughs. She plays no games. Her one passion is her big sister, whom she watches with devotion.

Our intrepid guests stayed a while, left gifts, and ventured back out into the weather, our gratitude trailing after them. It was so kind of them to brave the weather that official Holland had chosen to ignore. Fortunately, the snowfall had slowed by the time they left. Down in the courtyard, the resident children were turning circles of wonder, looking up in the sky, collecting snowflakes on their tongues.

Travelogue 781 – December 4
The Season

Tomorrow is Sinter Klaas. This is a Dutch holiday that celebrates Old Saint Nick on his own day, separate from Christmas. In a year in which even Christmas can generate who-cares controversy in my home country – whether saying or not saying ‘Merry Christmas’ is more offensive – this holiday continues to spark real controversy in Holland. The reason is Sinter Klaas’s little buddy, Zwarte Piet, a diminutive black servant in seventeenth-century gear, who clowns around at the old man’s side. During the holiday season, it’s not unusual to encounter people in black-face, dressed up for children’s events or parties. It can be startling at first.

Not too surprisingly, Dutch people of colour feel uncomfortable with this tradition. More surprisingly, lots of white Dutch seem very defensive. There have been efforts to soften the tradition – frame the black-face as soot from the chimneys, or propose a multi-colour Piet, which I think is more fun – but old-style Dutch nationalists insist that Black Pete must be black as Al Jolson or else the foundations of the nation might truly be shaken. I try to avoid these topics in polite conversation. I find it hard to know how exactly to respond to nonsense as doctrine. It’s not my country yet, and when I’m confronted with sentiments about Zwarte Piet, I simply nod like a psychotherapist.

Aside from the little black elf, Sinter Klaas is a great holiday for the children, and if I were organised enough to celebrate anything at this time of year – when, often as not, I’m horribly sick and staggering under piles of corrections from school, - Sinter Klaas it would be. But, sad parent always caught unprepared by the calendar, I have nothing. Instead, Mama and I have been preoccupied with the second baby’s birthday, which occurs a few days after Sinter Klaas, and now always will. I foresee perennial issues. But please, I ask the dull winter skies, just let me get through this first year.

We did manage to take Baby to her first ballet lesson. She has found inspiration from the cartoon ballerina, Angelina the mouse, and she practices turns and foot positions constantly, often looking for our applause. So it is we found ourselves in the ballet studio on Sunday, among a dozen other families. We struggled to keep up with the Dutch of the instructor, and found ourselves alarmed to find out that, during this trial lesson, one parent was invited to participate with the child. Menna quickly withdrew from the field. I stayed. Because I love my daughter profoundly, I stayed, and yes, I turned and flexed my toes and pranced around with her, and with the dozen other little girls, in front of a wall of mirrors, sweating profusely because in the humid atmosphere of the studio. Baby was elated. She couldn’t decide which was more fascinating, the elegant instructor telling stories and demonstrating simple routines, or the other girls, some of whom could not focus at all on the lesson. In the end, she was a wonderful student, showing incredible skill and grace. That is said with all the objectivity of a dad who danced ballet with his baby girl.

Travelogue 780 – November 27
Property
Part Two

Suddenly I wake up with a cold. I call into work sick, and I stay home, dosing and, in between dreams, watching the clouds scud overhead, measuring the splash of rain on the windows. I’m dreaming, as I often do, of absent friends. (They might be saying, ‘You are the one who is absent. You moved away.’) I dream of meetings, and there are so many decisions being made. Everyone is proud. I’m traveling again. I’m staying in rooms that will not stay still. Outside are green hills. When I’m awake, I check the windows, spotted with rain. I worry about my family catching this cold. I imagine Baby’s new possessiveness: ‘Papa’s cold; Baby’s cold.’

My sick book is a collection of mysteries by Philip Kerr, set in late-30s Berlin. The city is in the grip of the Nazis, and the hero is a detective who has to navigate a landscape controlled by the Gestapo and Heydrich’s security forces. He’s tough and sardonic, smokes too much. He takes his lumps at the hands of the bad guys, but still prevails. He’s hard as mails but sensitive, etc. In other words, everything the detective hero should be. He hates the Nazis and doesn’t hide it, but he doesn’t try to fight them. The author takes every opportunity to bring to life the brutality and corruption of the Nazi regime.

It’s hard to believe that only forty years separate the worlds in my dual-track reading. I’ve started the second of Galsworthy’s books about a London family of means in the 1890s. Could the Victorians have imagined a time like Hitler’s, and so close at hand? In their time, royalty and nobility still appeared at the helm of societies across Europe, playing with their alliances, their cavalries, and their navies in preparation for the war that would be their undoing.

The oldest generation in Galsworthy’s fictional family has largely moved on. The second book opens with reference to several funerals. These serve as portents, in a work of fiction replete with portents, of the decline to come. The books are dismal with their continual foreshadowing of decline. It occurs to me there is nothing more modern than this gloomy narcissism with which the bourgeoisie narrates its own imminent death. This and the counterpoised roar of those declaring the new thousand-year regime, whichever fleeting one it may be. Neither voice ever seems to make true its prophecy, nor ever to waver in its unappealing song.

The question of the bourgeoisie and its place in history is still a fascinating one. This sturdy, grey creation of medieval cities and commerce, grown to be the definition of modernity, the property-owning middle class, it survives, despite some of the worst press since the Mongols, despite unreserved contumely from above and below, and despite a long, public and self-indulgent contempt for self.

Have we ever figured out what made them so unbearable? Mussolini condemned their ‘social games, five o'clock tea, vacations, compassion for Jews, preference for armchairs, desire for compromise, desire for money’. These are intriguing polemics to deploy, as though perhaps Tolkien’s hobbits were the army of the Antichrist. And yet, it’s no less than history.

I turn again to the Goncourt brothers, who committed to paper their artist’s complaint against the bourgeoisie of Paris as early as 1860. ‘When society had a hierarchy of orders,’ they wrote, ‘the nobleman, deeply conscious and proud of his rank, did not feel jealous of the man of letters; he conversed with him on familiar terms, because talent did not encroach on his rank or offend his vanity. … A man of letters was a rare bird, whose intelligence and verve tickled delicate, sophisticated minds. Easy-going hospitality, a friendly welcome, flattering attentions did not strike eighteenth-century society as too high a price to pay for the pleasure of a writer’s company.

‘But the bourgeoisie stopped all that. The grand passion of the bourgeoisie is equality. The man of letters offends it because a man of letters is better known than a bourgeois. He arouses a hidden rancour, a secret jealousy. Moreover, the bourgeoisie, an enormous family of active people, doing business and making children, has no need of intellectual discourse: it is satisfied with the newspaper.’

Travelogue 779 – November 20
The Victims of Our Fictions

We took our youngest to the doctor yesterday. It was nothing serious. She’s so eager for life, little one. She started walking absurdly early, and now she walks nearly all day, waddling round in circles, picking up things and handing them to us with a big smile made achingly cute by her one small tooth. She walks so much, she has developed a curve in her small legs, like a tiny cowgirl. The doctor says it’s nothing to worry about. But that’s what we do. It’s virtual definition. We worry. And little one is so eager for life.

I leave so early in the morning, it’s dark. All our windows are dark. I lock the door behind, double-locking it as I turn the key. Facing outward, I breathe in the morning air with child-like eagerness, but, looking back, I worry. I check the door again.

These children are precious things. It’s society’s job to protect them. And still, as I’ve noted, I see imagined children put in harm’s way with disturbing consistency by our writers for TV and film. I can think of half a dozen dramas I’ve seen lately that had threats or harm to children as a central device.

My wife is furious. We’ve made it to the tenth episode in this new series, and things have taken a turn that she didn’t appreciate. The story begins with a child murder, and moves forward from there, every subsequent action a reference to the original murder. The writers cleverly manipulate their audience, wrenching our sympathies first one way and then another. By the end of the season, we are – spoiler alert – tempted to side with the murderer in his struggle with the father, who has become something of a monster. My wife is furious that the father is so relentless. I have to remind her that his boy had been shot and killed.

The star of the series is one of my favourites, Tim Roth. He brings to the role both the blunt force and the ambivalence that make it continually fascinating. One is never quite sure what he is capable of.

Still, it’s the innocent who must suffer, even in fiction, some suffering at the hands of their own callous and mercenary creators. Some suffer at the hands of more delicate creators. I’m finishing the first in the Forsyte series of novels by Galsworthy, the book I’ve written about before, the first in his study of the slow decline of the Victorian bourgeoisie. It’s an oddly cool narrative, built though it is around a passionate extramarital affair. The point of view is removed, placed among family and never with the lovers, often among the eldest generation of the family, who are the ones who built the family fortune. And here too, -- spoiler alert -- a character must finally be done away with, and discarded rather pointlessly, having been maintained at such a distance already by the narrator. It’s less tragedy than riddle. This character was no child anymore, but young.

An interesting, and possibly redeeming, effect is created by the affection of the eldest Forsyte for his small grandchildren, some of the only warmth in the novel. It’s a kind of meeting of innocence, the natural innocence of the children drawing from the old man a vestigial complement. The grandfather, led thus into a purer state, intervenes finally in a touching way, during a long epilogue to the novel, which the author calls an ‘interlude’. It’s actually a beautiful piece, and admittedly not possible without the long and cynical tale of the novel proper.

Travelogue 778 – November 15
Oliphant’s Ear in Old Stamboul

Baby is putting names to the world. She’s gathering her vocabulary. She’s putting simple phrases together, and with these she narrates what she sees. The words come with urgency. She shouts at me to listen. ‘Papa! Papa! Mama’s standing!’ If I repeat, then the observation is confirmed and she is happy.

We watched ‘Ice Age’ last night. She was very taken with the characters. She pointed in her excessively cute way – eyes wide, leaning forward and finger extended in the way of an admonishing teacher, -- and she named the characters upon every time a new scene opened: Oliphant and Baby and Tiger. She learned ‘Sloth’, but wasn’t too confident with it.

The layers of teaching blur for me here. I’m teaching my college-age students the ‘th’ sound. ‘Bite your tongue’, I shout, and they smile with embarrassment. They know me now; they know I’m going to drill them in pronunciation, no matter how much they squirm. I’ve made my apologies. Adult students enjoy pronunciation drills, but adolescents feel too keenly the shame of having so recently been children.

Baby is experimenting with possessives. ‘Baby’s shoes!’ she shouts until I repeat. The baby she refers to is her little sister. ‘Mama’s shoes! Papa’s shoes!’ Corresponding to this bit of grammar is the discovery of relative size; it offers her another point of leverage in her battle for identity. ‘Too big for baby,’ she points out helpfully, pointing to her shoes and her dress. She sings it. ‘Too big for baby.’ And she swings her head left and right in a slow negation.

We watch her movie. ‘Oliphant’s ears!’ ‘Tiger’s ears!’ Yes, yes, we say, affirming all good things. She finds it fascinating. Her wonder awakens ours. Wonder at all the ears in the world. Wonder at our patience.

Mama and Papa made it to a film recently, and that film featured no sabre-toothed tigers, but instead one heavily bewhiskered Kenneth Branagh, performing as Hercule Poirot. The story is a classic, the famous mystery set on the Orient Express. The glamorous sets and costume were fun. The plot twists amusing, and the performances entertaining. But I found myself surprisingly pulled in by the unexpected pathos. Poirot is portrayed as man exactingly and stubbornly principled. It’s a caricature, but still somehow moving. Murder is an abomination and accounts must be settled.

Spoiler alert! Central to the plot is a murder predating the one in the film, and it’s the murder of a little girl. The murder on the train is avenging her death. For me, this becomes a particularly affecting device, pitching Poirot’s principles against the justice performed against another abomination.

Maybe I’m becoming sentimental, but I was grateful to Mr. Branagh for affirming that morality is more than a dry court case. It’s a struggle in the heart. Since becoming a parent, I’ve been upset by the shows and movies and books in which children are harmed simply to heighten dramatic effect. These are ‘only’ products of fiction, but, as I’ve remarked before, I find something to censure there, when an author has no love for his or her creations. I can’t help but lose faith, no matter how fine a wordsmith he or she may be.

Travelogue 777 – November 7
Side Trip

Three-quarters of a moon hangs over Orion’s shoulder. Maybe it’s less. It’s been waning quickly since the last full moon, a moon that I thought I saw full only yesterday, rising over the city in promise. I regret that I’ve lost touch with the cycles of the night sky. Life in Holland is too busy, and the weather too routinely inclement to feel connected to the lunar phases.

The city lights have washed out much of the heat of the stars. It makes them seem even farther away. The lights have washed out most of the detail among the constellations, but I can still make out the bold outline of the Hunter. I can see a few of the stars of Taurus, which lie in the path of the moon. I see the twin stars of Gemini, and the blazing one of Sirius. I scan quickly for the familiar companions of the North Star, the Bear and the proud queen of Ethiopia. I regret that I don’t get to watch the stars circle on a more regular basis. It reminds me, in fact, of Ethiopia, where I took more time to watch the skies.

Now I’m always on the move. Even this quiet morning, I’m taking in the view of night skies while I walk, already on my way to work. We’ve entered the season in which night intrudes upon the day, draws close to us and becomes familiar again.

The neighbourhood was so silent, I was self-conscious about turning on the lights, as though the incandescence might send an echoing report across the courtyard and wake all those souls dreaming behind the black windows. I held off, and I dressed in the dark. We hold darkness in reverence in the northern latitudes. We feel reluctant to challenge it.

As it happens, I’ve left my bicycle at the central station. The weather has been so unreliable this autumn, and my tolerance for rain so low -- dropping in inverse proportion to the seasons accruing to my body, in fact, accelerating as the Dutch seasons pass, -- that I find myself abandoning the bike here and there for collection later. Here I am, strolling up to the tram station, joining the early commuters converging on the resting trams with all the shuffling, blinking energy of the undead.

The café that stands across from the train station feels like it’s a lone outpost, and its clients like sad refugees. One man waits silently for his order, his head bowed in dejection. Another silently stares at his laptop screen. All the tables are empty. Night stands close to the windows, and only the baristas have the energy to defy it, awake in motion. One whistles ‘Qué Será Será’.

My bike is below the station, where I left it, in the echoing vaults of the bicycle ramp. I unlock it, rescuing it from its cold exile among the hundreds of others stacked like aluminum puppets. I join the stream of cyclists outside, everyone pedaling blindly forward. Light has begun to dawn, and the new day presents itself most dramatically by the river. I arrive there by a route past the Havenziekenhuis, and the spaciousness opening over the water comes as a relief. The wide river meanders east, clearing a course to for sun, which is about to rise.

I follow the river side for half a mile or so, and where the road turns away, I follow. But I do break away, to find some peace. I turn off the busy road and pedal though a park to a quiet bike path that rides along the top of a berm, a grassy strip of piled earth like a dyke, but there is no water below, only the tracks of another tram line. I’m coasting alone along this path, and a moment alone outside is such a rare pleasure in Holland, I refrain from pedaling to prolong the interlude. The parked cars below have thin layers of ice on the windows. There is a low fog hanging over the football pitches in the distance. The sun hasn’t risen but its light teases a rich palette of colours from the sky and earth, the windows and the leaves.

Travelogue 776 – November 1
Property
Part One

Now I’m reading John Galsworthy. It’s another book that straddles the turn of the twentieth century. It was written in 1906, but the story is set in the 1880s. It recounts the decline of an upper-class family in Victorian England, and it’s called ‘The Man of Property’. That seems fitting: my extended meditation on Maugham last month produced a question about ownership. Do we own the artist? Do we own their stories? Do we own our own stories?

The man of property in the book’s title is the middle-aged scion of a wealthy family. Members of the Forsyte family seem to have developed over a hundred years of success a uniquely distilled bourgeois consciousness, a psychological lens that measures all in terms of monetary value and possession. The wife of the man of property is dissatisfied. She acquiesced to the man’s marriage proposal in a moment of weakness. Her values are at variance with his, and he is ill-equipped to understand. He resents her restlessness. There’s a new generation coming of age in London, and they value passion. And so on. You see how the Forsytes are being set up for a fall. I haven’t decided whether the author has any love for his characters. He’s rather sarcastic in his narration of their thoughts and dialogue. I usually have little patience for an unsympathetic narrator or author, but something has kept me reading. I like the author’s language. I appreciate the slow build of suspense, even if it’s all too clear who must be sacrificed as grain to the grinding mill of the plot.

The bourgeoisie are hard to like. Certainly we get that by now, and even Galsworthy’s contemporaries must have been well-versed in the principle. The nineteenth century saw the consolidation of the supremacy of the European bourgeoisie, even as the thought of the period represented one long recoil from bourgeois culture, beginning with a revulsion released in the French Revolution. By the time of Galsworthy’s worthy effort, contempt alone was not novel. The task of authors had evolved by then into capturing something of the inevitability of the fall of the hated class, and the decadence that the fall revealed.

It’s made me wonder who can be said to have filled the void left by the bourgeoisie? The proletariat? Was the twentieth century the century of the masses? Would that be demonstrated by the phenomena of fascist Europe and Stalinist Russia, and by the rise of unruly mob called America?

Apparently, the artists of the nineteenth century had reason to hate the bourgeoisie. I came across this passage in the journals of the Goncourt Brothers, dated 1860. Speaking about the lifestyle of their friend Flaubert, they wrote, ‘This forced bearishness of the nineteenth-century man of letters is a strange phenomenon compared with the worldly life of the eighteenth-century man of letters, a life spent in the midst of society, and riddled with approaches, invitations, and connexions, the life of a Diderot or a Voltaire, whom the society of his time went to see at Ferney, or of lesser men, fashionable authors such as Crébillon fils or Marmontel. Approaches to the writer and interest in him ceased to exist with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the proclamation of equality. The man of letters no longer forms part of society, no longer reigns over it, no longer even enters into it. Of all the men of letters I know, not a single one goes into what is called society.’