Travelogue 1006 – October 1
The Power to Surprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 1005 – September 19
How to Enjoy September Sun

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 1004 – September 8
The Present Perfect
Part Thirteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 1003 – September 5
The Present Perfect
Part Twelve

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 1002 – August 31
The Present Perfect
Part Eleven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 1000 – August 19
Interlude: An Even Grand 

Part One

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

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

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

Travelogue 999 – August 13
The Present Perfect
Part Ten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 998 – August 9
The Present Perfect
Part Nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 997 – August 1
The Present Perfect

Part Eight

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 996 – July 17

The Present Perfect

Part Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 995 – July 15
The Present Perfect
Part Six

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 994 – July 13

The Present Perfect

Part Five

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 993 – July 11

The Present Perfect

Part Four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 992 – July 9

The Present Perfect

Part Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 991 – July 7

The Present Perfect

Part Two

Maybe it’s always been that way. Teachers see barbarism at every turn. The older we get, the more apparent the decline of civilization on all sides. We speaking examiners grouse about the impoverishment of our language. Is it true? Is everyday language in decline? I think it’s fair to say that the discourse in press and literature and civil discussion has declined. Is that the cause or the effect of what’s happening to everyday language? There is some agreement among researchers that vocabulary is in decline. Some are blaming social media. Social media and texting demand strict economy in language, whereas conversation is spacious and playful. Vocabulary is built through interaction, not in dreaming up cute captions.

My argument has been that language in decline will affect our experience of the world. An impoverishment among grammatical forms and vocabulary will narrow or simplify our perception of the world and our ability to communicate with subtlety. My example has been verb tenses. With fewer tenses at our disposal, wouldn’t our shared experience of time become more elementary? With fewer types of time, wouldn’t our accounting of time become clumsy? Consider the difference between “He has never been to Paris” and “He never went to Paris”. I’ve seen ample evidence that the latter is becoming an acceptable substitute for the former, as options diminish. Apparently, we’re under some kind of pressure to say things bluntly, so accuracy – and certainly elegance – must drop among priorities. ‘He never went’ is an answer to a specific question, something like, ‘Did he go? (I know he was thinking about it.)’ But instead we answer the general (has he ever been?) with the specific (he didn’t go). This conforms to a general pattern, in which abstraction and the hypothetical are sacrificed for the ever more concrete and personal.

A few more examples of starved grammatical forms might illustrate my point. Conditional statements have four fundamental forms in English, plus a few extra ‘mixed’ forms. We examiners have noticed that those six-plus forms have been reduced in everyday usage to two. Most commonly we hear the ‘zero’ conditional, all in the simple present, and an incorrect variety that deploys two ‘woulds’; e.g., ‘if I would go to school, I would learn a few things.’ The latter corresponds to a growing confusion about the difference between ‘will’ and ‘would’. ‘Imagine aliens landing tomorrow. That will change everything.’

Conditionals explore our relationship with the unreal: you would be a fool to quit that job; Hillary would have been a great president; etc. The decline in these usages offer further evidence of the deterioration of our capacity for abstraction. And this when faith in the scientific method is at its lowest since the days of the Inquisition.

Cohesive devices (for example, in fact, therefore, however, moreover, etc.) lead us through the logic of longer utterances, a function altogether useless in social media caption culture. In the new world, nothing worth saying takes longer than a sentence.

In sum, according to my Chicken Little interpretation, we’re losing degrees of time, we’re losing abstraction, and we’re losing cohesion. All is in the present. Nothing exists in any state but the concrete and real. And everything worth communicating can be delivered in single, disconnected, declarative sentences.

Travelogue 990 – July 5
The Present Perfect

Part One

Please forgive the digression. I will return to the topic of Hilary Mantel ….

We are speaking examiners at a local language centre, conducting the speaking portion of English certification exams. Between sessions, we talk. Sometimes we even talk about language.

My colleague is a polyglot. She speaks Dutch, and so she has many opportunities to measure students’ language deficiencies in both English, their acquired language, and in Dutch, their mother tongue. How well do they align?

“Why can’t they get this?” teachers sometimes wonder. We assume that learners’ blocks arise from our flaws, bad judgement in lessons or in teaching style. My colleague tells me she has found, in trying to explain English vocabulary in Dutch, some surprising gaps in vocabulary in students’ own language. Learners are limited by what they bring into the learning experience. New concepts rely on old concepts. And language, like most skills, requires some equipment being in place.

Grammatical forms reflect conceptual thinking. We created verb tenses, for example, to offer variety and nuance in the communication of time. When did it happen? Is it over and done? Did it take a long time? Where is it in a sequence of events? Is our emphasis on the event itself or on its impact in the present?

I’m no linguist or philosopher, but I think it’s natural to ask whether thought happens without language. Will someone whose mother tongue has two tenses think about time the same way as someone whose mother tongue has twelve? Within a language group, what intellectual differences develop between those who are well-trained in a language and those who are poorly educated in the same language? Does someone with twice the vocabulary see the world in a more nuanced way?

A culture may have forged tools for thought that individuals within the culture don’t have access to. Say a generation drops the usage of the perfect tenses. Those tenses exist in the toolbox for the culture, but the individuals have no handy access to it. Does our experience of the past, for example, become shallower? Without the perfect tenses, does the past becomes more starkly separate from us? Does the past become a series of discreet events without continuity? These would be subtle things, but nonetheless with consequence. Never having been exposed to perfect tenses, you could be forgiven for not seeing the use for them. For example, the subjunctive mood in English has largely withered away, and we’ve done without it for a long while. Now, when we English speakers study Latin, with its rich subjunctive mood, we wonder why this elaborate structure was ever necessary. We don’t recognize its utility.

I think this is generally the human response to sophistication. Across cultures or among individuals, we tend to study each other and wonder how the other could be so captivated by some strange pursuit or by the development of some skill beyond our understanding.

(On a related note, I’ve often thought that we write time travel scenarios simply to congratulate ourselves. The medieval philosopher would be so impressed with us, we tell ourselves. In fact, he would hold a smart phone in his hands and wonder, “Why?”)

Travelogue 989 – June 23

Time and History

Baby still confuses yesterday and tomorrow. She tells stories about what happened ‘tomorrow’, and we still get confused, though she has made this substitution for months. Our confusion is as telling as hers. It speaks to how deeply the constructs of time have become rooted. She’s clearly talking about a past event, and we get snagged on the one word. I’m not saying we can’t quickly make the adjustment in our heads; it’s just that the word stands out so sorely for us, like a jinx on time. From her perspective, it might be just as confusing that we are so adamant about this differentiation, time for her being one muddy reservoir for all the things that aren’t here now. When the girls were smaller, they used to hypothesize futures in which Mama and Papa were small and they were big, or when they would be babies again. Forward and backward were fluid and interchangeable.

Summer arrived in a haze worthy of Baby Time. The heat spell had run its course already. Clouds had gathered, and the longest day of the year was dim, cool and overcast. They still equate the season with sunshine, soe when I say, it’s summer now, Little Ren replies, “I can’t see the sun.” If Baby had a stronger grip on the concept of time as a river, unidirectional and subject to Renaissance-like measures of perspective, she might have objected that summer had already happened, and had actually only recently ended. The sun had shone, and then it had left. Why hadn’t we gone to the beach while it was summer? With more of a sense of continuity, she might have given me a good debate. But tide and time are still jumbled; things happen without order. That I would say that now it’s summer is like offering up nonsense.

A while ago, during the winter, I believe, I was writing about historical fiction. I have considered gathering those thoughts into one long essay, but, aside from my own laziness, other obstacles that have held me back. One is that it’s a subject that never ends. I never had a chance to comment on one huge project from the winter and spring, the first book of Colleen McCullough’s series on the late Roman Republic, recommended to me by Carolyn. That first book, a thousand pages long, reviews Marius’s glory years, between 110 and 100 BC, and there’s a lot I could say about it. That’s especially true in the context of my historical fiction winter, when I was reading “Julian” and Caesar’s “Gallic Wars”. But I didn’t. There’s never enough time, and McCullough’s achievement was a bit overwhelming.

My second obstacle in closing even an ad hoc discussion of historical fiction was the obvious lacuna, the author left out of the discussion. Any current discussion about historical fiction that didn’t include Hilary Mantel seemed incomplete. With her “Wolf Hall” series and “A Place of Greater Safety”, it seemed to me she’d changed and illuminated the genre. But I hadn’t read anything of hers in a few years. That has changed, as I have finally laid my hands on the third book in the “Wolf Hall” series about Thomas Cromwell, “The Mirror and the Light”. I’ve had some unexpected reactions to that book, and so maybe it’s time I try to comment on Mantel.

Travelogue 988 – June 6
Inside the Café

Yesterday some cafes opened for indoor seating. It was good timing for two reasons. I had to work the entire Saturday as an examiner downtown. Now I had somewhere to go during breaks: across the square to the Coffee Company. And, to make the visit all the more enjoyable, the weather offered only clouds and chill. It was our one relapse into May weather this week. Even with the cold, most customers were choosing to sit outside, so the inside was both warm and quiet. It’s a small space, dominated by one long, chunky wooden table. Along the ample floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides are divan-style couches, a long line of cushions. The tables there are just trays are short stands. I sat there by the window and set my espresso on a tray. I watched the traffic outside. I leafed through the Groene Amsterdammer, a venerable old Dutch magazine that always has something interesting to read. I should say, to apply my weak language skills to. This week, there’s an article about forgotten authors. It’s amazing that, after a lifetime of reading, there are still names I don’t know. Not that I claim to be exceptionally well-read. I love reading, and I’m curious. Even reading the short bios of authors is fun for me. It’s rewarding to see that my weak Dutch is up to at least this much. My break time is short: the perfect interval for an espresso. One might think that the espresso was invented just for this, a tasty shot of life to be taken while absorbing a few paragraphs of news. Before standing, I take a moment to appreciate the occasion: I’m having a coffee inside a café! Who would know this would become such a rare treat? Anyone who has known me for any time would be forced to wonder how I survived this year and a half of COVID time without cafes. I wonder myself.

Travelogue 987 – June 2

Knee High

It rained nearly every day in May. Now that the sun has reappeared, we are surrounded by a rich green. Every park, every margin by the road radiates spring colours. Where the grass has been allowed to grow, it has reached knee high. It is sprinkled with wildflowers. The red poppies are just starting to bloom. It is lovely.

The sheep have made their entrance this year. Every spring, they are imported into the neighbourhood to cut back the grass. Temporary fencing is put up, and they are moved from one patch of public land to another, chewing their way through weeks of wild growth, leaving behind them yellow nubs and – as my girls point out every chance they get – lots of poop. I’m enjoying the high grass before the sheep get to it. When I can, I take a walk along paths bound by these high grasses on both sides. It’s very peaceful.

Little Ren continues to enjoy a peak of cuteness. She’s become very girlie and very sweet. She likes getting hugs and kisses. She loves her family. Her older sister is over it already. When I pick them up at school, Little Ren lights up when she sees me, and her big sister just frowns as though I showed up late and without any candy. Big Sister has her moments, to be sure, but she is well past the phase of those simple, sweet behaviours.

Little Ren holds out a closed hand and asks me to guess what’s in it. I guess silly things, and she explains very earnestly why it can’t be what I’ve proposed.

“Is it a grape?”

“No, the grapes are in the refrigerator, father.”

“Is it a ball?”

“A ball is too big, father!”

“Is it sheep poop?”

“Father! Sheep poop would be too smelly!”