Travelogue 747 – April 13
Making Books

Electricity has returned to the wijn bar. Customers cheer. Enough of the Ethiopian experience survives in me to temper my response. All this happens on a different register for the Dutch. The music resumes. Perhaps that is more comfort than the light to generations raised with earphones. The interruption is unsettling; one can’t be sure one is having fun unless the music says so. Ethiopia has been good conditioning for me, a culture of interruption to scramble the programming. It’s liberating for those of us bred to be cyborgs.

I pack away the magazines. The evening is just beginning. I have a ticket to see author Michael Chabon speak at one of the local bookstores. It’s the biggest bookstore in town, meandering across the entire ground floor of a large building facing the busy Coolsingel. It’s after hours; the doors are looked. A solitary employee is stationed by the door to let in people with tickets. We are guided through wide open spaces lined with bookshelves toward a central room set with chairs and stage.

We ticket-holders are a select crowd. We check each other out, with all the affection and hostility of extended family. We are bookworms, writers, and culture junkies. Some of us are comic book aficionados, drawn by Chabon’s forays into that special realm. We chose our seats with care. We pose by the display tables. There is some posing with the interviewer and moderator, a young author who apparently cuts a fine figure among local literary circles.

Once the show gets going, I recognize with a smile the interviewer’s distinctly Dutch style of questioning, brusque and eager for every tangent. Mr. Chabon handles it well, with appealing humility and openness. He discusses his new book, writing styles, his distinct subject matter, and working with his author wife. If it weren’t for his unnerving resemblance, with the coke-bottle glasses and the querulous high treble in his voice, to a particularly repellent member of the board I worked for until recently, I would have thoroughly enjoyed his company.

I reflect on these communities we drift along through and along with, and how these communities define us in pinwheel fashion, giving us our chameleon colours as we progress through our days. I’ve been contemplating this little bit of commentary that takes a look at how politics changes with the multiplication of identities. We are loath to admit how much democracy has historically relied on homogeneous blocks of identity, and how fragile democracy is proving to be in the age of heightened individualism.

It’s a sort of intrusion of politics that finally convinces me to leave the lecture. Chabon is clearly very experienced in interviews. He is resolute in taking no risks. I don’t blame him. I’ve noticed how sensitive people have become, so easy to wound. It has become a persistent danger to anyone in the public eye. It’s as though the enrichment of individuality has only accomplished a taut stretching of our thin skins over more surface area. We are many-faceted targets.

It’s getting late, and I’m thinking about my babies. After his engaging thoughts about the Holocaust in arts – worded with excruciating and exhausting care – I find there isn’t much more to excite me. I slip out of my seat and go in search of the lonely guardian of the door. It’s true night now; there are no traces of the spring sun in the west. I’ve forgotten where I locked my bike. I walk up and down the Coolsingel, breathing deeply of the cool air.

Travelogue 746 – April 12
Making Lists

I cycle down to the Meent. I have some time between engagements. I have a mind to stop in at a favourite wijn bar. What I want is a place to read.

I stop on a quiet street, not far from the cathedral. There is a row of small cafes here, all carrying forward a tradition of simple tastes and quiet relaxation. The décor is subdued, the interiors both dark and light, big windows and dark wood.

I lock up the bicycle and enter. It’s a week night, and there aren’t many people. Something is up. It’s unusually quiet. The few patrons have a stunned look about them. They look at me as though sharing a joke. I take a seat, and I extract my magazines from my rucksack.

I’m slow to figure out what has happened, but it does seep in. They are talking about it, and the language filters in. The lights have gone out on this block. One of the servers is lighting candles and deploying them, though it’s still light out. The barkeep from next door rushes in to assure everyone he has called the city.

I shrug. It’s all the same to me. Spring has brought long hours. There is still plenty of sunlight to read by. Out my window, the sun is hanging over the shoulder of the cathedral.

My first article is an unfortunate choice. It’s enjoyable because it’s well-written, but the subject is loss and grief. I have been spending so much time in this emotional territory lately, I’m vulnerable to the underlying despair.

I set the magazine aside, and I stare out the window at the narrow lane outside. I feel the weight of the subject matter settle inside of me, and I take a minute to acknowledge what I’ve done to myself. I’ll be paying for this for a few days. There’s a nightmare coming.

What’s more, the article was written was written by a woman who has lost her father. This will work to layer my new anxieties about fatherhood on top of the existing layers of grief. I’m beginning to realize there is no ‘working this out’. One premise behind years of scribbling has been proven false. I am still editing pages for publication from among of the hundreds written about this stuff. At least I can take pride in how diligently I have pursued the premise.

The realization has been a very long process, maybe because I have imagined healing to be a long process. By the time the rainbow dissipates, stranding one far from any pot of gold, many irretrievable miles have been travelled. One settles in a new country.

It’s an American publication I’ve been reading. I’m wondering if mood is an American specialty, soul-drenching mood, sorrow and melancholy, rages and fits of insanity. It’s not that other nations have no struggles with the spectre of death, but could it be that Americans of a certain generation have taken it personally? Is it the shadow of our post-war optimism?

I’m discovering that parenthood sharpens this struggle. The stakes are higher. I must teach hope. I have observed that hope tends to reward itself, and hopeful people have happier lives. I refer to real hope, not the hope bred of desperation.

I sense – probably wrongly – that Europeans do see things differently. I sense that the world consists of more facts, and is less saturated with mood. I sense that Freud’s (and his followers’) theories were indeed revolutionary, but were processed in the mind first, rather than in the heart. Existentialism fuelled discussion, rather than lonely despair.

I set the magazine aside. I use the balance of my time to write lists. Lists are wonderful restorative devices. Inventories of names are a tonic to depression. Death teaches the insignificance of things. Names teach significance. It is not the job of the void to assign value to things of substance.

Every day Baby learns a new name. I have to keep up.

Travelogue 745 – March 28
Counting Steps

And so I lick my wounds after the half marathon, and I return to my routine in Holland, even as spring dawns. The weather has been a sudden tonic for winter, and people have been beside themselves, making every step a celebration. The skies are alarmingly blue, and the sun brings us warmth.

And so a winter training season ends with a spring run. The skies have broken open. When I ride the bike into work in the morning, the sun has risen. The birds are singing. By the time I get a chance to run, the pavements beyond the protection of shadows is warm. I regret the long sleeves. I have company in new runners, lured by the spring into fleeting hopes of sweaty fun.

I bring the injury back into training, and slowly it disappears, a Cheshire grin of pain. I have slowed the training down, but I must continue. I am scheduled to run another distance for charity, this time as part of a relay team of colleagues in the Rotterdam Marathon. It will, thankfully, be a shorter run.

Running is an opportunity for reflection. I reflect on the long stretches of road in Bath, unusual for England in their straight lines of sight, chosen by the marathon committee to unnerve native-born Brits, who would rarely have run a straight line for miles in this way. There’s something like achievement in turning corners. The sight of distance can drain away momentum.

I had made it to the final straightaway, leading back into town on the second loop, when my hip went into meltdown. In that circumstance, the distance ahead was taunting. I started walking.

I think of the winding roads outside Bath, riding along them in Pey’s car, struggling with car sickness. I’m sitting on what should be the driver’s side, and I’m watching whatever I can see in the high beams of the little auto. Most of what I see is alarmingly close. The landscape is as compact as the car, the little stone walls racing by just beyond the bumper, other cars breezing bay with inches to spare. We are turning, rising and falling, all at once, and I am battling to keep my stomach in place.

We are traveling to Trowbridge, where we will sit in a poetry group. I will sip tea with some desperation for the first half hour, hoping to calm my tummy. But as the nausea recedes and I listen, I discover with some delight that this is good stuff being shared. My memories of poetry readings from my youth has prepared me for embarrassment and boredom. These people are good. They are lively and intelligent, and they know their poetry.

I leave inspired, even if a little disheartened by the prospect of another harrowing ride home. I write every day, even without much faith in writing. This renews my faith. Their faith is contagious.

I write every day, and lately I am rounding off the editing work on a book I hope to self-publish within a matter of weeks. This book forms the second and connecting link among three works that capture some themes from my life, specifically from what forms now the middle part of my narrative, those years begun in Minnesota and carrying me to Ethiopia.

It’s funny. The more I try to narrate ‘life’, the more I think there is no such thing. There are only details. And, as I’ve recently said about sport, one can only take detail lightly in order to take it seriously. It makes no sense as meaning unless dismissed as meaning. One writes and reads about detail simply for the fun of it, and then somehow a sense of import dawns on one. But it rarely unfolds, blooms, (like spring,) into an explicit, simple, readable text.

I’ve returned home with blue skies commencing. I ask the Gryphon to lead me to someone with a story. The Mock Turtle looks at us with large eyes full of tears, saying nothing.

'He wants for to know your history, she do,' says the Gryphon.

'I'll tell it her,' says the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone. 'Sit down, both of you, and don't speak a word till I've finished. When we were little,' the Mock Turtle is still sobbing, 'we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle — we used to call him Tortoise — .'

Travelogue 744 – March 13
Halted Steps

There are those moments in a long road race when you are empowered to make time stand still. You are compelled to make time stand still. It’s meditation forged in a furnace, a deep mining of the present moment by agency of pain.

Except for the first mile and the last mile, the course of the Bath Half pursues a loop west to a bridge that crosses the Avon out past the city limits, where the town has given way to open fields, and following another road back into town. The race completes that loop twice before running by the train station, through Widcombe, and down Great Pulteney Street to the finish. That loop makes for four long straightaways, first west and then east, long and flat stretches of road that test the will.

‘It's always six o'clock now,' says the Mad Hatter mournfully. Time (Him, not It, the Hatter has clarified,) Time won’t allow the hour to advance past six. ‘It’s always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.'

This is the chosen curse of Mr. Time, in the mad science of the Hatter. Make him mad and he will stop the clock. Why do we (more or less) sane mortals daydream about stopping time? Maybe it’s simply because we want to sleep, or read more than headlines. But in Wonderland, this is a punishment particularly galling, especially when you can’t complete tea time to satisfaction.

In our world, runners stop time in order to complete the race. It’s a paradox among endurance sports: we perform feats that are measured by time, so we must dismantle time. The race becomes a set of steps. And each one is a still shot of the asphalt underneath, of that guy just ahead of you, of the furthest visible point ahead. It becomes a chronicle of single, noisy breaths. For an older runner like me, it’s like a medical file, monitoring a variety of systems. How are those ankles, those knees? Lungs, heart, stomach?

And then there’s the recurring question, ‘What am I doing here?’ That needs constant contemplation. There are so many angles to explore. When is sport trivial? When is sport madness? The answers are almost universally matters of perspective. Take it lightly, and sport has merit and meaning. Take it seriously, and become ridiculous. Yes, it’s madness.

They say Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the nineteenth-century Oxford don writing as Lewis Carroll, had a special sympathy for children, particularly little girls. It could be that ‘sympathy’ was not the right word. Either way, he enjoyed the company of children, and enjoyed the kind of repartee that children partake in, the word play, the irreverence, the quick moods and emphatic declarations, the will to subjectivity.

‘We’re all mad here,’ says the Cheshire Cat. ‘I’m mad. You’re mad.’

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”

I’m keeping a decent pace. I’m not on course to break my record, but I’m not far off it, either. Then comes Mile Ten. Every long race has its wall. For the half marathon, it’s Mile Ten. I put in many long training runs before the race with nothing more than the spectre of Mile Ten to goad me forward, the anxiety of the imagined pain. But no preparation will save me this time. My hip suddenly starts in with a steady and deep, debilitating ache. I have to stop.

I stop, and I calculate. What am I capable of doing now? The time is gone, but is the race? I walk, testing the hip. I slowly start running again. It’s painful, but if I keep it slow, maybe. I carry on for no more than half a kilometre before I have to stop again. I won’t let myself pull out of the race. I think of my athletes in Ethiopia, and I’m ashamed. I have to finish.

So this is how I make it to the finish line, some 15 minutes off the time I should have had. But I arrive in one piece, and I celebrate nonetheless. Anything less would be madness.

Travelogue 743 – March 12
Many Steps

‘It’s HIM,’ the Mad Hatter says. ‘If you knew Time as well as I do, ….’

I began the day of the race with some drills out in the rain. At seven, I jogged up to Alexandria Park and did a few circuits, alternating between fast and slow, warming up for the ordeal of the race. The park occupies the top of a hill, and there is a circular drive there, about half a kilometre in length. It climbs steeply, then drops. Running round it is a good warm-up. I build up to some speed. Time is, after all, the measure of today’s success.

I’ve been re-reading Alice(‘s Adventures) in Wonderland. The Tim Burton film was on TV before I left for England. Alice’s story seemed rather liberally re-interpreted in the film, but it had been many years since I read the book. In point of fact, I didn’t remember there being much of a story to Alice in Wonderland at all. Hadn’t that been one of its charms?

After my morning drills, I ate with Pey and her family. I took an hour to rest, completely off my feet. I read a few pages from Alice. ‘I dare say,’ the Mad Hatter objected, `I dare say you never even spoke to Time!' The little girl wasn’t sure how to answer.

Lewis Carroll – actual name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson -- published this little story in 1865. Before it was ever written down, the story was told to entertain the three young Liddell sisters (including Alice) while rowing one summer day up the Isis River in Oxford. Mr. Dodgson was a professor in mathematics and logic at the university. That a logician should come up with the age’s nonsense tale seems to me lovely.

I’m here to raise money for my athletes in Addis Ababa, a place far down the rabbit hole of north-south disparity. I’ve set a nonsense goal, a new time to beat an old time. Nonsensically, I allow it to rattle me, to make me nervous. I’ve been training toward this nonsense time for months, and it’s been strangely effective in motivating me. I’m in very good shape.

‘I know I have to beat time when I learn music,’ Alice says. The Hatter warns her, ‘He won't stand beating.’

Pey and I start down the hill toward town. She’s accompanying me to the race start. I’m feeling fragile as we approach the steep staircase down Beechen Cliff. ‘Maybe I could do this thing tomorrow?’ I wonder. Pey advises me that they will disqualify me. Why this day? Why this distance? I ask all the questions that make sport seem genuinely silly. And not only am I running, but raising money for runners and perpetuating the nonsense. So it goes. Life is a very serious matter until one attends the details.

I’m safe among the crowds of runners in the starting gate. The race will begin in five. We stretch and jump to keep warm. We joke with each other and wave to spectators. Phones are raised high to snap pictures of the thousands of competitors. It will take us almost five minutes to reach the starting line, slowly surging forward, and we’re among the first groups to start. In an hour, the same people bouncing left to right and smiling in anticipation will be lost somewhere in the second loop of the course, suffering and urging him- or herself forward with every step, perhaps with a mantra like mine, ‘Never again.’ Every so often, police will wave them to the side to allow passage of an ambulance.

‘Suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons,’ says the Hatter. ‘You'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!’

Travelogue 742 – March 11
High Steps

The youngest trees are budding here on Beechen Cliff in Bath. It’s spring. The morning air is still, fresh and damp. I have to stop at the head of the stairs. I pause because the stone staircase down the steep hillside is daunting, I know, from years’ experience how jarring they are, the steps spaced unnaturally. I want to take a breath. I want to stretch. I set my back pack down and exercise my aching back. I’m only freshly out of bed. I was so eager to enjoy the morning, I set out immediately after waking.

I take a deep breath, exercising my lungs. They are going to be put to the test tomorrow, when I run the half marathon. I’ve been having some trouble with those trusty old organs of breathing. I have asked a lot from them in this long life. They have lived in some of the planet’s most polluted cities. They have run. They have performed quite faithfully despite debilitation in childhood, due to asthma and repeated illness. This week, it feels like I have some minor infection, inhibiting full expansion. I stand at the head of the stairs and I fill my lungs. I undertake some easy stretches.

My senses are sharp. I am aware of the miracle of this morning, the concatenation of miracles. For one thing, I am back. I have been writing about return, in my piece about Grace. At my age, life seems like stories of return and recurrence. This place, both Bath and the cliff above it, are sacred places of return. I have been here so many times, standing under the high pines, pausing just like this, to catch my breath on the stairs, to listen to the birds, to absorb the stillness of the small wood, so often free of human disturbance, a place made for pause among the activities and travels.

Another miracle is the sensation of being rested. I have slept eight hours straight! If I didn’t have the race tomorrow, I wouldn’t know what to do with this renewed energy. With twenty-one kilometres to run on the morrow, the answer is, conserve it. Tuck it away and protect it, like gold. And what to do with this clarity of mind? The answer is, calculate how long it’s been since I had eight hours of sleep. I try and I can’t. I will need another eight hours to have full brain power. I’m content to enjoy the hushed scene of slender tree trunks soaring past me into the fog of the early morning. That seems the best use of heightened perceptions.

I pick up the old rucksack again, throwing it over my shoulder. I start carefully down the decline, employing a kind of sideways, swinging gait to minimize the impact of the high steps. I remember the days when I could jog all the way down. Reaching further, I remember days when I could jog up. Age is measured in pain.

At the bottom, I’ll follow the walkway down, through the old churchyard and then to the river. Pey has told me about a great new bakery by the bus station. I will have a huge pain aux raisins with an espresso.

Travelogue 741 – March 2
Reading

I’ve been editing. I’ve been a long time editing. As the atmosphere condenses, as late winter broods and struggles with itself, wrestles with its shadows and its showers, I’m reading and revising. I have another book to get out the door. Most of the stories I wrote years ago. There’s been so much to do.

The spring birds have begun singing in the courtyard of my apartment complex. I hear them when I leave the flat, as I take my first breaths of the day’s fresh air. I love that one moment of the day. It is unique, and it’s precious, the taste of fresh morning air. It’s the taste of being alive. It renews my choice for this place by the sea, even during times of trial. Now the birds of spring have returned.

It’s less often that I’m leaving the house in darkness. Night is retreating.

I hear the cry of ‘Boek!’ Baby has developed a passion for books. She cries for them, cries if we don’t have time to read them aloud. She sits and recites from them for her stuffed animals, jabbing one chubby finger at the open page.

‘Where is the boek?’ Mama asks, and Baby stops, suddenly alert. She runs to the cabinet where we keep her books. She pulls at the door. We laugh. ‘Panda, panda,’ we read. ‘Wat zie jij daar?’

There are more words. They wrap round me when I’m tired. I want this done by month’s end. I am editing the final piece, a short memoir piece about my mother. Three brothers are there. They stand above the wild surf in Oregon, and they are releasing ashes into the waves, releasing words in memoriam into the salty spray and the roar of the violent ocean. It is all I can do to make this scene cohere.

I’ve written a lot about survival. ‘Survive’ is a transitive verb, whether one uses it as such or not. One survives something, and that something is meant to harm. One survives someone, and that someone did not survive the things that harm. Survival, when treated as an intransitive, is a celebration. I have not overcome its transitive nature. That is survival’s shadow. It casts one in darkness, and in that darkness it can be difficult to concentrate.

The ocean spray, water’s intention cast upon stone, waves disintegrated, lines the boulders with slick sea water. I remember that much. Those stones underfoot have uneven and sharp edges, and the brothers are struggling for balance. In quick flashes, they may observe themselves. It is comic. And it’s also unbearably sad. The one occasion for remembrance is rendered another silly story. It is freighted with detail. But detail is the stuff of living, and it makes fools of us all. There is beauty in being a fool.

It is all I can do to make this scene cohere. That’s the truth, while it’s happening. It never did cohere. The written word gathers the shards and splinters of it, lovingly places them in neat rows and catalogues them. The order achieved is no order. So why?

The rivers surface is choppy. One sees the wind cross over the rippling puddles. And the spray from the sky, leaving ephemeral patterns there, drops quickly passing. The spring is born from such turmoil. I am tired. The wind on my shoulders requires so much effort. I bend to it; I set myself to the day’s mundane journeys. The afternoon is gloomy. It darkens so. The rain catches me before I’m home. I stand outside one extra minute, too tired even to get out of the weather. The birds have retreated to their nests. Inside mine, I stand a moment without shedding even my backpack. Baby comes to look up into my face.

It’s evening. The lights inside are yellow, a low flame held in stasis. We hear the wind outside. Tiny Baby’s fingers are cold.

‘Boek!’ She says. Her voice is sure. Okay, Baby. Come close. ‘Panda, panda, wat zie jij daar?’

Travelogue 740 – February 21
Two!

Baby says new words almost every day. Yesterday, she repeated her own name for the first time. We were drawing, and I spelled out her name for her. I’ve done it before, but this time she repeated it when I read it out loud.. She said her name.

Her excitement was nothing compared to ours. Mama rushed in from the kitchen. But Baby was already tiring of the game. It’s funny how the little things begin to count for so much. She is saying her own name! And I marvel at it. I briefly wonder what it means to her. Names suddenly appear so ephemeral and arbitrary. How does we take these words to oneself, fashion identities from them?

All words are being re-invented. Some of her first words: cold, lekker (delicious in Dutch,) joro (ear in Amharic). She counts to three now, with some assistance. She and I recite the numbers to each other. She seems most taken with two. She wants to start there. She points at any number, and she says two. I point to numbers and name them. She looks up at me and she thinks. Says, ‘Two.’

Everything she says, she says in a tender baby accent. She wants us to say it over and over, while she repeats it. She plays with the pronunciation. And she never says it quite right. She smiles with excitement.

What is the difference, after all? Five looks like a backward two. Three is the bottom twisted the other way. Eight connects all the lines. Why? Play that game where you repeat some word until the meaning fades and the sound begins to sound ridiculous. I think numbers are most vulnerable to degenerating into nonsense. What is a number? Why do they follow each other this way, each a product of the arbitrary ‘one’? Is there something inherent in the sound or symbol of ‘one’, or ‘two’, that fits it to its place? No, each dissolves into nonsense. And then, as soon as you turn your back, they re-constitute themselves. Numbers are durable as atoms.

‘One … tree,’ she shouts and she jumps into my arms. I lift her up in the air, so she can scream. When I put her on the ground, she retreats and repeats. ‘One … tree,’ and charges. She hasn’t put the names of the numbers together quite yet, but she has discovered the fun of the countdown.

I don’t remember learning numbers. Baby won’t. None of us remember, I suppose. But the numbers enter our minds, and I’m guessing they form there one of the early structures for logic, order and thought. What colours and shapes do these forms take in the inchoate mind of the child? Will two always be yellow, and four green? Do the numbers march in succession, left to right? Or does each appear freely, ballooning like cartoons before the mind’s eye?

Does this zone of pre-thought form one province of the unconscious? Do our precious numbers float there among so many other impressions brought on board before we had thought? Do they always thereafter speak to us of a thousand other ingredients from the dark? As adults, we will return to numbers with some wonder. We will sense a mystery around them, and sometimes form theories that numbers have mystical qualities to them.

I’ve been reading about the Early Moderns in Europe, whose science and mathematics changed everything. They taught us that mathematics was the language for understanding the universe. I find that an appealing thought. I’m sure I’m not alone. We’ve wrestled with the uncompromising laws of maths and found in them something to admire and respect. Life is like that, we think, precise and unbending in its laws. We learn about pi, and we slowly realize that it occupies its place like a monument. And we learn that some monuments have no corporal existence. They are abstract. Civilization shares a mind, and in that mind are monuments of absolute value. How is that possible?

It will be easier for Baby, I’m guessing, having been born into the computer age. Information is a parallel realm of disembodied thought, built from thought matter provided by mathematicians. Maybe abstractions have become easier.

It’s said that René Descartes was a sickly child. The teachers at his boarding school allowed him to stay in bed until noon. He followed this pattern for much of his life. He lay in bed dreaming about numbers. One morning he watched the progress of a fly across his ceiling, and he asked himself how he would describe the fly’s position mathematically. He realized that any position could be described by any two numbers, along a vertical axis and a horizontal one, once you defined one point of reference, say, the corner of the ceiling.

This thought experiment became the basis of Cartesian coordinates and analytical geometry. These, in turn, became a foundation for calculus and then the imaginings of modern physics, drafting geometries we can’t see, pictures of the universe that can exclusively be described by mathematics.

This is how we construct worlds from numbers. These are fantastical dreams. I wonder what the Greeks would have thought of relativity and gravity wells and quantum mechanics, elaborations on reality that describe no phenomenon that any man or woman has ever experienced. Would Plato have decided these mathematical dreams were the incorporeal forms that informed the imperfect world?

Every day, Baby is learning. I can’t describe it. I couldn’t direct it or stop it, even if I had the will. It’s nature, and it’s wondrous. ‘One, two, three,’ and she jumps in my arms.

Travelogue 739 – February 13
The View from the Gym

I’m not going far, only as far as the gym. Today was supposed to be my long day, the day I put in a couple hours running the roads. But there’s still too much snow on the ground. I’m better off cycling through the slush than trying to run through it for two hours. My shoes would be soaked in fifteen minutes.

I’ve chosen to pay for a cheap gym membership this winter. It works out on days like this. It also works out as a commuter option. It’s on the way to work, and convenient to my usual cafes. Like this morning’s cafe. I’ve been coming to this cafe for years, taking a table upstairs for my morning work desk. I’m appreciated. I’m a nice regular. The baristas have organized a campaign to support my fundraising for Team Tesfa. I appear now on the cafe’s Facebook page.

From there I only have to pedal down the Westblaak, turn left before I get to the Blaak. and cross the pedestrian Hogestraat, lined with chain discount stores and the dingy little shops selling cheap watches and cheap luggage. The gym is there, overlooking the Hogestraat. The gym shares something of the character of the seamy old shopping district. It’s a good deal, but the facilities are old, the services minimalistic. There is little ventilation. That becomes problematic when you’re training for a half marathon. Maybe it’s different for the guys who groan over their weights for two minutes and then strut around for ten. Marathoners need long shifts of exertion. My cheap jersey is quickly soaked. My towel is soaked. I’m dripping on the treadmill.

But all that’s fine. My gym has the basics. I don’t have to wait for machines. In between spells on the machines, I stretch by the windows that overlook the Grotekerkplein. This is the view from the other side of the building. On this side we see the city’s cathedral and its square. I’ve always been fond of the old church. It was never one of Holland’s magnificent churches. It came along a little late for High Gothic, begun in the fifteenth century or so. And it took a beating in the 1940 bombing of the city. It’s just a solid old brick structure, content with its square tower and the dignity of its age.

They’re working on the square now. It looks like they might be laying gravel and walking paths across the previously open square. I am relieved to see they have raised a fence around the statue of Erasmus. The bronze is an icon itself, standing in front of the old church. It was cast in 1622 to replace a stone statue of their native son. There is some academic dispute, as it turns out, about whether Erasmus, known as ‘Roterodamus’ even in his own day, was actually born here. Gouda wants to claim him, and it’s true that he spent some of his childhood there. But, lacking the final proof against it, I will think of him as a Rotterdammer.

In an age of extremists, it may be hard to appreciate our friend Erasmus. He was a moderate. He decided to stand against Luther, even though his own critiques of the Catholic Church had contributed to setting the stage for revolution. In an age that seems staunchly anti-intellectual, it may be hard to appreciate Erasmus, who was a scholar first and last. He was one of the greatest of his age, mastering Greek and Latin, much of classical thought and literature, as well as contributing enormously to Biblical scholarship, particularly with his Greek New Testament.

So it goes. By our standards, he must be unpopular. I read – and enjoyed – Wolf Hall. I observed how Erasmus was portrayed as a flatterer and opportunist first, and the penniless, drifting intellectual second, set beside Mantel’s man of action, Thomas Cromwell. I resign myself to it. These portrayals stand in as assessments of our own boring men of reason. Me, I still like the old man. I salute to him from the second-floor window in the gym. He doesn’t see me. He’s still turning that page.

Travelogue 738 – February 12
The Swell New Snel

I’m grateful for my new bicycle this morning. It has fenders. I’m protected from the slush on the roads. I miss the silver ‘Snel’, my classy old ten-speed, totalled in my run-in with the belligerent auto a few weeks ago. But there’s no denying that I would have been a mess in this weather, arriving in town wet and cold, with a line of mud up my back.

Baby stands in the courtyard of our complex. She is looking at her boots, on the toes of which she has picked up two little dollops of new snow. She is wearing pink mittens, and holding her hands out as though pushing away the sting of the cold. She watches mama gathering snow into a ball, laughing, throwing it at Papa. It’s all a beautiful mystery.

Yes, I miss the sleek old ‘Snel’, and the quick pace I could keep crossing town. I rode it for more than three years. But there is no denying the benefits of the new cycle. It’s not as fast, but it’s fun, riding low to the ground cruising on the fat tires. And it has fenders. The melt is on this morning, turning the pretty fields of white back into green grass, making the trees shed their pretty white dressings in steady, chilly drops on the heads of cyclists travelling underneath.

I stop at the café on my way to the gym. The baristas laugh to see me. I’m arriving just as they open. ‘Only you,’ they say. I’m their lone customer this early on a Sunday morning. ‘Only you.’ Later they laugh again as I leave. It happens that Springsteen is singing, ‘Born in the U.S.A.’

I unlock the sturdy new bike, green and black and rusting, my durable second-hand machine. I swing a leg over the frame, settle on the cushioned seat. I bought this bike from my regular cycle shop. The shop is run by an amiable guy who has been in the business a long time. He still looks young, slim and wiry, his bowl cut exhibiting very little grey. He always has a smile and some wry aphorism about life and cycling. His shop occupies one corner in what is considered an unsavoury neighbourhood in Delfshaven. He has rows of sturdy little bikes, just like my new one, bikes he buys from the city’s impound lot and fixes up. I decided I would save myself the online search for second-hand deals on Marktplaats and buy from my cycle doctor. He shook his head sadly when I wheeled in the bent and scraped old Snel. He took a measure of the frame and declared it a lost cause. He signed a quick letter to present to any insurance agent that may find his or her way to my door.

I start pedalling toward the Westblaak. I don’t have far to go. I have to log a workout at my gym this morning. The calendar shows I’m getting uncomfortably close to race day. One month, in fact. I’m running the Bath Half in one month, and trying to raise money for the team in Ethiopia. I set the foolish target of breaking my record, set on the same course seven years ago. Seven years ago! Never dream up goals from a vantage point of three months ahead. They weigh more heavily with each day’s subsequent training.

Travelogue 737 – February 5
Negative Space

It always sneaks up me. More than that, it nearly sneaks by me. By the time I realize that Rotterdam’s international film festival is actually under way, the festival is usually half completed. I note all the advertisements, months ahead of time, but the dates don’t sink in. And so it goes this year. I only think to search the schedule during the final weekend.

Rotterdam hosts one of the biggest film festivals in the world. It’s been going since 1972, and last year over three hundred thousand attended. There are more than four hundred feature length and short films. All the theatres downtown are taken over by the festival. That’s what usually triggers the realization for me. ‘Ah, the festival is in town.’ A few days later, I’ll make the effort to check the festival schedule.

All these steps have to play out in my glacial intelligence. I look up the festival schedule. This year I’m going to go with documentaries.

I’m lucky with my selections. On Friday night, we catch a film by a young Argentinian who charts his course through a variety of assignments, artistic and journalistic, around Europe and Israel. He has a fascination with war and fantasizes about a story on the front line. Any front line. He ends up in Israel because he is a descendant of Russian Jews who found their way to South America well ahead of the Nazis. He narrates with irony. He shares texts from his mother asking about new charges on her credit card. He critiques his own interviews, calling them lot opportunities. Finally he finds his front line in Palestine. Nothing terribly dramatic happens, but he feels a sense of arrival. He floats in the Dead Sea, and he tells us he is only a character in the production.

It turns out we had stumbled over the Argentinian’s legs when we arrived late. He stands for questions. Audience questions circle around this dichotomy of his, the split between the director and character. He insists on a playful interpretation of it all, which I appreciate.

On Saturday night, we see something more local, a film by a guy from Ghent. He is also in the audience and fields questions afterward. He is also humble, though in the quieter way of northern Europe, in the way that doesn’t look like humility to people from the Americas. The audience is also more intense. They ask about equipment. They ask about composition. He admits his love of ‘negative space’. I’m moved by his intelligence and the intention behind his work.

I’m moved by the film. The premise is simple enough, a look into the life of a boxing coach in Ghent. The old man is an Armenian from Georgia, who moved to Belgium thirteen years ago. We witness his first trip back home. Tbilisi looks like Addis. He sits on the balcony of his friend’s flat. The flat is in a tired old Communist-era block. The balcony looks out over trees and the debris of poverty, and out toward mountains that could be Ethiopian. They are drinking, and they are reminiscing. When Giorgi laughs, you feel somehow comforted. You sense something of hardship and survival. He speaks softly. Several times, we see his old boxer’s hand resting on a map of Georgia.

The young director does love negative spaces. The film is very shy of direct shots. We see things through mirrors and around corners. Shadows occupy much of the screen. At boxing matches, we hear the action, and see the coach’s eyes and his ears. We hear his occasional shout, and we see the sweat trickle down his neck. His protégé wins the European title, and we see none of the winning punches. The coach calls his son in Georgia. The young champ says hello shyly, and receives his congratulations.

Both films reflect back to me perspectives on my own process in writing memoir. One admits that the subject can only ever be a character, and the other captures the subject from distances and muted, frames him among negative spaces. There are severe limits to reporting. The subject, and even oneself, is elusive and must be approached obliquely. There’s a skittish animal inside stories, or inside characters, and one has to tread very softly in, into their territory.

Travelogue 736 – January 27
The Accident, the Substance

He’s speaking Dutch, so I don’t catch every word, but I understand enough. ‘You should watch where you’re going,’ he’s saying. ‘What?’ I shout. I decide to offer him a personal lesson in English invective, my face very close to his so he catches every inflection.

It has taken two bystanders to help me free my leg from underneath his car. My bicycle is destroyed, wheels and frame bent. This driver has stayed inside the car until now, and his first words are accusation.

Later, I tell the police the worst of it. He wouldn’t stop. ‘How long,’ the policeman asks. I say I don’t know. I hadn’t thought to trigger the stopwatch. But long enough, I tell him, that I’m yelling, ‘Stop the *** car!’

I survive, even if the bicycle doesn’t. My leg is bent. I can’t walk on it without a lot of pain for a day or two. But I’m fine, and the leg will recover. This won’t stop me from running my race in March.

As hardy as the body, so fragile is the spirit. I am shaken. I ask myself, was I wrong to react with so much anger? I don’t think anyone would blame me, but that doesn’t make it right. I don’t have an answer, but I do decide that it might all have played out differently if the driver had begun with expressions of something more human. ‘Are you all right?’

It’s sobering to think this way, how powerful is the discourse, how powerful the force of forgiveness. I see it everywhere. It would be impossible for me not to extend the concept outward, given the tenor of world events, when America reaps the fruit of several generations of rage and polarization.

It’s astonishing how fragile we are, how sure we think we have to be. The man emerges from his auto with no thought but for his righteousness. It’s astonishing how fragile our world view has become when we deny, without qualification, that there can be any view but ours. We become weak. The police confront him with the likely facts, and the driver is rattled. All he can do is repeat his objection, until the policeman feels he must check whether he is hearing properly. Outside, the driver’s wife is illustrating her version of the story to passers-by.

The police here are trained in objectivity. They stay calm. They speak rationally. They analyse situations; they isolate the basics. They repeat and re-direct, maintaining focus on those basics. I admire them. I reflect how rationality is a learned skill. I reflect that it’s a skill we expect from our police, but not from ourselves. There was a time when we expected it from political leaders.

These days, we question the value of objectivity. We find it suspect. In truth, it challenges us. We have fallen for righteousness. We are seduced by the idea that one side in a conflict is one hundred percent right, and the other side is one hundred percent wrong. If we are unsettled by a doubt, we cannot expect reason to come to the rescue. Reason will moderate, and will humble.

Because I am puzzled by this, I have been reading. I am curious about the history of reason during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in early modern European history. It’s a great heritage. (No civilization owns reason, of course. You can find stories of the triumph of reason in Islamic, Chinese, African history. But I’m a sucker for European history. I have been since I was an impressionable bachelor’s student in university.)

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” Francis Bacon

‘I think sometimes we can disagree with the facts.’ Sean Spicer, Trump’s press secretary.

Travelogue 735 – January 22
Reading Romania

Only a few days later, I have my proofs. I have seen the ice. I have seen the children playing hockey on the surface of a canal. That was over by the Zestienhoven Park. I was half an hour into a run and crossing over the canal and into the park. My body has been struggling with the long freeze. I feel sluggish. The muscles are tight; I need to stop for a stretch. My joints complain. But my spirits are high; the sun is out. I start across the small, arching bridge, and I spot them a hundred metres down the canal, skating feverishly, swinging hockey sticks. As quickly as I spot them, they are hidden by the reeds attending the canal. It was a glimpse, an imprint like a vision of Breughel.

Then this morning, it’s even colder. I’m surprised by the reading on my phone. It was supposed to be warming up. The sun is up by the time I leave the house. It’s Sunday. I’m free to wait for sunrise. It’s a bright morning, and as I cross the River Schie, I can see quite clearly that the ice has claimed it, forming one delicate surface from bank to bank. Only birds test the strength of it. They stand and turn their heads, as though still assessing the risk, as though listening for tell-tale crackling under their feet.

Yesterday was the women’s march in Washington, and in other cities. It was a day for us to share our pain. Citizens are protesting political systems that have broken with their people, systems intent upon their own interests. Their interests diverge more boldly with every generation from even the broadest definitions of the public good. Leaders name themselves elected, and they follow their will. The new administration issues ‘alternative facts’, and it makes for great comedy. But it’s governance only in the sense of power.

Eventually, the high gestures of history filter down to the personal. They impact us at home. That seems easier for Europeans to understand, even as the Second World War recedes into the past. We see refugees from the Syrian civil war in our cities. The Dutch Turks debate Erdogan’s rule, more aggressive as every week passes. Students at my school were born among the debris of the Bosnian war. Putin seems more of a menace here. To Americans, he is still a curiosity, the bear at the circus. We won the Cold War, after all.

I have some students from Romania. They look like the other teenagers, going to the same lengths to fit in and have fun, displaying their references to pop culture in clothes, style, word and gesture. The kids from the smallest villages show the same savvy nowadays. There are no country rubes.

When I mention that I’m reading a famous Romanian author, Bogdan lights up. He knows the author, cites the controversies he stirred so many years ago. He goes on to recommend other authors from his homeland. He is a patriot.

The book is called ‘For Two Thousand Years’, and it was written by a Romanian Jew who lived during the first half of the twentieth century. The story is based on his own experiences as a student in the years following Romania’s experiment with a liberal constitution. Modern Romania came into being in the aftermath to the First World War. In 1923, it voted on its first constitution. The document declared universal male suffrage and equal rights. Apparently, this was a bitter pill for many people. Rights for the Jews seemed particularly provocative. The right reacted with riots. At the university, they called for a cap on numbers of Jewish students.

The book begins with a litany of beatings the character and his friends submit to in order to attend classes at the law school. He’s ordered mid-lecture to leave, by fellow students. ‘I slide out of the desk and slip towards the door between two rows of onlookers. It all happens decorously, ritually. Someone by the door lashes out with his fist, but it is a glancing blow. A late punch, my friend.’

The students live together in abject poverty. They walk together to the university, looking for safety in numbers. They escape from unexpected mobs intent on violence. Every day is an experiment in hope. This is the loneliness of oppression.

Travelogue 734 – January 19
Cold!

There is ice on the small canal behind our building. Temperatures have not broken freezing for several days. This is the coldest stretch since I moved here. The ice covers the whole canal. But it wouldn’t hold anyone’s weight. When I see ice, I think of complaints I’ve heard among the older Dutch people I know. They say that winters aren’t what they used to be. Ice skating on the canals has become a fond memory.

Cycling beside the Schie in the early morning, I think I see the curdled sheen of thin ice on the surface of the river. Hard to say without light. Was there a day when locals skated on this river? I’m sure there was.

There were times the Thames froze over in London. Apparently, the eighteenth century witnessed an exceptional number of harsh winters in Europe, particularly in the 80s. One of those winters is generally recognized as a contributing factor in the outbreak of revolution in France in 1789.

Yes, I’ve continued my reading about the Enlightenment. The events of the day move me to read more. They were prolific writers, those men in wigs, and their ideas are foundational to our systems even today. They inform how we think about human rights and citizenship. They inform how we form governments. Their essential optimism about human nature has nourished philosophy ever since.

Lately I can’t escape the feeling that some consensus has been reached among the people who shape our times that those ideas have outlived their usefulness. Chinese leaders and Muslim extremists mock ‘Western values’. Democracy is lumped in with crass consumerism and moral decline. Trump and Putin make a mockery of democracy, serving older ideas of tribe and empire.

‘Co-o-old,’ Baby says, and she dances a variation of the shivers. We don’t go outside much anymore. I miss that. It was one of my favourite activities with her. She shivers and she makes a face, a mask of surprise at the big cold world out there. I say it with her. ‘Cold!’ And I shiver. She laughs.

I can’t help it. Her face is a sign of hope to me. It’s hard-wired into my father’s brain, something biological, I imagine. Maybe it’s this advent of new hope into the world, my baby, someone whose life span may encompass the rest of this pessimistic century, that compels me to contemplate hope.

She watches me suit up to go out. I’ve had to make one concession to winter this year. I was forced to buy full finger gloves. Twenty minutes on the bicycle has become too painful without them. I’m waiting before I take on the bulky wool coat. I’m fine like this to 5C below. But there is still a lot of winter left.

Travelogue 733 – January 14
Night Comes in the Mail

Winter brings us night. It drops night in the mail slot of the door, delivering it before dinner. We turn the lights on, and the long evenings are yellow with dim incandescence. Winter ought to be a season of reflection. But we work. I do my thinking on the bicycle, pedalling in the dark, pedalling across town to school.

I’ve succeeded in making Baby laugh tonight. We’ve played some of her favourite games. She tugs on my shirt, so that I’ll chase after her. Once I’ve caught her, I swing her in the air and I tickle her. She hides behind the drapes, and I pretend to look for her. We sit together on the floor, and we draw swirling lines on an A3 sheet of paper. She leaves marks on her hands and on her new clothes.

I’m having to make up to her. During the week, I was distracted. Classes were on again after winter break. At home, I corrected old assignments and I prepared new ones. Baby shot me hurt looks. I smiled and I invited her to sit with me while I worked. But still my attention was quickly diverted. I’ve had no time of my own.

This complex was built in the 1920s, and the flats were originally half the size. They’ve been expanded, but our place still has two front doors. One of them we never open. But since both have mail slots, we get twice the junk mail. One door is just beside my desk. Suddenly, in the early evening, there will be a sudden noise as the metal slot is opened, and then a packet of sales material in a plastic bag is shoved through. It hangs suspended there, never making it all the way through. Baby opens her eyes wide and covers her mouth in a gesture of surprise. She points.

The house is a hungry economy. Everything is used. The little sales booklets from the super market chain, those become magazines for Batu. She sits in her chair in the dining room and leafs through them for hours. While Menna cooks, Batu gossips with her about prices. The rest of the junk mail becomes play material for Baby. She arranges them on the floor. She tears them. She throws them to see them flutter.

I used to take Baby for regular walks. It was her favourite part of the day. But now there’s little time, and the weather rarely cooperates. Baby points to the window, and she repeats her first word, ‘Cold!’ She shivers theatrically. ‘Cold!’

I pick her up, and we look out the window. ‘Look, Baby, it’s winter!’ She touches the glass with one finger, and she whispers something to herself.

Home starts to look like night to me. Most of my time there is zonder zon, time without light. When I pick Baby up, and we go to the window, there’s little to see outside. We see lights in the windows. We see a portion of dark sky. She whispers, and she peers out into the world without sun. We turn back inside.

Winter brings us night. The mailman slips it through without effort. There is no noise to announce it. Darkness enters with the same ease as light.

Travelogue 732 – January 5
Reading David
Part Three

The philosopher works at the café where I do most of my writing. We discuss books. He has made me interested in philosophy again. He awakened an interest in those naughty existentialists again. My first loan from the Leeskabinet was ‘Nausea’, which has been a guilty pleasure over a pint when I’ve had time.

I appreciate philosophies framed in stories or practical exercises. I told the philosopher that my tastes in philosophy generally ran to dialogues. It was perhaps no surprise that a playwright would say that. The characterization makes a literary exercise of it, keeps an author honest. And it offers the philosopher diverging voices in which to explore differing angles on a question, keeping the scientist honest.

I had started David’s dialogue about Natural Religion, written as a dialogue among three characters. Appropriately, it starts with the question of how children should be educated. Appropriate because Greek philosophy began as a pedagogical exercise. Of course, as debates among consenting adults will do, it meanders, and the three men jibe each other about their religious beliefs. Erudite mid-eighteenth-century gentlemen that they are, their thoughts about religion are laced with scepticism and attempts at scientific method.

My café philosopher’s interest was piqued. He commented that David was a very important link in the chain that was the history of Western philosophy, and, what was more, he himself hadn’t read him yet. He suggested we tackle the seminal work together, the hefty Treatise of Human Nature. We would meet in reading club style and discuss.

Our first two meetings have been something like David’s dialogue, meandering and effective only in releasing a dizzying variety of tangential thoughts. But how could David object?

The work itself begins with a somewhat airy examination of the activities of the mind. He starts by saying,

All the perceptions of the human mind
fall into two distinct kinds,
which I shall call ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’.

David wrote this work – running in my edition over six hundred pages – before he was thirty. He had dreamt about this achievement since he was a teenager, studying at the University of Edinburgh. He gave up the study of law to read philosophy. He conceived a plan for a scientific study of human nature. His generation grew up in the shadow of Newton. Humanity seemed poised to decipher all the laws of the universe. Some forays had been made into explaining the human thought and character by way of the new scientific method, but never comprehensively. He would be the one. He fled to France. He wrote. He consulted with the Jesuits at the college where Descartes studied as a boy.

‘And as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences,’ he wrote, ‘so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.’

He set himself in mild opposition to the rationalists, like Descartes himself, asserting that the most successful scientific inquiry was not solved through mathematical thought but by observation.

‘We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life,’ he says, ‘and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.’

He is ambitious. ‘Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension.’

His method places him among the empiricists. His book earns him a high rank in that company. David goes on to write more. He goes on to regret the big book he wrote in his youth, though it only continues to grow in stature. It goes on to inspire a young man in Germany who will do much to undermine poor David’s naïve thought, and the naïve hope of the eighteenth century.

Travelogue 731 – December 30
Reading Babies

I’m moved by movement to interrupt my series about David, moved by the ceaseless movement of my new-born. If I don’t speak now, the week will pass. The week will become another and Little Sister will be a different text. Reading babies is day to day.

She is ceaseless noise and heat. She squirms in my hands, tiny fingers exploring the atmosphere and her lips forming the shapes of every quick mood. She’s ready to yawn, but she’s overcome by sudden worry, and then she resolves it with a frank look into my eyes. She stares into my eyes with curiosity, a look so sure and unalloyed that I am profoundly moved. She sighs. Her fingers curl. She kicks.

I have written that babies have changed my perceptions about the significance of organic life. We humans have always defined ourselves by the power of thought, but we find ourselves threatened by a new chimera, that of artificial intelligence. Machine thought: maybe it’s imminent, maybe it’s not. It doesn’t matter to the psychology.

For me, the profile of intelligence has changed. It isn’t described by the movement of Euclidean proofs. It is described by the squirming dance performed by the baby in my hands.

The routine of the last few days has me watching Little Sister late at night. She has just been fed. Her colic kicks in, and she is crying in pain. I can only hold her upright, and rock her, and hope she moves some of the air through her system. Sometimes it takes hours. I am saddened by all this pain. This is another axis in the notation of life and intelligence: the crying, the adversity of biology.

In movies, chimerical machines are smarter for their liberation from the biology. I’m skeptical. I’ve read the babies.

The solitary yellow VW winds along the mountain road. The camera silently follows from a great height.

What the hell, I think. I may as well watch. I haven’t seen ‘The Shining’ in a while. I’m in charge of Little Baby, and it’s late at night. She’s on my shoulder. We’re alone downstairs, alone on the sofa watching TV.

It’s a unique viewing experience, ‘The Shining’ with a new-born screaming in your ear. She doesn’t stop. I rock and I soothe, and I watch Jack Nicholson deteriorate into a murderous father. I can’t quite hear everything over Little Baby’s screams, so I’m reading the subtitles in Dutch. (I’m struck again by how much is lost in subtitles, how bland the language.)

Given I can’t hear much, I am absorbed in Kubrick’s vision, in the measured pace of each scene, the pacing of the speech and action. It feels so different to the manic choppiness of current film. I’m watching Jack’s face. He’s so young, and it seems as though he’s still finding his signature tics. There is something irrepressible in him, some unconquered energy. I imagine trying to direct him. I say, ‘Beautiful at one-tenth the amplitude.’ But everything depends on the mobility of those iconic features of his.

Little One finds some peace. The final mayhem hasn’t erupted in ‘The Shining’, and it’s just as well. I shut the TV off, and I quietly carry her upstairs. Everyone else is asleep. I check on Big Baby. She’s in deep sleep. Her face is so calm. She also changes all the time. I have renewed wonder for the human face and its mutability.

Time for sleep. Good night, Moon.

Travelogue 730 – December 21
Reading David
Part Two

Now she doesn’t sleep. She is so bereft. She loses her Mama. Every time is new grief, every time Mama responds to the cry from the crib, the new baby. Why, oh why? She sits up and she starts crying, with such hopelessness. Papa is a poor substitute. But she tires herself out. She has caught Papa’s cold, so she is not at full strength. Papa is happy when she slumps back and consents to cuddling. Her breathing evens out, even through her clogged sinuses. She’s breathing deeply and sighing.

We have so little power over the sadness in the world. We offer each other time. When Baby finally dozes off, I don’t dare move, even while my back aches. The position is all wrong. I ache as long as I can stand it so I won’t disturb her. It’s something I can do. It accomplishes very little about Baby’s sadness, about Mama being occupied. But it’s something. I’m studying her innocent face, and wishing for her some peace.

At my morning café, the young musician-barista is shaking his head over the newspaper. He has read an article about an advertising firm steering away from the term ‘Christmas’ for fear of offering offense. There is a backlash, people offended by the suggestion there would be offense. Others are offended by offense at offense being called offense. And so on. The young barista finds it sad and aggravating. ‘Why are they feeding me this as news?’

It does seem at times like we are confounded by the news. Journalists are as confounded as readers. News feeds read like an extended contemplation on human folly and forms of misery we can’t understand. Our writers are hypnotized by the tide of irrationality, like victims in a disaster film, watching the tidal wave come in.

Last week, Scottie sent me an article about Jerry Brown, governor of California. The two of us remember him from childhood, when he was governor for the first time, as a young man. The governor is defying our new Commander in Chief, saying he will preserve data about climate change. If Trump pulls satellite time, then California will launch a satellite. We laugh at the folly. But we finish the article feeling unsettled. Doesn’t it echo a history lesson, something about medieval scribes in monasteries?

Is it true? Is science suddenly struggling to preserve its own narrative? In an age when science might have claimed ultimate triumph, when ‘data’ has supplanted knowledge, the tide turns and science finds itself drowning in its own prolific outflows.

Science itself seems to support the obvious about the internet age, the decay of sustained reasoning and imaginative response. Information is no longer a wave but a particle, packaged in randomized bundles, crashing against the reefs of the mind with mounting ferocity. The world itself appears to us increasingly random and pixelated.

Sadness arrives, like the debris of broken seashells on the beach. It almost seems disrespectful to search for a pattern.

Baby still has the patience for a story before bedtime, though her eyes are teary and swollen. We make it through the storybook. She takes it from me, and she reads it back to me in her own way. She turns a few pages, points and recites in her made-up language.

I daydream about my books while I am holding my sleeping baby. I keep still. The night’s routine always accelerates past any point I might be able to do any of my own reading. The books from the Leeskabinet stand in a pile on my desk. David’s volume sits by itself. It is a reading with a deadline. I must get to it soon.

Travelogue 729 – December 17
Reading David
Part One

Baby enjoys reading. It comes to her like a new notion every day. She sees ‘One Fish, Two Fish’ or ‘A Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and she gasps and points. She opens her mouth wide in amazement and expects similar expressions of wonder from us. We say, ‘Wow, look!’ We pick it up, and we read out the title. We open it like a precious package. ‘Look, Baby. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish ….’ At some point, she will grab the book and conduct the reading herself, pointing to each picture and making up stories in her language.

I’m glad she likes Dr. Seuss. It makes Papa nostalgic about his first years reading. I don’t remember specifically what reading looked like in my family. I don’t remember the plot lines; I don’t hear the voices. I had two brothers old enough to be in school, and I think they must have contributed to reading duties. I have memories of others types of play, but no pictures of sitting with them while they read aloud. I can imagine my mother reading those crazy stories, and I think she would have been good at it. But I can’t pull up any memory of it.

I know I loved my books. What I remember is all sensory. I loved them as objects, the bright colours, the glossy covers, the smell and the texture of new pages. I loved them as visions and sounds, the bold lines and the bright colours, the wild characters, and the rich rhymes of Dr. Seuss.

I still love books. I find peace and sometimes solace in bookstores. I’m attracted to books by their colours and their heft. I rub my hand over the covers. I smell their pages.

Papa is happy about a new development in his reading life. He has re-discovered libraries. After so many years on the road, after so many years in Ethiopia … indeed, after so many years building school libraries in foreign lands, Papa has discovered the public library, here at home. The revelation comes to him in the form of the Leeskabinet at Erasmus University.

The whole campus has been undergoing massive construction and renovation projects. As has my neighbourhood. I’ve resigned myself to a life among construction equipment, dust, detours, and orange vests. Addis Ababa was no different. The Erasmus library has been shut since I started at the Hogeschool. Parts of the collection reside in various locations around the campus. I can’t decipher the plan. I’d had no motivation to understand it before I accidentally discovered the Leeskabinet. It’s housed in a temporary structure that feels like a container, not far from the Hogeschool where I teach. I walked by it dozens of times before I noticed it.

The Leeskabinet is a sort of library within the Erasmus library, an institution founded 150 years ago as a place to read, based, I’m assuming, on the great Reading Room in London. I’ve seen photos from its Victorian days, hardwood shelving and carpets and dim lights. The current war-time digs are a shocking departure.

I strolled through one day to kill time between classes. I found shelves devoted to English-language fiction. I could borrow one of these, I thought to myself. Libraries are more than exhibits of book art. The books shelved here have more purpose than visual catalogue and meditation. I could, in theory, do more than browse and skim.

At the desk, I was told I could pay a reduced membership fee because I was Hogeschool faculty. I was stunned. Long shelves full of books, and I didn’t have to pay.

The kind auditor of my thoughts must be reminded of two factors that led to such retarded development on Papa’s part. First, there is the power of habit. Poor Papa has been on the road so long, and so far from home, that he is used to picking up reading materials as contraband, here and there, accepting the expense and the limited selection as things beyond his power, a tax levied on travellers. The second factor has been the peculiarly closed system in the Netherlands, the surprisingly effective management of the rights of residence in this small republic. Without an address, it’s hard to get a residency number. Without residence, it’s hard to rent. Without residence, you can’t get a bank account. And so on. Library card is far down that cascading chain of conditionals.

I proved my residence with a card. I proved my occupation with a card. I paid for my membership with my bank card. And I was issued a library card. I immediately collected a bundle of books, like a survivor of disaster, and I dashed out the door before the custodians could change their minds.

Travelogue 728 – December 12
Collateral Truths

I’ve managed a few hours of sleep. Sometimes a little sleep is worse than none. I wrote in my last entry that my mind felt like a spilled tray of tiny ball bearings. That was hubris. They were not ball bearings but in fact those little sprinkles you put on cakes. They crunch under foot as you stumble, and the thought or the neuron is turned to powder.

Baby Two is doing well. She lost weight during her first day, but she is regaining it now. Her big eyes search the room, and she exercises her thin fingers in the air. She works her lips, tasting something, then opening them wide for air or for food. We are quiet and smiling in her presence.

Little Sister has her own complaints, of course, having been rudely pushed into the world of air and oxygen, a world where she has to take in her nutrients through those untried red lips. She takes her food, and it causes pain. Her little stomach can’t handle new substances. She cries in the middle of the night and needs to be soothed. We hold her upright so her system can pass the air trapped inside. In her tiny body, these bubbles of gas cause turmoil.

Baby One is taking a kindlier view toward her little sister, though still circumspect. Sometimes she points and giggles. Sometimes she says ‘baby’ with wonder. Sometimes she just stares sullenly. She has her doubts. We still have to sell her on this new idea. ‘You have a sister.’ But she said unto them, ‘Except I shall see the nails on her delicate hands, and put my finger against her warm skin, and thrust my hand into hers, I will not believe.’

We keep her at a distance because Little Sister is so fragile. Baby One doesn’t know her own strength. She bruises us in her enthusiasms. We take it; that’s our job. And, no doubt, she will give Little Sister plenty of small bruises in the years to come, and Little Sister will reciprocate.

I appreciate her skepticism. In this Christian season, in this year that sees the resurgence of authoritarianism around the world, I think of Thomas. Didymus was his name. He was one of Jesus’s chosen twelve. But he had other business the day Jesus showed himself as resurrected Saviour. Afterward he questioned. He was called ‘Doubting Thomas’. I think Doubting Didymus sounds better.

Jesus showed himself a good teacher by saying, yes, please ask. Here, push your fingers into my wounds. But then he also showed himself the typical teacher by praising those who hadn’t needed to ask in the first place.

I know how annoying it can be to be interrupted by questions when you’re leading a class. But teaching is communication. You have to know how those beatitudes are being received. Jesus didn’t have the tools for standardized testing. So we say, ‘there’s no such thing as a stupid question.’ What we’re really saying is, ‘I can’t always tell when I’m being stupid.’ It’s a doctrine of second chances. We want the chance for true knowledge, in both directions.

It’s not a time that favours doubt, though. Doubt is seen as weakness. One backs one’s party, and one’s clan and one’s country without question. Anything less is scandal. The answer to doubt is some form of violence, first verbal, and after that, more.

The voice inside must conform. The habit of questioning oneself before speaking is a quaint modernist notion. Better to pronounce oneself sure upon all points. There’s time to think later. There’s no time to think later. The same certainty may lend itself to an opposite viewpoint. That’s what happens later. It’s the certainty that counts.

I think it’s a probably a fun way to live. It’s living in a state of perpetual revelation. The things coming out of your mouth are surprising and exciting. There is an astonishing truth to your words, you realize, even as you hear them.

You have been raised on a belief in revelation. Now you are experiencing it on a daily basis. These are the fun possibilities in post-truth politics. It’s magical.

Travelogue 727 – December 9
Collateral Damage

My feet are still sore. So is my back. I don’t think my brain is doing all that well, either, to be honest. It’s difficult to measure brain function from the inside, but my thinking is cloudy, reflecting the chilly fog outside. It’s so cloudy I can’t remember what it feels like to think clearly. How does one define clear thought? If there were any objective measure, I’m sure I would find it very humbling. Fortunately, none is handy. Maybe this sort of rambling is the best yardstick.

I have enough brain function remaining to trace the genesis of every ache and pain. Each has origins within the past thirty-six hours. That’s about as long as my second daughter has been alive. There is no coincidence in that.

Baby Two (Meisje Twee) entered into the world somewhat precipitately. The pains of contraction never settled into a pattern. Menna waited to wake me up. By the time she did, the pains were coming fast, but still erratically. We debated calling. We called. And then she came, our eager little girl. Oma was watching Baby One in another room. There were only the two of us, Mama and Papa, and the baby was not going to listen to reason.

It’s not easy to be calm while someone is screaming. I’ve had some intense tutorials in the last thirty-six hours. Mom is screaming with pain. The baby is not waiting, I need to think clearly. What is there to think about? I have to guide her into the world.

It’s night again. No one has slept in a long time. Baby One is screaming. She doesn’t understand. Mama can’t be available. She is nursing Baby’s new little sister. But she can’t think it through. Mama is always here for her.

I am trying to hold Baby and comfort her. She is grieving. And she is strong. I have to fight to keep her on the bed with me. She struggles. She kicks out a tantrum. She wants her mama. I pick her up and I walk around with her. We walk back and forth a long time. My back is protesting. When she is sleepy, we lie down. I hold her. I can’t move. My back is aching. It’s all I can think about.

It’s only after Baby Two had arrived that the nurse arrived. Menna was holding the new baby, cord still attached. The nurse called from her mobile. She was downstairs and lost. We live in a massive complex, which is locked up at night, and we play this game with visitors every time: where are they? Which entrance? The baby had arrived, but we were scared for her. Her pallor seemed off, seemed bluish. We needed the expert immediately. I didn’t hesitate; I ran out the door.

I ran down the stairs and out of the complex. I didn’t have time to play hide and seek among the various entrances. I would have to run the entire outside perimeter until I found her. And indeed I did make it most of the way around before I spotted her, lone figure beside the building at 3:30 in the morning. She told me as I guided her in that she had called the ambulance.

She checked the baby. She declared all things appearing well and normal. She helped to cut and tie the cord. She said the ambulance must have arrived. I ran outside again, and started the dash around the building. This time I made it about halfway around, as far as the front gate, where the ambulance had parked, lights flashing. I let them in, and we started the long hike back to the flat. They laughed at me. I was in short sleeves. I was barefoot.

Once in the flat, they took the baby in hand, big and expert hands. With gentleness and with authority, they checked to see she was whole. She was.

Now it’s the morning after the morning after. No one has slept much. The babies traded off in their crying, Baby Two looking for food, Baby One looking for love and reassurance. My feet are bruised and lacerated. My back aches without respite. My mind feels a spilled box of tiny ball bearings, dropped onto grey concrete. I’m on my hands and knees, collecting them one by one. I replace them in the carton, but I think there may be a whole in the bottom.

Travelogue 726 – November 23
The Virtues

Baby is playing with her food. She’s quietly digging among the remnants of dinner with her spoon. She’s not making a mess, so I let it go. I just enjoy watching her, whatever she’s doing.

It’s dark outside, a deep winter’s night already. It was dark when I cycled home from work, and it was barely past six. In the morning, I had cycled in the dark to work. At midday, it was an anaemic and soupy, grey light that had been filtering through the classroom windows.

We gather at night in the warm bubble of light that is home. The TV adds a flickering note of blue. Baby has her back to the screen. She’s standing in front of the low table in our salon, and she is perfectly absorbed in her explorations.

I know what will happen when I take the bowl and spoon away. She will cry and kick. I’ll pick her up and comfort her, but she will be outraged. She will arch her back and cry to the heavens. That’s how she is now, and I don’t mind too much. A few minutes pass, and she’s smiling about some new occupation, the tears still fresh on her cheeks. The tantrums are hers, and they make sense. I regret being the one to say ‘no’ so often. I imagine most parents haven’t thought his through too thoroughly, this sudden inheritance of the power of no. We have all apprenticed on the other side it. As children, we may have daydreamed about the day we would have this mighty authority. Then quite unexpectedly, we are asked to carry it forward, civilization’s strict negative.

Once in a while, I have a few minutes to spare at work and I skim through articles on the Guardian’s website. I was captivated by a wonderful quote today. It was embedded in a story about the alt-right’s outrage at Trumps’ disavowal of a group who trade Nazi salutes at their meetings. They videotape themselves giving what they imagine are thundering orations. They shout and they salute, and they look about as scary as boys playing cops and robbers in their clubhouse. They wouldn’t merit disavowal from anyone other than Trump, the prince of juvenilia in politics.

Someone had left a comment on Breitbart that was quoted in the Guardian: ‘This constant virtue signaling needs to finally end, otherwise our civilization will simply collapse,’ he said. It was such a wonderful quote, I smiled about it all day.

Civilization will collapse! Such warmth and such purity! I wish I could bend my mood to this kind of major chord. Isn’t this how we all wish things were in this tedious world, where, in fact, civilization seems more vulnerable to aerosol than to philosophy? It’s inspiring to think my virtue may be ransom for all the world’s safety.

Still, silly me, I had thought that ‘virtue signaling’ was civilization. Didn’t society evolve from a set of ‘virtue signals’, as humans learned how to live together? There were ‘virtue signals’ like the Ten Commandments, for example. Killing people may be counterproductive. You may need that guy later, or his family may come after yours. Things like that.

And I’m confused by Nazis rebelling against rules. I had thought that society under the Nazis was nothing if not a very strict litany of ‘virtue signaling’. Certainly that old lady Adolph, who in his secret mirror was a scolding, powdered English duchess, had codes upon codes scrolling through the dim chamber of his mind.

There’s something to raise compassion here, this pouting resentment against the people who, yes, do enjoy telling us what to think and what to do, and enjoy it too much. There are always those who are right, and there are those who are very smug about it. Few personality types are more irritating. But righteousness is free as sunshine. The smug ones don’t own it. There’s the Word and there’s the preacher. I think there’s a saying, something about the baby and the bathwater?

But we want freedom. That’s what people do. We want to play with our food. We want to put the five-cent piece in our mouth. We want to play on the stairs. Some poor sucker has agreed to be the one to say ‘no’. We scream and we kick. The adult hangs on, and probably wonders how he or she ended up in this position.

Travelogue 725 – November 14
Shadow Play

It’s foggy this morning. I’m waking to life from dreams. I’m always waking from sleep, and I can’t always say I know which way lies the dream. My compass is ageing, corroded. But I say, I wake to life and take my waking slow.

I’m going to take my time going to work. The fog creates a wonderful sense of making no progress. I’m rolling on the bike beside the River Schie, and the fog is rolling back. The water slowly reflects the greys back, a variety of greys poured back into the other elements. I can’t see to the end of the straightaway on the path ahead. I take my rolling slow. I don’t see the destination. I guess I never do.

It’s a foggy Monday. Mondays are made for work. Yesterday was about play. And by play, I mean the theatre. I attended the second staging of my one-act plays. The one-acts go together. They were written to complement each other. I should say, the second was written to complement the first. The first was written almost twenty years ago.

There are a few themes uniting them. The most obvious is sexuality. Is there a coincidence at work, my staging plays about sex in Holland? As far as I know, there is. The first play was written in buttoned-up Minnesota, after all. And, after all, it’s such a ready theme, always rich in blood and comedy.

Underneath the theme of sexuality is one of gender identity. In the 90s, the thought of gender as a choice was closer to cutting edge than it is now. So the second play can afford to be more playful. In fact, it is a very silly farce, in randy cabaret style. In some way, it had to be, as an answer to the sober meditation that is the first play.

Peel back the words about gender identity, though, and there are more crawling underneath. There are deeper veins of identity. Do we fight? Do we think? ‘See, I’m a fan of anonymity,’ says the jaded brother of the dying man-become-woman.

There are the riddles we solve every day, solving always the same ones, though they are delivered in slight variations of grey, like shadows in the fog. We solve the stripes on the zebra. We say they point up; we say they point down. We say devil, we say God. And what do we do with God, after all?

We pray. We fashion prayer, and it has objects. It is sent with direction. But I take the opportunity to wonder about efficiencies. Prayer might be most pointed in Monday fogs, making the spoked wheels turn, so to say, and getting nowhere. It’s a little machine for love, like a toymaker’s invention, sitting in one’s palm, tiny spoked wheels whirring and tiny levers clicking. It was made to go nowhere, but to excite affection. It is far from useless, but a cause for wonder.

Pray that the toy exists. The toy exists. Pray that it exists. That is as profound as it gets; this is our life in the palm of a hand. Pray for the stripes. They go up and down, and then the zebra runs. It finds the sun, but that’s after your time.

It’s the first time I’ve had a chance to watch a play of mine staged since about fifteen years ago, since before I went to Ethiopia. Every step of the process comes with memories of the last time, long ago. We audition. I compare people to ghosts. Previous actors stand before me, and, behind them, the unfinished productions of the imagination, characters in the rough. In this case, there are real people who inspired the parts. Rehearsals ensue, the acting out of acting. The explanations: here is how I think. The actors are opening windows. ‘What if?’ they are asking. And I catch the scent of fresh air. I’m thankful.

Finally, there is the sensation of being in the audience. ‘So many words!’ I’m thinking. It doesn’t seem feasible that this torrent of words originated from one source. Plays and books just exist, after all. I understand the improvisations of artists like Michelangelo and Plato in philosophy: every creation existed before being created. It must be so. I recognize each phrase; the sum of them escapes me.

I find that finishing projects leaves me more naked than before. Life is paradox.

This long ride through fog is refreshing. The grey wash is liberating I’m getting nowhere. I’m relishing each breath.

Travelogue 724 – November 7
The Troubles

In London, I stopped to see some of my favourite paintings at the National Gallery. There is a kind of resonance that happens when we check in with history. I mean something more than reading about it, more than TV portrayals or fictionalized accounts. There is a spark of truth passed in the physical presence of history. The artefact can’t interpret or editorialize. Romance does not survive the encounter intact. It changes. I won’t say romance ever dies, because it’s a reflex too deeply embedded in the human psyche to ever be uprooted. But silent contact, mixed with even the most diluted sincerity, stimulates change.

There’s a blunt edge to the work of the old masters. I think we are encouraged to project a decadence upon them and their works, lay over them a veil of eviscerating sophistication. We are surprised by the artefact. It is smaller than we expect, rougher, coarse in its materiality. It is a product of craft and crude materials. The human hand is evident.

I walked out of the National Gallery and into the confusion of the construction under way around Trafalgar Square. Cities are never static. They are collections of projects. Rotterdam has exploded with road work this fall. It feels like living in a changing matrix of sawdust and cement dust. Every day a straight path has become crooked. One gets used to a life of detours.

I emerge from the Gallery, and I follow my detour around the construction and to the Tube. I’m heading to West London. Later that night, I am walking with Patrick alongside the Thames, down by the Hammersmith Bridge. The humble little bridge was targeted by the IRA three times! I scratch my head at that, examining the modest artefact of Victorian engineering, the bridge that seems barely able to clear the surface of the river, the bridge that asserts so little with its squalid towers in dark stone.

It seems the IRA have paid their respects at the National Gallery, as well. Twenty-five years ago, a firebomb was set off in the bookstore at 3:30 in the morning. No art was damaged, and the museum was open the next day. It was the Christmas season, and the IRA had planned a spate of attacks around the city. The whole year had been a busy one, some dozen incidents altogether. That included a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street, while the Prime Minister had been meeting with his War Cabinet.

Yes, the IRA was still active in the 90s. History is an odd patchwork. Things overlap and challenge our categories. The IRA stages an attempt on the life of the Prime Minister as he meets with advisors about the first Gulf War. Al Qaeda had been founded three years earlier. The Gulf War offends their sensibilities, with troops stationed in sacred Saudi Arabia. In seven more years, they would attack U.S. embassies in East Africa. In ten, they would take down the World Trade Center.

Now’s it’s thirty years on from their founding, and Al Qaeda is considered a moribund entity, past its glory days and out-performed by ISIS. The IRA seems a quaint bit of history, bloody history, though the IRA represented more than three hundred years of armed resistance to British rule. And a struggle not yet abandoned, a few stalwarts will say.

The history behind the IRA describes anything but a straight line of development. It included a detour through America, not too dissimilar to Al Qaeda’s. In the 1860s, in the wake of the Civil War, militants decided that an invasion of Canada was just the thing to advance the Irish Republican cause. They made a few raids across the border, the biggest of which crossed the Niagara River in 1866 and seized one town for a few days. Ulysses S. Grant himself rushed to assess the situation. Canadian patriotism was inflamed for a moment, and the raid seems to have galvanized the movement toward confederation among the provinces, achieved the next year.

Shoot a few guns, and you never know what will happen. It’s so rarely what you set out to accomplish. There’s always this kind of blunt edge to the objects of history.

Travelogue 723 – November 3
Ambassadors

When I went to London a few weeks ago, my first stop was the National Gallery. I only had an hour or so before I was due to meet Patrick. I hadn’t visited the gallery in years, so I was happy with even this one hour. I strolled slowly through the Middle Ages, and on to the Renaissance. I had two favourites I wanted to visit. One was Jan van Eyck, my Flemish muse. I’ve written about him in several stories now, and I had an urge to see the Arnolfini portrait again, to meditate the intensity, the loving detail, the sense of a future -- the future of the couple, the future of an art form, the future of a civilization.

I stopped to see Holbein. I stood before his portrait, ‘The Ambassadors’, for a while. The painting was commissioned in 1533 by one of the two subjects of the portrait, a nobleman named Jean de Dinteville. He had been sent to England as France's representative at the coronation of the new king, Ann Boleyn. The other man in the portrait was the Bishop of Lavaur, one Georges de Selve. He was in London on a hopeless mission to keep England faithful to the Catholic Pope. The wedding itself was proof and cause of the hopelessness. One can fairly see it in the bishop’s sombre face in the portrait.

We all know the story. Henry needed a male heir. He was the son of a king who had put an end to a long bloody civil war, whose claim to the throne was tentative, and who had to watch for betrayal throughout his reign. The Tudor dynasty was haunted to the end by its early history. Their pre-eminent concern was stability. Henry’s wife of more than twenty years had not born him a son. He needed an heir that the nobility would recognize. Henry decided he had to have an annulment. He would remarry and have another chance at producing an heir.

The Pope was not inclined to grant that annulment. Queen Catherine was aunt to the powerful Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who had only a few years earlier sacked Rome in a conflict with the papacy. This was not an enemy that Pope Clement VII wanted to aggravate. Henry reacted by denying the Pope and declaring that the English king was the head of the English church.

Poor Georges de Selve was on a doomed mission. Events were too far advanced. The marriage itself was a sin and an offense in the eyes of the Catholic Church. In short order, Henry would be excommunicated by the Pope.

I find this kind of paradox in history often. The Tudors were essentially a conservative force. They did not want to rock the boat. Henry, in an effort to secure stability, effected one of the most wrenching and revolutionary changes in a millennium of English history.

It would seem that both subjects of the portrait found themselves discouraged by the state of affairs. Only sixteen years after Luther had nailed his challenge to church doctrine on the door of the Wittenberg church, Europe was wracked by rebellion and war. To Catholic men of principle, it was horrifying. It was profound tragedy.

The painting is loaded with symbols to reflect the unease in the minds of the two men. Between them in the painting are shelves stacked with objects that seem to advertise their learning, books, quadrants, a globe, a lyre. Renaissance noblemen were expected to demonstrate an intellectual versatility that today’s party of Donald would probably find suspect and effete. These sorts of displays in portraiture were not unusual. But when you study the objects, there are elements of discord. The lyre has a broken string. The astronomical devices are misaligned. A book on mathematics is open to a page about division. The only sign of a higher order is the silver crucifix high in the left corner of the painting, half hidden by the green curtain that is the backdrop for the scene.

The two men in the portrait were fated to live in a time of growing discord. Within a generation, France itself would be engulfed in a bloody civil war. There were few signs of hope for them. They had no refuge from the violence but that of philosophy, captured in the final symbol and most famous of the great painting, the distorted skull at the bottom, the reminder that all things pass, the memento mori.

Few and fortunate are those who have regarded this portrait in the subsequent centuries, and, recognizing the symbols of discord and distress, didn’t identify with them. It’s in the nature of our inventive species to find new ways to compete and fight for advantage, flying the banners of ideas forged for the occasion.

We in our time watch a tide of conflict envelope the world. We ourselves watch as a citadel of ideas is under siege, the philosophies we thought impregnable: liberalism and democracy. While some Americans celebrate Trump’s irrationality as a kind of mystical quintessence of democracy, the rulers of China and Russia openly mock democracy. The emergent non-nations of ideological clans and warlords invent post-modern elaborations of medieval law. We manifest the same sort of shock and disbelief that overtook the ambassadors to Henry VIII’s London. Reason must have some weapons left in its arsenal. But the partisans of reason so seldom win out. We’re far more likely to be the witnesses of a violent birth of some new era, than the guardians of the faith in a time of trial.

Look at the scene from just the right angle and you see the skull emerge. Find your solace.

Travelogue 722 – November 1
Trick or Treat

Halloween still exists! On an early evening break from duties at the school, I ride through Kralingen, in eastern Rotterdam, close to campus, and I see the boys and girls in costume. I think I had decided that the holiday was dead for children. It had become a prank for adults, a time to dress up and drink, bust glass in the streets as they stumble home. But there they were, little witches and skeletons and clowns running along the brick sidewalks, clustered in front of open doors. The difference now, it seems, is that parents tag along. I see them standing behind by a few paces, taking pictures. The children seem genuinely overjoyed. It’s cheering after a full day in classes full of the older versions of these Dutch children, children who have discovered the dubious delights of adulthood, innocence still showing in their eyes though they have become busy being grown-up with their bodies.

I’m meeting up with the actors later tonight. We’re playing our own style of trick or treat. Our first performance is only ten days away. We are rehearsing my two one-acts, two pieces to be performed the same evening. We’ll be performing in a club-and-theatre in downtown Rotterdam, near Eendrachtsplein and the train station.

Are we ready? Theatre is chaos. That’s part of the attraction to performance, I think, the temptation to ride this wave toward controlled disaster. You set a date and you put money down on a room. You gather people together and you commit each to one another in an exercise in silliness, a playful seriousness, masks and costumes in front of people paying for tickets. It’s a species of madness.

The venue is being difficult. No one answers or returns our calls. We are anxious about logistics. How will we plan things like lighting? Are we getting enough promotion out there? Why isn’t the theatre promoting? Actors are still struggling with their lines. My job is to push them. They snap at me. Tensions always build this close to show-time. But the game is resilient. We dive right back into it. It’s surprising every time I see it.

Trick-or-treat is not only about the costumes. It’s as fun as the buy-in. With the right group, every costume is hilarious and every piece of candy delicious. We have a good group of trick-or-treaters.

Theatre is magic. It conjures things out of spirit. It plays with the essence of the transitory world. Each show vanishes in the moment, different than the last. The script might be the constant, but each show changes, like the water in the river.

Reading Shakespeare is reading poetry. Seeing stagings of Shakespeare is speculation. Seeing his play in 1600 was probably good fun. But no one walked out of the theatre thinking it was the event that defined his life. It was gone.

I arrive back at the college. I see my playmates. And so we move on to the next door. We’re giggling at the silliness of it all, dressing up like this and shouting to the house, lights up, ‘Trick or treat!’