Travelogue 863 – August 5
Fictions – 1
A New York Yankee

apologies to Victor Hugo

On that day, there was to be a bonfire on the Place de Grève, a maypole at the Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery at the Palais de Justice. It had been cried, to the sound of the trumpet, the preceding evening at all the crossroads, by the provost’s men, clad in handsome, short, sleeveless coats of violet camelot, with large white crosses upon their breasts.
The populace thronged the avenues of the law courts in particular, because they knew that the American ambassadors, who had arrived two days previously, intended to be present at the representation of the mystery, and at the election of the Pope of the Fools, which was also to take place in the grand hall.

The palace place, encumbered with people, offered to the curious gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into which five or six streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged every moment fresh floods of heads. The waves of this crowd, augmented incessantly, dashed against the angles of the houses which projected here and there, like so many promontories, into the irregular basin of the place. In the centre of the lofty Gothic façade of the palace, the grand staircase, incessantly ascended and descended by a double current, which, after parting on the intermediate landing-place, flowed in broad waves along its lateral slopes,—the grand staircase, I say, trickled incessantly into the place, like a cascade into a lake.

Above their heads was a double ogive vault, panelled with wood carving, painted azure, and sown with golden fleurs-de-lis; beneath their feet a pavement of black and white marble, alternating. A few paces distant, an enormous pillar, then another, then another; seven pillars in all, down the length of the hall, sustaining the spring of the arches of the double vault, in the centre of its width. Around four of the pillars, stalls of merchants, all sparkling with glass and tinsel; around the last three, benches of oak, worn and polished by the trunk hose of the litigants, and the robes of the attorneys. Around the hall, along the lofty wall, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, the interminable row of all the kings of France, from Pharamond down: the lazy kings, with pendent arms and downcast eyes; the valiant and combative kings, with heads and arms raised boldly heavenward. Then in the long, pointed windows, glass of a thousand hues; at the wide entrances to the hall, rich doors, finely sculptured; and all, the vaults, pillars, walls, jambs, panelling, doors, statues, covered from top to bottom with a splendid blue and gold illumination.

The two extremities of this gigantic parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, as the ancient land rolls say, “such a slice of marble as was never beheld in the world”; the other by the chapel where Louis XI had himself sculptured on his knees before the Virgin. This chapel, quite new, having been built only six years, was entirely in that charming taste of delicate architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine and deep chasing, which marks with us the end of the Gothic era. The little open-work rose window, pierced above the portal, was, in particular, a masterpiece of lightness and grace; one would have pronounced it a star of lace.

In the middle of the hall, opposite the great door, a platform of gold brocade, placed against the wall, a special entrance to which had been effected through a window in the corridor of the gold chamber, had been erected for the American emissaries and the other great personages invited to the presentation of the mystery play.

All at once, the door of the reserved gallery which had hitherto remained so inopportunely closed, opened still more inopportunely; and the ringing voice of the usher announced abruptly, “His eminence, Monseigneur the President of the United States.”

The President halted for a moment on the threshold of the estrade. While he was sending a rather indifferent glance around the audience, the tumult redoubled. Each person wished to get a better view of him. Each man vied with the other in thrusting his head over his neighbour’s shoulder. He entered, then, wearing a fine scarlet robe, which he carried off very well, bowed to those present with the hereditary smile of the great for the people, and directed his course slowly towards his scarlet velvet armchair.

Stopping at the balustrade, the President spoke to the crowd.

“It's great to be back in this country that I love. I love this country, very special, very, very special, on the banks of the beautiful Seine River with the hardworking patriots of the French heartland. Thank you, Paris. We love you Paris. So we've got thousands of people standing outside, and I asked the officials, can we sneak some up along the aisles?

“Can they sit on the stairs? But I'll tell you what, this is some crowd, some turnout. We've sold tens of thousands of tickets, and you know what the sale price is, we keep it nice and low, we keep it nice and low. But there never has been a movement like this. This is a movement the likes of which they've never seen before, maybe anywhere, but certainly in this country. If I hadn’t won the 2016 Election, we would be in a Great Recession/Depression right now.

“I was watching the so-called debate last night, and I also watched the night before, that was long, long television. And this morning, that's all the fake news was talking about that. The people I saw on stage last night, and you can add in Sleepy Joe, Harris, and the rest, will lead us into an economic sinkhole the likes of which we have never seen before. With me, only up!"

Travelogue 862 – July 31
A Nice Breeze

I welcome the cool breezes. The weather has turned. It will rain today. We won’t be able to ride bikes, but we’ll have the relief of some fresh air to breathe and some cool air against our skin. We’ve been through two record-breaking blasts of heat already this summer.

We suffered in the heat. It felt like we would suffocate. Menna made the comment that we look forward to summer through the damp chill of winter and spring, making for too many months of anticipation. Then when the summer comes, we suffer. This kind of heat has a debilitating effect on me. Cold can be dispiriting, but mind and body still function. If anything, they are stimulated. Heat slows me down. Quick thoughts congeal into a thick syrup. My skin breaks out in heat rashes. When I run, there is little pleasure and my times are embarrassing.

These intervals of cool sea breezes feel like awakening. The walking sleep of hot summer can start to pall, like a nap that’s gone on too long. You’re more tired than before the nap; you have a headache. Cool air is like a tonic.

The rewards of hot and sleepy summer are tied to the lazy passage of time. My girls love the sunshine. Their energy levels don’t suffer. And we have time to play. They lighten my experience immeasurably.

Yesterday was muggy. It wasn’t the hottest day, so I felt like I could move. The hot sun was broken at regular intervals by lovely white clouds. It was a picture of the best kind of summer’s day. If it hadn’t been preceded by such extreme heat, it would have been perfect.

We made it perfect, anyway, walking together to the ‘Dakpark’, a park built onto the roof of a kilometre-long strip mall. It’s a surprisingly pleasant stretch of green grass and clean walkways. In the middle, there’s a fountain where children play, a long shallow basin in dark stone fitted with small fountains shooting water straight up in random order into the breezes. The girls were enchanted. They waded tentatively into the water. They followed other children as they ran, smiling to watch their antics.

One parent was filling water balloons from the fountain nozzles. Baby Jos held hers in both hands like something precious. She brought it home with us, and only then did she throw it against the pavement to watch it burst, laughing with pure delight.

Travelogue 861 – July 26
The Toilets

I studied history in university. My mentor taught Roman History. For anyone interested in a deeper study of Roman life, there was also a Classics Department. The purpose of that department was a study of ancient languages and civilization. I would have liked to have taken more courses in classics, but I was a history student. There was something of a friendly rivalry between the departments. Classics students studied Roman toilets (so we said,) while we serious history students tackled the big issues. Still, I was somewhat envious. I found immersion in an ancient language and culture very tempting.

In Gent, I thought about the Roman toilets. Civilization is made of its details. An understanding of it requires making time for the toilets. Four years in university is so short. As a history student, I had four years to find my way through several millennia of European politics and culture. No time to smell the roses, or the sewers, as it happens. It’s too bad. It’s the knowledge of the day-to-day that transports us, creates real understanding and empathy.

Setting aside medieval Gent, an example: many of us have absorbed an outline of Muslim history. It’s topical and relevant. We read short histories, and we understand something more than we did before. That’s good. But how many have heard the call to prayer – not in movies, but in person? The adhan is integral to the mundane and tactile experience of Islam. I’m guessing it would be difficult for someone who grew up in the Middle East to separate historical Islam from the sensory Islam, the sound of the adhan, and the prayer itself. Taking the thought further, how many have heard the call often enough and in enough settings to have a feeling for how it changes according to country, area, city or village? What do we know about Islam, current or past?

Making a decision to write fiction, I have been confronted by this old (false) dichotomy between history and civilization, between events and experience. A story about Gent can never be a true accounting. Research is an effort to align fiction with reality as closely as possible with finite resources. They never merge. They just hover near for an instant.

In the city museum, I had walked across the huge floor map of Gent. It was a reminder how my study started. The city was born in the mind as a map. Landmarks were discovered, in time and space. Maps were histories, and histories were maps. Continuing on, I inevitably wanted to feel the ground of the place under my feet. Detail is a kind of descent into the map. Detail is infinite: shadow and texture and the passage of every minute of the day.

One fun feature of the castle at Gent are the toilets, apparently a luxury for the counts and their families: private toilets built into the castle walls. The toilets hung over the moat, and waste was thus disposed of immediately. Bored commoners could watch from the road for noble faeces dropping into the water.

Travelogue 860 – July 18
Status of Seasons

I go for my walk with the girls. It’s evening. This is later than we usually go. We’re giving Mama some time with her guests.

It’s been chilly for summer. Clouds come and go, never freeing the sky entirely. The girls have on their jackets.

When we get to the park, Baby always races ahead, while Little Ren stops at the bridge to look for ducks. Children enjoy their rituals. And I enjoy what they enjoy.

Watching Baby running makes me so happy. I can’t say why precisely. It could be the sense of freedom expressed in a child’s run. It could be her pride. She likes showing me how fast she can run. I look forward to this moment whenever I we get time to go out.

At the top of the stairs, I present them with their lollipops. That’s the ritual. Then we walk along the path where the train tracks used to be, becoming quite narrow this time of year, crowded by the brush on either side. We talk about what we see today, the flowers and the insects and the rabbit poop.

Much of the brush crowding our little path consists of blackberry bushes. Little Ren fell in the thorns once, so now we are very respectful of the long shoots the bushes throw in our way. We have been watching the progress of the berries. Many are ripe now. We pick a few samples. Some are tart. Baby makes a face. She calls things that are tart ‘winky’ because they make her wink.

The sun is lower than usual because it’s evening. Its light is filtered through the heavy foliage of the season. When we emerge into sunlight, we stand still and absorb the warmth. When we resume our walk into the shade, we are chilly again.

The details define the moment: the angle of the sun, the chance weather, the progress charted by the season. Every week makes a difference in the state of the season, its leaves, its fruits, the blossoms and the insect populations.

None of that accounts for the subjective experience of seasons. Because I work in a school, seasons have their cycles of stress and release. Summer is becoming sweet just now, the relief of approaching vacation time blowing in like fresh spring air.

The accumulation of detail feeds any scene. Fiction is composed of setting and experience. So it was that my every step in Gent counted. How might the sun strike the cobblestones of one narrow street, say a small alley running east and west? How would the line of that sun divide the brick wall rising to the north? How would that line rise through the afternoon, and how would the warmth stored in the brick feel to the touch? How would the complex of colours in that small space be affected? How differently might the brick have looked then?

Travelogue 859 – July 12
Stone by Stone

I studied history in university. My mentor taught Roman history. His focus was late Empire, but his courses covered all the thousand years or so of Roman history, and quite a bit of historiography along the way. The old question, ‘when did the empire really fall,’ for example, prompted all sorts of questions. If the Byzantines called themselves Romans; if Charlemagne called himself a Roman Emperor; if Latin was taught in the schools of the British Empire until the twentieth century, then how do we define the empire and Roman civilization? Was Constantine more recognizable in a Byzantine context than in a pre-Augustan context? Et cetera.

We can agree that Rome changed, though we can’t agree on what precisely Rome was. We can agree that Rome fell, though not on when, or even on what we mean by ‘fall’. I love history. I love its riddles. The mysteries keep us engaged and add a human element. Behind the gradual change are everyday decisions, like the collective shrug over another accusation of rape on the part of the president of the U.S., let’s say.

Gent had its rise and its fall. The rise was gradual, the product of generations of good trading decisions and hard work, and the result of many successful negotiations with the counts of Flanders. One can imagine the expediency in each decision. Families knew each other. Merchants traded with people they knew and trusted. The counts had more important matters to attend to, like pressing campaigns to pursue against neighbouring nobility, marriage alliances to negotiate, hunts and banquets to arrange. No decision happens in a void. So city-states like Gent gathered piecemeal rights and privileges that gave them monopolies of wealth and influence. With these, they made themselves an irritation and an indispensable asset to the counts.

In the thirteenth century, the counts acknowledged the importance of Gent, building the castle Gravensteen. The name means ‘count’s stone’, a proud reference to the counts' contribution to a city being rebuilt in stone because of its new wealth. His was going to be THE stone house. It was suitably impressive, towering over the town and its bustling port on the River Leie, surviving more than seven centuries until my family could arrive and our girls could run madly along its ramparts.

The place didn’t serve long as a place of residence. The counts of Flanders were a peripatetic lot, as were most medieval nobility and royalty. They visited less and less often, and within two centuries, the castle was used primarily as a court and prison. This was its manifestation in the era I’ve been writing about.

Travelogue 858 – July 7
The Count’s Castle

Baby Jos was very excited to visit a castle. It was our first stop in Gent, the Count’s Castle, or Gravensteen. We stood outside the high grey walls to take pictures together, documenting our first real castle. Inside the gates, the girls ran back and forth across the rough flagstones of the courtyard while Mama and Papa listened to audio guides. We entered the buildings of the castle, and we moved slowly from chamber to chamber, absorbing what we could of the setting and history while reining in the wild enthusiasm of the children.

Little Ren wanted badly to play the small harp standing in the countess’s tiny chamber. The instrument was likely a sturdy replica, but, no, we couldn’t let her play. Museum guests stood in semi-circle, frowning as they listened to the same audio passage, frowning at Little Ren in her distress.

Baby Jos wanted to race up the narrow, circling staircases, regardless of who stood in the way. At the top, between slats guarding the crenellations, we could see the sprawling town. At that height, our babies panicked us at every turn. They continued making dashes one way and then another, as though possessed. We captured them; we led them by hand back to the stairway. Down again we wound, down the cold, constricted wells of spiralling steps, where the air was close and smelled of ancient stone.

Standing at each vantage point, my task as papa was to track racing, tumbling babies. My task as writer was to see the living map, to make the floorplan come alive and speak to me. It’s a tremendous challenge, actually, seeing through time. It requires much more than a vacation day with the family. It takes concentration and imagination. It takes a freed mind, a capacity to daydream. That’s not easy while monitoring crazy children.

I sigh now to think, ‘I chose to write fiction.’ How foolish. That’s life: we choose things without knowledge of them. That’s how it works with time and matter. We choose, and then we learn. Fiction requires varieties of work and commitment that feel somewhat alien, alien to my character and alien also to the zeitgeist.

Of course it requires work. In these days of triumphalist and angry capitalism, it’s no great challenge to conceive of art as hard labour. Anything good must emerge from labour and pain. That’s quite easy to get. But there’s another side to creation that excites more suspicion. Stories also require time spent in active imagination. And imagination is known to keep company with lazy fellow-travellers like ‘reflection; and ‘daydreaming’. And who can abide all the time that authors spend reading? The only reading worthy of our age happens in airports. And frankly, it’s better if the books are Harvard-edited manuals of business management.

So it is that I feel guilty. I feel guilty that I love stories. I feel guilty that I would spend precious vacation time in a place like Gent. I should be more functional, building status with names like Ibiza or Tuscany. I feel guilty about moments stolen in medieval alleyways, when I ought to be earning money or muscle tone. I feel guilty even about the time I don’t have, the hours that exist only in longings, time I would invest in dreaming, contemplation, meditation, speculation, reflection and wonder.

Travelogue 857 – June 30
The Big Map

The first room in Gent’s city museum, or the STAM, as it’s called, is the map room. Laid out on the floor is an aerial view of the city, covering three hundred square metres. Available for comparison are smaller historical maps of the city from previous centuries. Several of these maps I’m already familiar with. In fact, there is a lot I recognize among the features of the city.

I’ve been studying maps of Gent, current and historical, since I started working on this book. In my odd relationship with this place, I can say the map has pre-dated the city. While it’s true that Gent is older than I am, and while it’s true that I had visited Gent before I started the research for this book, real acquaintance began with the maps. Previous trips had been too brief. It’d been impossible to form a coherent sense of the town based on the route from the train station to Sint-Baafskerk.

I circled the museum’s floor map, studying the details. The outline of things was familiar, the town’s shape determined by the course of rivers and canals; the town’s orientation according to the compass. I wanted to drill down into the picture, see the paths that became the streets, see the public buildings that shaped the centre and the rows of houses that rose and rose again among the areas less central. I wanted to follow the canals that had shaped the city’s history. I did follow the miniature of the long trench of the Terneuzen canal, dug in the nineteenth century to link the city to the Dutch port on the Scheldt estuary, twenty miles away. I was thinking it would be a nice cycle ride.

Of course, I could identify the museum in its own map, situated in the Bijlokesite complex, once a convent and, for centuries, a hospital. The large complex also houses a concert hall and an academy for opera. Each building seems to come from a different era. The museum building includes the old abbey church and a dormitory for the nuns.

Outside the map room, my interest waned. I enjoyed some of the artefacts, the medieval crossbows, for example. But the historical background was general and offered me very little that was new about my period of interest. I lingered in the rooms devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eras that I hadn’t studied as well, times of Spanish dominance, slow decline and decadence.

I also enjoyed the room dedicated to the mystery of the panel stolen from Van Eyck’s ‘Lam Gods’ triptych in the 1930s. It made for an engaging story. Seven months after the theft, the likely thief died of a heart attack, and only left a cryptic clue in his desk about the whereabouts of the panel. No one has ever found it. One theory ascribes the theft to the diocese itself, hard up for cash. I had a good time looking over the contemporary headlines and watching video clips from news reels and later documentaries.

Travelogue 856 – June 23
Solstice 19

It was approaching midnight, and I couldn’t sleep. I opened the front door to the flat to let in a breeze. The evening was cool.

There was still a tint of cerulean blue in the sky, making shadows of the rows of clouds in the west. I experienced a double sense of wonder, inspired by the lingering sunlight at that hour and by the beauty of the colour. I took in the fresh air, breathing out a wordless prayer of thanks for the season.

I’ve been taking the girls to the local park about every other day. We walk hand-in-hand to the canal. They run across the bridge to climb the stairs on the other side. These steps lead to a dirt path that runs along the ridge of a man-made hill. This once was a railway line that brought freight cars to the Van Nelle plant. Now it’s like a wall that divides one district from another. On our side there is a canal with its narrow margins of grass. On the other side is a playground and petting zoo. These days, we can’t see much on either side because of the spring growth.

Along our path, the wildflowers and berry bushes have been growing noticeably. Bees and butterflies flit among the flowers. We’ve seen the season’s first dragon fly. This is our little nature walk, and I try to make the most of it. We stop to call out the colours of the blooms. We stop to check the shade of green in the blackberries. The girls know they will get to taste them when they turn purple. If we spot a ladybug, we set it on Baby’s finger to crawl up her arm. Little Ren will squat over a train of ants, and she knows not to squash them. Further down the path, we descend another stairway, the stones of which are being pushed out of position by the roots and grass underneath, and we run to the playground on the corner.

That day, I told Baby Jos that it was the first day of summer. She’s been longing for summer, when she and her sister could play in the water. She never really got the concept of spring. Sunny days were summer, and cold days were winter. I pointed out the budding trees and the new flowers, attempting to link spring to fall, when the leaves fell. She repeated, ‘it’s summer!’ with some relief.

It was the solstice. I had watched the long day unfold, waking at four to briefly appreciate the brightening colours in the sky. I had enjoyed every hour of sunlight, morning into afternoon. And, as midnight approached, I stood outside my door to marvel at the final colours of the calendar’s happiest day.

Travelogue 855 – June 22
Citadelpark

In Gent, we stayed at a hotel beside the Scheldt River, just inside the bounds of the medieval city, close to the city’s southern gates (demolished a long time ago). It was a neighbourhood that appeared to be more of a legacy of the imperial era of Belgium, when the industrial revolution had brought something of the old mercantile energy back to Flanders. The houses were snug and stolid, set with humble bits of Jugendstil ornamentation.

One morning, I woke early to make a museum trip on my own. I walked west across the breadth of old Gent, across the Scheldt and across the tongue of land between the two rivers. It only took me fifteen minutes to travel this distance. I traversed the Citadelpark, a generous tract of green urban park set on the site of a post-Napoleonic citadel built.

The park occupied part of a hill that rose like a ridge along the spine of that tongue of land between rivers, a hill that contrasted so starkly with the surrounding Flemish flatlands that it had a name, Blandijnberg, and a long history in the defences of the city. In the age of the Citadel, it must be said, history seemed to have found its rounding off. The French sent no more conquering armies. And the wars of the twentieth century made of the greatest nineteenth-century fortresses quaint hallmarks of futility.

Actually, the French did send one more army, in 1832. But it was in defence of the new Belgian kingdom, rather than in conquest. A year after Belgian independence, the Dutch king invaded. He wanted Flanders back. While the other powers dithered, it was restoration France that came to the rescue. No one outside of Holland objected. It seemed that neutral Belgium had quickly become a vital buffer for the countries in the region.

Well before the Kaiser’s generals projected campaigns across the Belgian frontier, the Citadel had become irrelevant. In the late nineteenth century, when Belgium was eager to count itself among the industrial and colonial powers of Europe, Gent re-imagined the district of the Blandijnberg. The park was planned. The university moved in with new buildings.

Crossing the park, I found a path that led behind a small, artificial waterfall. The park had that kind of moulded feel, like other urban parks surviving from the time before world wars, when park spaces had been designed as sites for the amusement of the city’s families, and the city’s lovers. Designers simulated and enhanced nature, dreaming up a kind of romantic pastoral. I’m sure it would have seemed absurd to simply allow nature to reclaim the hill. Nature for its own sake was not the point.

Crossing the park on the paved roads, I had to dodge cyclists careening around corners with the casual lack of concern for safety of students everywhere. I’m reminded with every adrenaline spike how this district is now, above all else, a university district.

Past the park and back in city streets, the rest of my way was downhill, past facades of the same era as eastward, down to the humble Leie River. The river was crossed in a minute, and I’d arrived at the Bijloke.

Travelogue 854 – June 11
Gefeliciteerd!

And I interrupt the Gent program again to report on events, momentous events. We celebrated a birthday on the weekend, the fourth birthday of my dear girl, Baby Jos, no longer a baby, but a tall and loud and forceful little girl.

Humans live to be surprised by each other. Habits are comfortable and efficient, but novelty is nourishment. Children have great versatility to surprise, growing so quickly, graced with such stores of energy. Discovery is continual, and it’s mutual. I mean that children’s discovery becomes conscious through the mirroring of adults. And children make the mundane new for adults.

Jos has grown so quickly this year. I am surprised by simple things. I am surprised by how heavy she has become to carry. I am surprised by the muscle in those lithe arms and legs. I am surprised by her humour, a child’s robust and subversive humour. She makes faces; she crosses her eyes; she makes up funny dances. Intelligence glints in her eye.

My Jos is passionate. She howls when she doesn’t get what she wants. She tells me she loves me, and then she tells me to go away. She laughs with joy when cartoon characters sing on TV. She cheers when I bring home treats. All of it I enjoy without reservation, encouraging her to enjoy.

My Jos is not shy. When the guests arrive at her birthday party, she greets them herself. If they have brought gifts, she asks about them right away. When it’s time for photos, she is quick to take a pretty pose. And when it’s time to blow the candles out, she’s excited and exhibits no stage fright. When people sing for her, she is openly delighted.

Baby Jos anticipated the party for days, thinking often of the cake and ice cream and gifts. She spent days reasoning forcefully with her younger sister about the privileges of birthdays. “It’s not your birthday, Ren. It’s mine.” Little Ren is unconvinced.

The two share everything, though not always peacefully. When there is peace, it’s often due to Little Ren’s idolization of her big sister. They play games together; they pretend. Baby Jos comes up with most games, and Little Ren repeats.

One morning, they’re playing dress-up. They’re rubbing Legos across their faces. It’s lipstick, they explain. They’re banging the Legos against their palms. It’s face cream. They rub their faces again. They apply the cream to their hair. They behind their backs and over their shoulders. They’re dressing, they say. They are perfect mimics, and it’s clear they have watched their mother putting on her bra.

Four years old and starting school soon. I am overcome!

Travelogue 853 – June 10
Processions

We had had good luck with weather. Our days in Gent had been the sort that make you want to sit outside, gathering the spring sunshine while you had it. Outside Sint-Baafskerk, as I’ve said, the square was bound on one side by a long line of cafes, and all of them had rows of tables outside. The tables and their wicker seats were packed tightly into partitioned areas nearly as big as the spaces indoors. And each café had outdoor heaters, installed above the storefront windows for the first row of tables or set upon poles for the tables further from the doors. I was quick to convince the girls they wanted juices and snacks, so I had an opportunity to have a beer and recuperate in the sun.

There’s a lot I wanted to see in this town. The trip was research. I’m writing a book set in Gent. But sightseeing was tiring work.

Fortunately, all was close at hand. Following the curving line of bars in Sint-Baarsplein, we passed the Lakenhalle into the next square, and then onto the street called Botermarkt that led up the slight hill to its intersection with Hoogpoort. Here, the Gothic broke out like ivy gone riot all over the buildings. Most of it was self-conscious nineteenth-century restoration. But I was not unaware that this intersection formed, in actual fact, one hub of the Gothic town itself.

I speculated that it was on the site of the kitschy old bar on the corner that the old guild of crossbowmen, Sint-Jorisgilde, had been housed. Through the town’s glory years, this guild, one of the oldest, had led in war and they had led in civic and religious processions.

I would have given a lot to have had a window opened in time so I could watch a medieval procession in this era, when the civilization of the Middle Ages was at its most codified, when ritual was most elaborate, and when the independent city states in northern Europe were at their freest and proudest. Originally processions were church occasions, but they evolved into expressions of local pride. The bridge between church and city was often the city’s patron saint. No self-respecting city could do without a relic of the patron saint, and some story linking the saint to the city’s history, no matter how improbable. On the saint’s day, the city and its mythos were celebrated.

The processions provided timely applications of glue to hold together enclaves like Gent, standing against titanic nation-building forces like the good dukes of Burgundy. I read recently about one of Gent’s many rebellions against the feudal authority, in 1467. Charles the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was making his first entry into the city after his father’s death. It was the ritual acknowledgement of his new authority over the town. Unwisely, he chose to make his entry during the city’s favourite religious festival, a two-day procession to the nearby town of Houtem to honour Saint Lieven. Hundreds of townspeople retuning the day after the duke’s entry, started rioting in the Vrijdagmarkt.

Travelogue 852 – May 29
The Strike

I interrupt the Gent journal to report on today’s transit strike. Rotterdam woke on strike day to persistent showers. The rain hasn’t abated yet, and it’s nearly noon. I’ve dug out my rain pants, and I’ve ventured out on the bike so I could experience the town on a day without trams or trains or buses. I found it a singularly and surprisingly difficult thing to imagine, a city without trams. It’s good once in a while to be made aware of the things you take for granted, and clearly I had taken the regular rumble and screech of rail transport all aboard into my psyche. Transit routes were cycles of nature, and train cars were as ubiquitous as canals and cows in their fields.

I can report that the streets were predictably quieter this morning. Life hadn’t stopped, but there was less activity. It felt like summer break. Cars sped by with all their former carelessness, but conspicuously absent was the network of sound underneath, the grumble, the bell, the whine of steel wheels.

I stopped by a Metro station. This seemed the ultimate test of the strike. I had never imagined the Metro stations as anything but open, at every hour and forever. The Metro station was a kind of community centre, where we met together to share our quiet disdain for each other.

Cycling by two Metro stations, I saw the proof. The stations were gated off, closed. It felt wrong. Those long train platforms silent and empty: it couldn’t be. Those were our sacred spaces, comprising a species of catacomb where we buried our sunlight and buried our individuality. Where would we find the day’s cold comfort, the shadowless, concrete dreamscape inhabited by sleepwalkers on smart phones? This was a blow.

I took a moment to stop at the grocery store. Here I found people. The aisles were alive with smiles and activity. There was an atmosphere of holiday.

I had originally thought that calling a strike that punished customers more than employers was a dubious strategy, but here I saw through my American bias. In America, the prevailing ethos is to punish the weakest person in any hierarchy. Wrath over a transit strike would be visited upon wage-earners who arrive late to work, sweaty and soaked by the rain. Here, all is viewed with a measure of indulgence. A strike is like a blizzard. The community shrugs and accepts it as a natural phenomenon, out of their control. That could never be countenanced in the America I remember.

Still, I wouldn’t recognize the attitude as support for the transit workers, either. I asked a few people about it in the days before the strike. Most only shrugged. Some were cynical. That was yesterday. Today, it’s a holiday.

Travelogue 851 – May 28
The Square

Outside Sint-Baafs cathedral, there is an open square. On one side is a line of café-bars with outdoor seating. That line drifts away in a curve to open the square wider at the opposite end, where stands the Lakenhalle, the Cloth Hall, which was built during the first half of the fifteenth century. The Lakenhalle is situated right underneath and adjoining the Belfry, Gent’s famous bell-tower.

Picture Gent in the 1430s. While the Vijds were finishing their chapel in the ambulatory of the church then called Sint-Jans, and while Jan Van Eyck was completing his masterpiece, the cloth merchants were busy building their hall across the square. Perhaps they were already using the space for business, storing cloth, conducting their inspections, negotiating daily. It’s hard to imagine how townspeople went about their business in a town centre dominated by multi-generational building projects. The square must have been a mess. Sint-Jans (later Sint-Baafs Cathedral) itself was in the midst of a slow-motion transformation from Romanesque structure to Gothic that would take the better part of two centuries.

The Belfry had only been completed some fifty to a hundred years earlier, so recently by medieval standards that the city watchmen hadn’t moved in yet. They still occupied the tower in the neighbouring Sint-Niklaas Church. These three towers, Sint-Baafs, the Belfry and Sint-Niklaas now form (as they did then, I suppose) a line of heights that give Gent its signature skyline. Tourists are advised to stand on or near the western Sint-Michiels Bridge crossing the Leie to get the finest view of these three towers standing together.

The imagination struggles to picture the city amidst all this change and growth. These days, there’s such generous space accorded these monuments in the centre of town, and there have been such extravagant efforts made to medievalize, that it’s hard to visualize the chaotic and crowded activity that would have been the fifteenth-century experience. It’s safe to say that business and life went on. The churches were open for business, regardless of the stage of building. The cloth trade carried on; it was the life blood of the town. If there was so much open space then, it was put to use, for markets or ceremonials. It’s hard to imagine Gentenaars sentimentalizing the open square, sitting for quiet beers at clean tables overlooking the well-swept flagstones of the square.

Today, the curve of Sint-Baafs Square continues past the Lakenhalle and into the next square, which is fronted by the old city hall and Sint-Niklaas. The square also contains a few curiosities from later times, including the modern City Pavilion, tall and intriguing, a structure that would have baffled the hard-bitten cloth merchants of old Gent. ‘What purpose does it serve?’ they might have asked. Well, it’s beautiful, and it provide shelter for concerts and events. They would have shaken their heads at the waste of space.

There is also an eighteenth-century gateway built into the corner between the Belfry and the Lakenhalle, an entryway into a city jail housed in the basement of the Lakenhalle. A very conspicuous relief was carved into the tympanum, depicting the Roman myth of Cimon, an old man sentenced to starvation but kept alive by his daughter, who breastfed him on prison visits. You can only stand below and laugh or scratch your head, wondering what the city fathers were thinking.

Travelogue 850 – May 26
Hats Off

The canons from Sint-Baafs Abbey were made homeless by the emperor’s vengeance on the city of Gent. They were allowed to relocate to Sint-Janskerk in town. John the Baptist was the patron saint of Gent, and so for centuries the church was named for him. With this shift, the church became known as Sint-Baafs. Today it is still known as Saint Bavo’s, and it’s most famous as home to the Lamb of God triptych painted by the Van Eyck brothers.

When I’ve visited Gent in the past, I’ve gone directly to the cathedral. I’ve stood in that small, sacred room off the nave, where dozens of tourists shuffle around the masterpiece, listening to their audio guides. Now I’m back. I’ve heard the lectures before. I’ve read extensively about the piece. I’ve examined reproductions of the painting closely on the page and on the web. None of that makes me an expert, but this is no introduction. The triptych like an old friend, and I’m just happy to be in the same room. I circle it, looking closely at a handful of details. What you don’t get in books is a sense of the object’s dimension, the air it displaces.

We tour the cathedral, taking in the towering space of the interior and the rich decoration accumulated over centuries. We stroll back to the chapel where the altarpiece was intended to stand. The painting would have dominated this small space built by and dedicated to the Vijd family nearly six hundred years ago.

Much has been written about the adventures of the triptych since the fifteenth century, barely surviving the iconoclasm of the Reformation and subsequent wars. It was claimed by the Nazis and nearly lost among German caverns full of treasure and art. One panel was stolen in a high-profile, mysterious and still unsolved case.

We need reminding how fortunate we are to be able to see the piece. So many artworks from that era are lost. And among the ones that have survived, how many people have had had the privilege to view them? The triptych was produced to serve a specific purpose in religious ritual. Its panels were only opened on holidays.

After we first entered the cathedral, I was idly walking in circles, looking for a place to park the buggy and looking up into the heights of the space. A guard caught my attention and with a friendly wink, gestured a suggestion that I remove my cap. I nodded and complied, of course. How many times a day does he have to remind people that this is still a church?

Travelogue 849 – May 20
The Heir

I mentioned how once upon a time – actually, for nearly a millennium, – an entry into Gent from the east would have taken one past the lands of Sint-Baaf’s Abbey. Now it doesn’t. Only the meagrest vestiges of the ancient abbey remain, buried among the streets of a rather dreary district.

The story of why the abbey doesn’t stand where it used to – why not even a real ruin survives to greet us – is a dramatic one. It leads us back, like so many threads in European history do, to the disappointing figure of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and first Habsburg king of Spain.

This energetic and earnest, yet somehow inadequate, man poses a kind of riddle in history. I’ll be forced to return to him, reconsider him from a few perspectives. In regard to Gent, he serves as a figure from Greek tragedy, born in the city but returning to it as destroyer.

Gent was perennially in rebellion. Resistance against their lords was a kind of sickness among cities in the Lowlands. Charles’s response in 1540 was vicious and decisive. City rights were revoked, city walls torn down. and the abbey was torn down to make way for a Spanish fort with a permanent garrison. Gent never really recovered. It was to be Antwerp’s time in the sun.

Charles is one of those totemic figures made possible in cultures mesmerized by blood lineage. At birth, with no bigger challenge before him than survival to an age of majority, Charles embodied the intersection of so many bloodlines with so many properties and allegiances attached, that he was destined to inherit a kind of leadership over most of Europe. He was the culmination of centuries of alliance and breeding. No one would ever inherit so extensive a European empire again.

Charles took his role seriously, probably to his detriment. He might have achieved as much and been better loved had he lived the life of a medieval monarch, drinking and jousting, leading picturesque campaigns for booty, and planting rebel heads on pikes as cautions.

Charles apprehended himself an emperor from another time, perhaps Hadrian’s or Charlemagne’s or Frederick the Great’s. But it wasn’t to be. The fact was, though he was feudal lord to all, he was king or conqueror to none. Where he saw an empire with far borders to defend (or expand), his people saw the patchwork quilt for what it was, hundreds of loyalties and alliances concluded on individual terms. This disparity in perception may account for Charles’s impatience with Gent.

The old man failed, somehow having had the worst instinct for nearly every occasion. He quietly acknowledged as much when he abdicated and retired to a monastery after forty years’ rule. Circumstance was not kind to this Caesar. The Reformation began under his reign, breaking out with the vehemence and unpredictability of a California forest fire. He waffled when he should have been ruthless; became ruthless when the Protestants had use for martyrs. He eventually resigned to it as a permanent affliction, like his gout.

Travelogue 848 – May 15
From Dampoort

The view of Gent from the Dampoort train station is not the most flattering. You see the skyline from the train platform. It’s not a big-city skyline with glass towers. It’s not a Gothic skyline, except for the tops of the three famous towers of medieval Gent. It’s a common view on Belgian towns, plain and perhaps tired, rows of high, windowed boxes in various faded colours with roofs slanting steeply away, their gables turned toward the narrow cross streets, flat and square building fronts turning rather blank looks outward.

In medieval times, the traveller in this spot would have looked westward into the precincts of the old Abbey of Sint-Baaf. I imagine that in the fifteenth century, it would have presented a more inspiring view than this one, the abbey being a complex of ancient buildings, gathered around its own steepled church, nestled in an estate surrounded by canals.

The medieval buildings we see are beautiful, but I question how attractive medieval towns would have been in their own times. I sense that, glimpsed from a distance, perhaps seen first as one rode horseback over the last hilltop, those towns would have been quite pretty. The picture of the town would have been dominated by the biggest and most enduring of structures, the churches, monasteries, guild halls and castles. Houses would have presented only rows of tiled or thatched roofs.

Closer acquaintance with the town might have been a different experience, confronted with the poverty that is hidden by distances, and with the ephemeral quality of most human production, like the ramshackle shelters built into the city walls and into the walls of the cathedral; or the oddly enduring footpaths become roads, still made of mud, mixed with all sort of excrement and waste.

We made no slow entry into town, at the packhorse pace of medieval pilgrims. We sped in a taxi past the twentieth-century squalor occupying the land of the old abbey and across the Scheldt. The centre of old Gent occupies a bit of land caught between the Leie and the Schedlt. The former river circles coyly around a peninsular jut of land before joining the Scheldt on the east side of the town centre. We wound among narrow streets, past old Sint-Jacobskerk and the famous Vrijdagmarkt, and then across the Leie to arrive underneath the walls of the twelfth-century castle of Gravensteen.

Below the castle is the Veerleplein, a square surrounded by historical facades, including the venerable gateway to the Fish Market, an institution probably as old as the castle, even though the rococo façade dates to the late seventeenth century. The square retains no atmosphere of the Middle Ages, though, with trams trundling by and troops of tourists choosing among the outdoor cafes. Baby has been excited about seeing a castle all day, so we pose for selfies in the busy square.

Travelogue 847 – May 14
The Break

I’ve grown to enjoy the ritual of the European break. You get the feeling that the whole population takes its holidays together. It’s not true. Business chugs away in offices and shops and train stations all year round. But most everyone in university and everyone with kids has a plan for the breaks. The timing does vary slightly region to region, at least in the Netherlands, but all school, universities, daycares centres and dance schools close their doors, and my city grows quieter.

I used to reserve a measure of contempt for this phenomenon, the conformism of spring breaks and mass migrations to the sea in August. But after all, there is something appealing about the idea that we share cycles, follow the rotation of the year together. I suppose it has grown very naturally from calendars based on communal experience, whether religious or seasonal. Holidays are signposts in a narrative. It might be the narrative of nature, or a New Testament narrative.

Consumerist and individualistic America sees vacations as personal choices only. Holidays on the calendar are party dates, but vacations are personal possessions. In that group mind, all experiences are individual.

I think my own resistance to travel during communal break times has had less to do with dogma than with habits of mind. Travel makes me anxious. Imagining travel at the same time as many thousands of others across the country was enough to raise my heart rate. But I’ve found, with conservative experimentation, that it’s not so bad.

Sitting at home, all the people out there, the atomized mass of action, emotion, instinct and will, all surging just outside the door, might be a cheery and reassuring notion, or it might be depressing, or even frightening. But the experience of humanity is more complex. Contact is an alloy, never satisfying any purity test, emotional or intellectual.

On the way home from Gent, we boarded a fast Thalys train in Antwerp to find that some English boys on their way to Amsterdam had taken our seats. They were a large group. The tables were littered with beer cans. We expected the worst, but there was nowhere else to sit. They were polite, though, vacating two seats for us. We were supposed to have two more for the girls, but no matter.

The lads continued their fun, their loud conversation and laughter, but I did mark that their language was censored for the family. They had adjusted. And the conversation was rather entertaining, after all, a discourse among public school lads about old teachers, about rugby, and about the what had happened to old friends and acquaintances. They indulged in an interesting digression about boys on steroids, pausing to shake their heads drunkenly about bad choices.

I was fond of the lads by the end, though the trip was short, and though no words had been exchanged after we had sunk into our seats in Antwerp. God knows what sort of outrages they performed upon the weary carcass of old Amsterdam, but they were (relative) gentlemen on the train.

Travelogue 846 – May 11
Train Travel

It was May Break. Teachers and students had a week off. Our plan was to spend only a few days in Gent. The purpose was two-fold: have fun and do some research. I’m writing a story based in Gent during the fifteenth century. We’ve been to Gent before, but too briefly to see more than a few tourist spots. Too briefly to get a feeling for the geography of it.

We packed our clothes and we packed our babies and we headed to the train station. It’s fortunate I had recovered from my April case of pneumonia. I was going to need all my strength. Train travel with babies can require something of the stamina of a half marathon. I had cancelled my spring half marathon because of the pneumonia.

This trip would be my contest. Ren was still travelling in the buggy. Standing on the platform behind a buggy while the train pulls in can feel like waiting for the sound of the starting gun on a hot day, with twenty-one kilometres ahead of you.

When the train pulled into the station, we manoeuvred anxiously for a door. People are nice, but there’s a powerful herd instinct that takes over. People press in, and they jockey for position. They want you out of the way. Rushing things with babies gets the adrenaline going. It always feels like you might lose your grip on the buggy, or like you just might end up with one child on the other side of the closing doors.

Making it onto the train was more than negotiating the first stairs. We signalled each other and split the team, like TV cops entering a dangerous building. Menna and Jos headed for seats. I pushed the buggy out of the way, while people continued to stream in. It was like weathering a sudden flood. Once they were all in, I could position the buggy safely and take Ren out.

We had to change trains in Antwerp (Anvers). An hour’s rest on the train, and then we were piling out again. We rode the interminable series of escalators up into the terminal. Though we had another train to catch, I pushed the buggy as far as the grand waiting room of the station, a magnificent space that I wanted the girls to see again. We have a lot of memories here, coming to Antwerp to see Yohannes and his family.

We should be greedy for beauty. I exhorted the girls to look, soak it all in. They stared for a moment, not sure what I was so excited about. Then they returned to their own occupations. Menna and I stood on the marble floors and looked into the depths of the dome, rising some sixty metres above.

W.G. Sebald made of this station a meditation in his book ‘Austerlitz’, its monumentalism and strange eclecticism, combining medievalism with Renaissance styles, Muslim with Byzantine, and adorned with references to “the deities of the nineteenth century – mining, industry, transport, trade, and capital”. Laughable, he says. But haunting in its grandeur, inspiring the kind of impulse to reverence that a cathedral does.

Travelogue 845 – May 6
Spelling Issues

What’s in a name? I’m set to write about a family trip during the May Break, but I’m stuck on the name of the city. I’m struggling with the spelling.

In English, the name of the town is Ghent. In Flemish, it’s Gent, pronounced with a hard initial ‘H’. In French, it’s Gant, pronounced something like ‘Gone Girl’ (without the girl). We recover the G sound, lose the T sound. The latter goes some way toward explaining the origins of the Shakespearean name, ‘John of Gaunt’. The place name descends from a Celtic designation, Ganda, that refers to the confluence of the two rivers, Scheldt and Leie.

Americans find it surprising that names in other parts of the world can be mutable. A name to us is something beyond debate or interpretation. Place names in our country were dreamed up by some pioneer while planting his claim, certified by the state, and that was that. There’s something essential in a name. You don’t mess with it.

I’ve observed this mental struggle while I worked in Ethiopia. For one thing, some places in Ethiopia had several names, according to which ethnicity claimed it. For another thing, the main Ethiopia language, Amharic, used a different writing system, so all names were transliterated before we learned them. And we were living through a time when Ethiopians were periodically adjusting spellings in the Roman alphabet. You could date an American’s entry into Ethiopia by the spellings they insisted on.

In Europe, a name exists in a set of overlapping fields, overlapping in time and geography. The French might feel a right to the city. It was founded in the times of the Frankish empire and came of age under the Count of Flanders, who was a vassal of the French king. Modern Belgium is bilingual. The English, too, might have some rights to at least a nickname. They were key trade partners with Ghent for centuries. If they didn’t feel ownership, they felt kinship. This is Europe; many old towns have a set of names.

So I struggle. I want to spell the city’s name ‘Gent’. That feels most natural to me. But will it seem pretentious or arbitrary? Does it matter that I live in Dutch-speaking territory? And won’t Gent have other associations for English speakers, as in ‘ladies and gents’. (The Gent Ladies, by the way, is the name of the women’s football club in Ghent.)

I could simply opt for ‘Ghent’ because I’m writing in English. That makes the most sense. But I do find that spelling grating. While anglicizing the sound, we affects an Italianate or French spelling, ‘gh’ for the hard g sound, something unnecessary for English. I don’t ghet it.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to go for ‘Gent’.

Travelogue 844 – April 28
King’s Day

Yesterday was King’s Day. It’s an annual holiday in the Netherlands to celebrate the monarch’s birthday. Since 2013, that monarch has been King Willem-Alexander. When I first came to Rotterdam, the holiday was Queen’s Day. It had been for many years, through a succession of three queens. Actually, the tradition started with the first of those queens, so I don’t think there was ever a King’s Day until now.

We celebrate it like most Nederlanders, going to the local flea market. The one we like is at the Heemraadsplein in Rotterdam West. Every walkway of the park, and every pavement surrounding the park is occupied by locals setting up stalls to sell second-hand goods. In the centre of the park is a temporary bandshell, where a band plays family-friendly tunes, and parents hold the hands of their toddlers and bounce.

The vrijmarkt is a King’s Day tradition. Permits are not required to sell, and no one pays sales taxes. I suppose it’s the job of a monarch to find indulgences for the people, and this is a popular one. They say one of five Dutch families set up shop on King’s Day, and half the population come out to buy. They even come out on chilly days like this one, during which showers come and go.

The swings are the highlight for my girls, and they are disappointed that the rains disrupt their fun. Jos is old enough to want to go as high as possible, laughing to see the sand speeding under her feet and the sky overhead. Ren is quiet. She holds the chains of the swing tight, and her wide eyes look on with concern and curiosity. She watches other children at play with something like suspicion. We run for shelter when the light rain turns to hail.

It’s an odd way to celebrate a birthday, the vrijmarkt. Of course, it’s not the only activity on King’s Day. There are concerts and parties. But the markets are the most popular, and they bring together the broadest cross-section of the population. It’s an odd variety of patriotism: the opportunity to make or save a few euros. Very pragmatic. But it all works. There are Dutch flags flying. People are wearing orange. The mood is buoyant.

Occasions like this always raise questions for me. What is patriotism? When it looks like people in funny orange hats holding up second-hand clothing for inspection, what is patriotism? Certainly, I prefer this variety to the American sort, which seems to require noise and anxious shows of aggression.

But more interesting to me is the question of national identity. In any setting, it’s a curious fiction. At the Heemraadsplein, most of the women cover their heads and the men greet each other with the salaam. In America, where neighbours are descended from peoples around the globe, they debate a wall to dissect desert land in the southwest. It’s an odd fiction, this idea of national identity.

It’s particularly interesting in this part of the world, in this part of Europe, where borders and allegiances have shifted continuously for several millennia. It’s nearly always been a place where peoples and goods meet, the mouths for busy rivers, ports for a busy sea. And yet, amidst the movement and change, there emerged very quickly a unique culture, easily recognizable as from this part of the world. It’s been durable and relatively constant through the centuries, crossing borders and language groups. It follows the River Meuse, for example, south into France. Primarily, though, it’s a Dutch-and-Flemish creation.

I’ve been studying this culture. I’ve been reading about its hodgepodge history. I’ve tried writing about it, setting stories in medieval Flanders. I continue to examine the question, what is this place?

Travelogue 843 – March 25
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part Three

I’m healing from the fevers. This is familiar, Ethiopia in convalescence. It’s more common to the end of my trips than the start of them, but I’m ready enough from habit to slip into the routines of tending to the debilitated body.

I’ve rarely been deathly ill, and nearly as rarely in perfect health. I think the story of biological life is little more than the dialectic between Platonic health and mortal defect; than degrees of suffering; than the various narrative arcs of our illnesses. The story of a virus may reveal more truth than our own. But that is neither here nor there.

It’s morning. The place has only just opened. I sit on the terrace. The ladies are sweeping. It’s a long process. They are steady, methodical. Their motion together and the sound of the straw brooms are comforting. I’m not going to move for a while. The morning sun is just what I need.

The quality of the Ethiopian sun is something I’ve written about before. I can afford to write about it again, since it’s impossible to capture in a few words. But there is certainly that which is healing about it. It’s gentle and strong in a reassuring ratio. It soothes. It counsels lentezza. It makes one feel blessed. It might be one long note, one sustained breath on a bass flute, low and tremulous.

The mountains add their melody, something as strong as the jagged stone that marks the sky, something as genial as the hectares of eucalyptus that cover the mountain slopes. I know the spaces under those trees, the little valleys that gallop down toward the plains, the red mud and jutting rocks. They feel close to me.

In this country of perpetual poverty, it’s hard to feel altogether lost. In prosperous Holland, one might sense in grey winter one has been lost to God’s sight.

The ladies continue their slow progress across the terrace, sweeping up the fallen fruit from the spreading shoa tree that shades the tables. Their presence and their work are a solace of sorts.

Sometimes it can seem like old women have no place of value in Ethiopian society. It may seem as though they are trapped at home, ageing before their time, gossiping, nagging and complaining. Few have the active and public lifestyles that European pensioners often have.

If they are underestimated from a Western perspective, it may simply be a measure of the extent that Western societies have given up on solace. We see action. We endure our pain. We value diversity, if diversity falls in line with our worship of productivity.

I’ve received much solace and comfort from the old women I’ve come to know in Ethiopia. I’ve seen rare equanimity and keen observations. I’ve seen strength in resignation. It’s occurred to me to question the Western devotion to hustle. Health for us is movement and speed and noise. There is more to lose with the loss of reflection than we are inclined to admit. One might look no further than the mounting insanity in the political sphere.

That’s not to say that all old women here are the same. That’s not to sentimentalize hard lives and complex conditions. These women sweeping the terrace would no doubt rather be somewhere else, and my taking solace from their work has no little scent of hypocrisy to it. But complexity has no prejudice. It extends equally in all directions. Within that complexity, I find beauty. It’s a compromised beauty. We’ve learned there is no other.

Travelogue 842 – March 18
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part Two

I boarded the plane without reading material. It’s the first time I’ve done that. My packing was haphazard. I decided on the morning of travel that I would just pick something up at a bookstore at the airport. Check-in took a long time. I was rushing. I couldn’t find a book shop.

Routines are fragile mechanisms, thrown off so easily. It had been a while since I made the trip to Ethiopia – almost three years. The day of the flight had come on too quickly. I had been struggling with a cold for weeks, repeatedly falling behind at work. I find it funny how rigid modern travel schedules are. It’s unnatural. We book flights months ahead of time, without any idea what our state of mind, health, or occupation will be; without any idea about the weather or political conditions. Travel never looked like this in history. One’s departure date happened when signs were propitious.

I did find a place at the airport to buy books. I chose a few items in a hurry, paid, and then, within the short half hour before boarding, managed to lay those items down somewhere and forget them. I boarded with nothing to read. I was really off my game.

I took my seat, and I spent he coming hours getting sicker than I was before. I sneezed and sniffled and battled a mounting fever. I shrank into my seat, trying not to be too annoying to the person next to me. It’s a seven-hour flight.

By the time I settled in at the hotel, my fever was high enough to disrupt my sleep. It seemed as though I was having a bad reaction to the yellow fever shot I had had a few days before. I’d had a mild cold when I went to the travel clinic, and the shot morphed the cold into a monster. The next day, I stayed in bed as long as I could. But I had one meeting.

Yenebeb made it easy for me, bringing the athletes to the hotel. We strolled outside, into the pleasant Ethiopian sunshine, and we chatted. I took photos of them. Our charity supports them in exchange for community service. We all agreed to meet a few days later at the school for autistic children where they volunteer.

I was exhausted, but I urged Yenebeb to take me one more place, to a bookshop. I wasn’t sleeping, I couldn’t go out, and I had nothing to read. I wasn’t going to survive. He thought about it, and he guided me across the harrowing streets of Megenagna toward one of the ubiquitous malls.

These malls are hallmarks of the past decade of financial growth in Addis. Everyone with a birr to rub together invested in real estate and construction. This resulted in dozens of uninspired glass-faced buildings lining every street in the newer districts of the south. They all rent out to retail and bill themselves as ‘malls’. Megenagna has more than its share of these ugly emporia.

We were searched at the doors to the building by listless security people. We entered the central atrium, stepping across the polished tile, looking into the shops on all sides and open to view behind glass walls. We found out there was a book store on the third floor. There were escalators, a measure of affluence, even though they only worked from the ground to the first floor. It was a sign of my despair that I agreed to climb stairs. Muscles were screaming.

The store was humble, occupying a corner spot on the outside circuit. It was a collection of cheap metal shelves pushed against the walls and filled with long banks of uniform colours in the distinctive local bindings. Almost everything was in Amharic or Oromifa, but there were a few selections in English.

I chose a history of modern Ethiopia, written some time ago by a historian at the University of Addis Ababa. In the coming days, I would spend quite a few hours suffering fevers in my hotel room and reading about the nobility and peasantry of nineteenth-century Ethiopia; reading about Emperors Tewodros, Yohannes, and Menelik; reading about battles, taxes and tributes. It made for good company while I recovered.

Travelogue 841 – March 11
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part One

My view is west along the line of the mountains. The mountains are near. I’m sitting on a terrace situated in the foothills. These are friendly mountains, green and accessible. These aren’t the Alps, sheer and snowy. They’re not imposing at all. Down in the city, at the base of the mountains, you’re already standing at more than two thousand metres above sea level. So the peaks don’t need to soar above the Ethiopian highlands to challenge the Alps in altitude.

The terrace is situated under the sky, under a tall blue sky. The morning sun is strong, and I’ve positioned myself to collect some of its glorious light on my face and shoulders. I’m well-practiced in this art.

These are my mountains. They are as familiar as the streets of any American city. I lived in these foothills for years. My neighbourhood was further west, just below the famous peak of Entoto. But I did spend time in the hills of Megenagna, even at this very terrace. The restaurant has been here for years. It’s an Italian restaurant that occupies the location of a house built at the end of the nineteenth-century by one of Menelik’s generals, just after the epic battle against the Italians. Addis Ababa was the new capital of Menelik’s empire, still unrealized, an open plain below these mountains.

I’m staying just down the hill, in a hotel that didn’t exist the last time I was in Addis. I walked up the steep incline early in the morning. The street curves around the base of a high bluff and then turns and climbs up behind it. It’s an old asphalt switchback with crumbling shoulders and dirt margins. We pedestrians walk in the dirt, while trucks and SUVs creep by in low gears. This neighbourhood might be the Hollywood Hills of Addis; the residents live in mansions. Some of them are famous athletes who trained in the mountains above in their youth.

The restaurant has only just opened for the day. The terrace is being cleaned by three women. They are sweeping up the mess left by the towering shoa tree in the middle. The tree drops messy fruit onto the terrace in surprising quantities. The ladies are sweeping the entire time I’m sitting there, from the top of the stepped terrace to the bottom. I’m staying a while. It’s not right to rush while in Ethiopia.

That sky, pale blue and suffused with sunlight, has no boundaries and so is more or less the same sky as the one that hangs so low over northern Europe. The clouds there, so like a grey ceiling, are here like white adornments, so big they make the sky look bigger.

But it’s the same sky. I arrived from out of that sky, descending from it like a leaf drifting to earth, rebelling against gravity a while before settling in to become a part of the mulch.

Travelogue 840 – February 24
The Dutch Ceiling

They are sitting along the wall, like rooks, if rooks could cross their legs or could draw their knees up to embrace them. If rooks could drink beer. The outdoor tables are all occupied. Undeterred, the human rooks pull themselves up onto the low brick wall and they order their beers. The wall is higher on one side than the other. On this side, the drinker’s toes may still reach the brick of the narrow alleyway, this roadway running the length of the canal that gives the district of Delfshaven its historical purpose, constructed in the seventeenth century to connect the Schie and the Maas Rivers. On its other side, the same brick wall extends down to the surface of the quiet canal waters, waters glinting today with reflected sunshine.

Cross the few metres of the canal-side brick road, and you find my regular pub. I’m cheered by the high spirits of the rookery along the wall. The Dutch are a race particularly sensitive to sunlight. Sunny days, especially in winter, never fail to release good cheer. Who doesn’t enjoy the sight of people enjoying a fine day?

Inside, tables are empty. I choose a place by the window, and I abandon my work almost immediately to stare out at the bright sky above the Dutch gabled roofs across the canal, above the masts of the old-fashioned little barges. A few months ago, the sun would have been getting ready to set at this hour. I feel real, palpable relief at the lengthening of the days.

The sky fills the top of the window frame, smiling down on the rooks on the wall. The smiles of the rooks are an acknowledgement of that wide open sky, but no one looks at it. The sky is like a parent. We love it, but we find enjoyment elsewhere, with friends and conversation. Or with our phones. There’s no point to staring into the void, I suppose. Though I admit that I do it often enough.

The breadth of the sky, harbouring all this air and the architecture of complex chemistry, the structures of condensation, white and insubstantial, and as big as downtown’s buildings, this breadth of the sky I find the best sort of meditation. It provides beauty. It provides awe. It provides a hint of eternity.

I wonder about the psychological effect on the Dutch of having a finite roof of cloud cover over their heads so much of the time. Our small homes are compact spaces inside nature’s confined space, and everything appears finite. The country is crowded. Land is limited. The landscape is geometrically simple, flat and divided by straight canals. The lack of light might be depressing, but it’s a world with its psychological comforts. Borders are clean and close. There’s a kind of certainty in that.

I’ve lived in a number of places, all different. Everywhere, there is geometry and space. Above every place is the limitless sky, tall as space. It’s this formal imposition of dimension that I find puzzling, humbling, suggestive of awe. Formal in that it follows consistent, unchanging laws. Laws that never abate. I find this hard dimensionality an effort – an effort to live with, an effort to imagine. Conjecturing gods ruling us, I see them straining to hold dimension together.

In fact, it’s lack of effort, it’s inertia, holding it together, lazy dimension entire lying in our path, making us step over it all the time. I step over it to get to work, counting the same kilometres every day, climbing the same stairway six flights to the offices, returning by the same rigid route home. No shape, no stretch of it ever wavers. I wonder at the commitment. I wait for the glitch, the lapse, the tell giving away the game. But it never comes.

Just days ago, I entered the sky itself. I flew south to Ethiopia.

Travelogue 839 – February 8
Kites in the Wind

The water is choppy in the Rijnhaven. I’m in a third-floor classroom, looking out the window. It’s warm day, so I’ve opened a window. Though I’ve opened it only a crack, the wind is whistling in with some force. It’s that kind of day, a taste of spring, blue skies and gusting winds. The surface of the harbour is like a miniature sea, accented by ranks of little whitecaps.

I like this view. There are reasons to miss the school’s previous location downtown, its convenience mainly. But this site has its charms. It’s across the river, in the south of Rotterdam, in neighbourhoods that are discovering themselves in the new century.

The world goes on. Humans sweat in their sleep, dreaming about the end of things. The world serenely sails along. It might be sailing along this river, the one I see out the window, the river lined with old and new city. The old city looks like the port city, the spooky silhouettes of cranes lining the river to the west. The new city is just below, represented by the buildings of revitalized districts. Only a dozen years ago, these city blocks along the southern bank of the city were humble and decayed.

Rijnhaven is an open and domesticated body of water, shaped somewhat like a damaged kite, abandoned on the ground in the middle of a bustling city, usually placid green water now driven by the winds inside its basin lined with clean stone. On one side the water is bound by the Wilhelmina Pier, a long strip of land that stands by the river and hosts Rotterdam’s second and most modern skyline. On the other side is Katendrecht, another pier and a district once famously unsavoury, where sailors and longshoremen sought their sordid entertainments. It has been undergoing a regeneration of late. From this window, it looks like an extended construction zone. Where the harbour opens to the river, a pedestrian bridge connects the two districts. On the Wilhelmina side, there stands the New York Hotel, a vestige of nineteenth century steam traffic to America. On the Katendrecht side, there is a warehouse converted into a kind of foodie dream mall, stalls with specialty items and a micro-brewery onsite. These two installations on ether side of the bridge describe the contrast well, between an area established as class and an area hip and aspiring.

The city centre has many of these little harbours, many now hosting pleasure boats and lined with restaurants and bars, crossed by fanciful bridges that were designed by one of the many firms quartered here in a city known as a destination for ambitious architects. I enjoy it, fond as I am of open water and of architecture. A minute by the window is restorative, looking over the broken green kite and the high-rises by the wide river.

Travelogue 838 – January 7
Nice Continental Drift Divide

The effect of time on the human psyche is the feeling of never being incomplete. Identity is narrative. It’s stretched over the term of a life. It’s never gathered in one place. One only has access, at any given moment, to fragments of identity.

We write stories to explain this lack of wholeness. We’re damned by original sin. We lack enlightenment. We carry karmic debt. We’re ‘working shit out’.

Youth offers one kind of yearning, age another. I’ve seen both. Either you hunger for fulfilment of dreams and ambitions. Or one regrets the ambition of youth, so poorly used by life. Contentment is rare, but even contentment consists largely of resignation.

For the ageing, there comes a moment when he or she senses – often with a sinking feeling – that the world is no longer his or hers. It has changed. It already belongs to younger people.

I wonder what that might have felt like in the Middle Ages, when life expectancy was forty or less, and when there was no steady stream of technological developments to signal the march of time. Maybe change was signalled simply by weddings. Or the accession of new kings and lords. Maybe it was the year when one’s children took over the work of bringing in the harvest.

I’ve been reading a lot of magazines this year. (By year, I mean the academic year. I’ve virtually always been a student or a teacher.) I decided my time on the Metro could be more productive, so I started reading. It’s been enlightening.

I’ve discovered a few things. Journalism has surrendered to the suspense revolution. Readers must be enticed to continue with promise of revelation. Journalism has become a hybrid of narrative and analysis. Nothing happens without implications for the future; we know that much. But these days, no journalist trusts the reader with that future. An account of events is incomplete without prediction.

For another thing, magazine editors are in love with technology. I have a sense sometimes that scifi dystopia has become the lens of intellect. It’s as though ‘Blade Runner’ were voted our default destination. All is measured more or less by this Ridleyan yardstick. Within only the last six months, I’ve read about scary neurological research, the scary state of Silicon Valley, scary cryptocurrency, and scary social media trends.

The scary technology stuff strikes a nerve. I see it every day. I ride the Metro and watch the descent of all and sundry into their phones. When I walk the street, I dodge people on their phones. It’s as though I’m alone among robots. When people do happen to look up, they flinch. They turn away quickly, as though put off by what they’ve seen.

One recent article described sexual practices in the days of mobile phone hook-up and dating apps. The picture painted was rather grim, as though people were losing the knack of face-to-face conversation. I have no experience against which to gauge the report. It’s been a long time since I dated. I don’t accept the sensationalism at face value, but I do have to confess an eerie correspondence to my observations of urban Dutch youth. They’re nice enough, but all communication and relationship appear mediated in some way. Direct, spontaneous conversation feels like a social obligation to be dispatched with quickly, almost urgently. Meaningful communication is left to email or other indirect media.

I’m ageing. My friends are all younger. They might be beyond the age of social media hook-ups, but meetings with them have the disturbing feel of agenda items. Gone are the days of ‘hanging out’. One never glances at the clock in surprise. The clock is always present. The clock is the chair of the meeting.

My purpose in this blog entry is to nominate Candidate Number Four among reasons I had a New Year’s dream about the end of the world. Perhaps my moment has come, the moment when I realize that the custodianship of the world has been passed. I no longer recognize what I see as ‘mine’. I do recognize it as ‘theirs’, the world my students navigate quite comfortably.

Travelogue 837 – January 6
And I Feel Fine

We read to pass the time. Or is it more accurate to say that time passes us in high pursuit of the Word? St John claimed that before there was time there was Logos. And why should we question a seer from the time of Caesars?

I finished a book about Seneca the night before I had my dream about the end of the world. It was a biography written by someone who seems to be a young (for a respected classicist) star in the field. She made some fame for herself being the first woman to translate the Odysseus into English … ever.

I had a hard time separating the author form her subject, and I don’t think that’s generally a credit to the biographer. Granted, we know that times past are chattel to the ones present, that there is no such thing as an objective picture of the past, and that subjects are at the mercy of their artists, etc. But, on the whole, I still favour a biographer who endeavours to lurk far in the background.

I don’t believe this author was trying to push herself to the fore. But I had the distinct impression that she found poor Seneca contemptible. No doubt he deserved it. And I must say, in the author’s defence, that it seems to be the fashion of our times. Neutrality is frowned upon as insincerity. So readers of the biography are repeatedly, and without much art, led back to the question of Seneca’s hypocrisy.

The core of this hypocrisy lies in the conflict between his philosophy and his politics. Truthfully, it is hard to imagine a stronger contrast. The same man known through the ages as a Stoic philosopher, writing about the meaninglessness of earthly riches and achievement, accrued staggering power and wealth as advisor to the crazy czar Nero.

If the point of the book had been judgement, I would have preferred a form other than biography. Write an extended essay, with claim and evidence. We would have learned as much about his life in this way and felt included in the program.

Oddly, though, moral positioning in the case of Seneca’s hypocrisy seemed to occupy a weak second among the author’s thoughts. A hint about her first love might lie in titles of other works of hers: “Mocked with Death” and “The Death of Socrates”.

Yes, here we address the theme dovetailing so neatly and terribly with the subject of my apocalyptic dream: death. Seneca was man obsessed with death. This isn’t a shocking preoccupation for a Stoic philosopher, who promotes good living informed by reflection about death, a foreshadowing of the wonderfully dark meditations of medieval moralists. In fact, Seneca, was accepted by many Christian writers as one of their own. Dante made sure he was safe in Limbo. Nor is it shocking that a man who led a very public life in Rome during the time of the maddest Caesars would be preoccupied with death. He advised young Nero, something like befriending hyenas in the wild.

Again, I might have felt more involved in the author’s argument if the argument had been more explicit. Thesis: what can we learn from this early and unique discussion of the value and possibility of pursuing a good life and a peaceful life among the dangers of a public service in corrupt times, written by someone who tried it and who fundamentally tried to publicly chronicle his attempt. Under Caligula and Nero. Now that’s interesting!

Practice death in your daily life, Seneca advised. It’s not at all a unique dictum. Be ready to let go. Be content with your life, as a story rounded and complete already. Meaning, ensuring that moral accounts are clean and audited. He argued often and passionately that people must be happy in the most extreme conditions. In grief, in danger, and in poverty.

I think again of the people wandering in my dream. They had realized the world was ending. Slowly and sleepily, they let go the routines of the day. And they turned inward, trying to make some sense of it all. That’s the pre-eminent human activity, crunching the data of world observed and world experienced to find or manufacture sense.

Time starts again. Humans are born. They start their lives hungrily, and they start with luminous human innocence. A universe dedicated to the most efficient lines of progress would not be organized this way, with legions of young creatures fanning out to occupy positions held by older ones who are in a state of quick decline. The young rarely listen. They have developed pride before sense. The old are enervated and mesmerized by their deterioration.

But I digress, and I foreshadow, at one and the same moment. The haunting of Seneca was Reason Three for why I might have dreamt about the end of the world when I did. Reason Four comes next time. I have to confess to ageing myself, to a certain deterioration of my capabilities. I hope to be able to deliver. I wonder sometimes whether I will make it to the next blog.

Seneca would advise to find happiness in even this circumstance: quiet decay amidst the plain and the mundane. I have no Nero to threaten me with violence. I have no society expecting ritual suicide. I have no absurd fortune, no palaces furnished in cypress and citrus wood. I have no insane intellect or talent that promises to make my memory cherished among monks who read my words to candlelight. They won’t practice my phrases over and over, hoping to imitate my style in English class.

Even so, is life rounded and complete? Was it rounded and complete when I was born? That might be the truest question. It tortured those monks, defrocked in the Reformation, who wondered about baptism and the fate of the soul. But I digress…

Travelogue 836 – January 5
Of the World As

I’ve had occasion to comment already on my confused sense of time. In the passage of passing, I find time mad with the sacking and the purging of its own citadels. It circles round itself like a dervish, and among the debris of the turning cyclone, it’s quite possible I found the source of my dream after waking.

Prominent in the news on the morning after my dream were more stories about the inauguration of Brasil’s new president, a rogue named Bolsonaro, hysterical with machismo, who swept in from the fringes right of the right to capture the presidency. His emotional populism struck all the right notes. He made no secret of his admiration for the current U.S. President. Of course, it didn’t hurt his chances that his biggest opponent ran his campaign from a prison cell. Add in an aura of martyrdom, after he was knifed at a campaign rally, and he had a charmed campaign.

Bolsonaro’s inauguration was an appropriate show of muscle. He commandeered three thousand troops, guards on horses, tanks, fighter jets, and even missiles for his grand entrance. We know how fond boys can be of military parades. (Macron showed real cunning in arranging for Trump street-side seats for a parade in Paris. It almost salvaged the Europe alliance. Effete, socialist France could still put on a show!)

Within hours of gaining power, Bolsonaro demonstrated what power means to weak minds. It means striking at defenceless people. Trump took aim at immigrants, flexing his might by going after the children of desperately poor people. For Bolsonaro, the weak are the indigenous peoples of Brasil, whom he has compared to animals in a zoo. Post haste, he transferred leadership of the agency recognizing protected lands for indigenous peoples to the ministry of agriculture. This is also a favourite ploy of Trump’s, handing agencies over to the enemies of the agency’s mission. It’s wonderfully effective.

And environmental policy? The autumn of 2018 saw the publication of several high-impact studies about climate change. One study found that 70% of the planet’s surviving wilderness falls in five countries. One of those is Brasil. Senhor Bolsonaro joins Trump and Putin in an elite club of power-mad narcissists who have the power to condemn future generations to extreme privation.

The new president is committed to opening up land and rivers to mining and dams, logging and agriculture: a direct assault on humanity’s last, long-shot hopes of containing the climate crisis. Lesser men might succumb to moments of reflection or self-doubt, allowing that, even though they may have personal reservations about the science of climate change – despite the well-documented opinion of 90+% of the world’s scientists, – the stakes are too high. We don’t elect people with healthy self-doubt. We elect one-dimensional caricatures of men because we nurture a persistent faith in the smug. A man smug must be a man accomplished.

It’s become fashionable to cast doubt on the efficacy and morality of democracy. While I would like to join in the defence of an institution that is clearly one of the best of human achievements, I do have one nagging question: how do we justify – in the name of any ideal – making vulnerable the world’s environment to the caprice of damaged boys like Trump and Bolsonaro? While we, the loyal opposition, feel good about ourselves, showcasing our tolerance and well-bred political literacy, permanent damage is being done daily to the planet. The effects aren’t abstract. They aren’t far away. They will affect our children.

Simply put, are there areas of policy that should be taken out of the realm of local politics, whatever the philosophical construction? Aren’t there things too important for these games? Or shall we go down with the ship, linking arms and singing sentimental songs about poor, dumb homo sapiens?

In context, dreaming about the end of the world seems entirely appropriate. It’s an age in which people are prescribed medication instead of umbrellas when they look out their windows and see clouds. In Dorothy’s time, we might, in extremis, have secured ourselves in the cellar. But cause and effect have become tricks of the mind: if we had had a better attitude, the clouds might have turned out to be rubies from heaven, more than we could sew into all the slippers in the world.

I endeavour to be clear: I had a dream that the world was coming to an end. In this series of blogs, I am trying to identify possible sources for this pessimistic production of the mind. I have discussed two of four now. In my next essay, I will explore another obvious source of sad meditations, Roman philosophy. It’s something that haunts us all.

Travelogue 835 – January 4
It’s the End

I’m examining possible sources for the gloom in my dream, occurring on (only) the second of the year. The first source should be the obvious one. I’ll dispatch with it forthwith.

It’s no secret that I’m getting older. I’ve complained about it often enough in this blog. I may be alone in this experience. I have evidence that it has happened before – that people have aged – and that people have found it an ordeal. But I don’t have definitive evidence that everyone has the same experience. Most people I see, I see every day. If they age, it’s at a rate that I can’t visually track. The exceptions to that rule are my children, whose growth is quite readily apparent. Their ageing we parents see, and they see, as something wonderful. The family celebrates it. “I’m a big girl now!” (Even as, inside, I mourn the passing stage. But I must make sacrifices in the name of consistency.) When I was little, I said, “I’m a big boy now!” How quickly things change! Nowadays, ageing is an embarrassment and an affliction. I regret it. I must regret everything. I’m dreaming about the world coming to an end.

I visited the dentist on the day before my dream, to finish up one root canal. How many I have in progress now escapes me (note of despair). But the dental chair is well-suited to meditations of mortality. You have little opportunity to multi-task while someone operates in your mouth. Maybe that’s the last frontier for developers of smart technology. No moment must be wasted that could be invested in porn or in swiping right on enticements.

For the moment, all one can do in the dental chair is stare at the ceiling or the lamp aimed down your throat. You might also wonder at the hirsute nature of your kindly dentist. How hairy his one arm is! His assistant’s arm is smooth and white, by contrast. She provides the delicacy. When you jump at the shot of pain administered when the dentist drills as far as your upper jaw, she’s the one who wrinkles her brow above the mask and asks if you are all right. The dentist manifests his irritation that she would ask, that you would answer, by pulling his fingers and the attenuated metal of his instruments from your mouth abruptly. I want to apologize, but I realize it would only contribute to his annoyance. Even shrugging would tilt his workspace violently. Best to allow graciousness a bye this time.

Your teeth are one of those gauges of progress along the arc of vigour and physical integrity. They aren’t constituted to recover as readily – at all – from your excesses as other organs of the body. There comes a point of no return when it sinks in. “Oh dear, those molars are not coming back.” The teeth you have left are delicate. There are things you can’t comfortably chew anymore. You monitor what goes in your mouth – a new perspective!

The case of my mother should have provided me the requisite cautionary tale. Only a year or two before she passed away, she spent who-can-tell-how-many thousands on a bridge. The impact of the dental surgery threw me off the scent of the more substantial emaciation she had suffered at the hand of her cancer. Did she regret the dollars she spent on her teeth when she discovered the cancer? I dare ask because I have had my own doubts when I’ve been presented with the dentist’s bills, when I have been presented with dreams about the end of the world. All sorts of blasphemy occur to you when your fragile teeth start talking to you in the middle of the night.

I do become confused about time in the passage of time. Or I might say, time renders me passing helpless in the stream of passage. After so many wakings, one wakes to wonderment. Where have I left things? Where was my phone? Where my wisdom teeth, and where my fabled innocence?

Wouldn’t it be better to face the world-engulfing wave of destruction with one’s innocence intact? We suffer for the innocent, and we fight to survive. We never quite make the connection between those two instincts. We realize when it’s too late, once the reflex to fight has become involuntary, that our teeth speak a language of truth that pity does not. What Kierkegaard wanted to ask, but for his northern courtesy, was whether Abraham’s suffering wasn’t always more important, given all the years granted him, than that of his green and bland son, and, further, that the outcome on the mountaintop was of no real consequence either way.

So I submit Item Number One in my deliberation about what informed my dream about the end of the world. That item is ageing, and more, the sensory and inescapable evidence of ageing. To which, you ask, of the many types of ageing referred to in the literature do I refer? That would be: Type Inexorable.

Then just to tie the big spotted bow on the package of logic that I’m delivering late for Christmas, I will draw the line between source and dream. In the language of the unconscious, (or the language of metaphor, for those of who don’t feel the need for a devilish internal daemon), personal death is the equivalent of the end of the world. And for those of us fated for ageing (Type Inexorable), ageing is often linked to personal death.

I yearn to be clear, and so I disclose there are four sources for the dream I have identified. By the end of this close examination, I will have achieved little. A dream is a dream, after all. But writing strives for illumination, in the way a cat rolls on its back to activate a motion-sensitive lamp.

Travelogue 834 – January 3
As We Know It

I dreamt last night that the end of the world was coming. Somewhat at variance with short timelines implied, the dream was a long one. It stretched on and on, and seemed to account for every hour left to us. But it wasn’t going to be a sudden solar flare or chain of earthquakes. We knew it was coming.

The world was coming to an end in a matter of days -- collision with a meteor or something – and people everywhere were coming to grips with it at their own pace. I was among the first wave to give up work and daily routines. That fits: happy for any excuse to set work aside. By the end of the dream, everyone had given up. They were wandering aimlessly and grappling with the meaning of it all.

It’s a scale we deal with so glibly in movies. If you like superhero movies, as I do, you’ve been brought to the precipice many times over and have lost no sleep over it. But when you’ve been given even the quasi-real space of a dream in which to meditate it, you have an opportunity to experience the dead silence of it. People confronted suddenly with the destruction of everything don’t run to the nearest orgy, as we’re trained to think. They go into shock. They stare out windows. They pace. They become lost.

It was one of those dreams in which the tone didn’t match the content. I was not thunderstruck. I was not even sad. For some reason, I started thinking about libraries. Had we done everything to preserve our genius? It made no sense, of course, if the planet itself was going to be blown up. But the mood of the dream was my point. I had no heavy feeling of doom or horror – while I was asleep. Awake, I was more affected. I was spooked, and I had some trouble getting back to sleep. I replayed the dream over and over in my thoughts.

Two elements stood out. First, by the end of the dream, I was singing REM’s “It's the end of the world as we know it”. I thought that was funny. I also thought it was funny in the dream. Secondly, I only remembered one familiar face from the dream, one close friend. She was sad. When I mentioned the library mission, she mumbled something about finding her own books and retreated into her own melancholy resignation.

If one assumes such dreams don’t represent prophecy - and I’m not ready to don the sandwich boards yet, – then they beg interpretation. Lacking any insights there, one looks for sources. Among the latter, I had some notions. They are absurd. All ideas hatched under this kind of pressure must be absurd. So I share them in a spirit of good humour.

We have just celebrated the new year. Why would I indulge in such horrific pessimism? I defer to the unconscious on that point. If dreams are the product of the unconscious, and if the unconscious is the faithful ledger that it’s often represented to be, – though I must disclose that I do have my doubts about the infallibility of the unconscious (gasp!) – then even this holiday season, habitually treated with such force(d)ful optimism, must play its part in the genesis of my apocalyptic vision. I have no choice but to indict even the infant year 2019.

What follows is a discussion of the sources of my dream. I have arbitrarily identified four of them.