Travelogue 1088 – 1 May

La Scala

Part Five

The sixteenth century was a time of tumult. It was also a time of significant scholarship, the time of Galileo and of Erasmus. Humanism and classical studies were the pursuit of many scholars, and there were so many of them working on classical languages and philosophy that it’s easy to stumble upon whole sets of them that you had never heard of before.

Not all the French humanists were in Paris. One cantankerous old writer was based in Agen, near Valence, in southwestern France. Born in 1484, he had been named Giulio Cesare, a typical Renaissance name, harking back to Roman history. He was Italian, but became physician to the bishop of Agen, and devoted his life to scholarship, accruing enough reputation to take on the mighty Erasmus and be taken seriously. He is remembered primarily for his defence of Aristotelianism aesthetics and science. His opinion on Seneca apparently had some effect on the young Shakespeare.

In good Renaissance form, he raised his son, Joseph Justus, on a steady diet of Latin and poetry. He made him write 80 lines of Latin every day until the Lord took him away, and his son was abandoned to his fate as overeducated youth in an age glutted with overeducated youths.

The boy distinguished himself. He studied in Paris; he studied in Valence. He travelled through Europe. Along the way, he became a Protestant. He taught in Geneva; he taught in Leiden. Between the two latter posts, he hid away on the manor of a friend, and he wrote. He studied Latin authors. He compiled histories of texts, histories of knowledge.

His contributions were in the field of textual criticism, a science dear to the hearts of Renaissance scholars. And he is credited with being the first to see the ancient world as a collection of contemporaneous civilizations, beyond the cultural borders of Greece and Rome. It included Babylonians, Jews, Persians and Egyptians, all of them sharing knowledge and culture. It’s a thought I feel some kinship with. I may love everything Greco-Roman now, but as a child I was much more interested in Egypt, Sumer, and Persia.

Scaliger, as he was called, left for Leiden in 1593, and it was to be his last academic post. He never saw France again.

He was called ‘Scaliger’ because his father maintained he was descended from the La Scala family that had ruled Verona in the Middle Ages. Enemies of Scaliger went to great lengths to prove that was not true. He fought them bitterly, maybe out of loyalty to his dear old dad, maybe threatened in his sense of self. But it’s quite likely his dad was inventing.

That's a cool bio. I felt instant affinity with it. And he was a handsome devil, too. I wish I could say I had found him by chance. The truth is, one day I woke with the name on my lips, ‘Scaliger’. I don’t know why. I had never heard of Joseph Justus or his father. Months earlier, investigating a spring trip to Italy, I had investigated Verona, and had read about the La Scala family. The name had probably remained with me. The mind is such an odd machine, so cluttered with data, barely coherent. The most one can do is marvel at the things that pop out of it.

Travelogue 1087 – 28 April

La Scala

Part Four

Yesterday was King’s Day in the Netherlands, the day the country goes mad celebrating the king’s birthday. It was a beautiful day, and it just so happened that, this year, the king was going to celebrate in Rotterdam. So we dressed up in orange, and we went downtown.

The crowd wasn’t so bad at Blaak, where a stage had been erected to host hours of bland music and five minutes of royal presence. We squeezed through the people and found a spot where we could just see the stage and the two jumbo screens beside it. In good Dutch style, the king was (almost) on schedule. We didn’t have to endure for too long the carefully forgettable band filling time till he arrived. One of the screens followed the king’s progress as he and his family walked along the central streets, seeing sights on the way to us. (Imagine Charles III strolling through Manchester and waving to his people!)

Some ageing pop star mounted the stage just ahead of the king, leading the crowd through a few old standards, one of which, oddly, was in English. Then the king and queen and their several princesses appeared, waving at the crowd. Unexpectedly, I was moved to wave back, as were hundreds of others. It was a strange feeling.

Europeans sneer at the American fascination with royalty. But it is, objectively, a strange and fascinating phenomenon. In this age, royalty is an abstraction. What is a monarch? It’s an expensive indulgence; it’s an intriguing institution. At best, the royal family forms an interesting dialectic with elected officials, perhaps standing for history and decorum. At worst, they are a domesticated breed of narcissists, who entertain with their foibles. But words don’t resolve the riddle at the centre of their longevity. How do you explain it? Even at their height of power, kings and queens were not all-powerful. They were pawns of history. The most powerful among them were keen individuals quick to read and manipulate the much more powerful forces around them.

We encountered my British neighbour after the event. He seemed stunned that we would have gone to see the king. He was at pains to hold his tongue, I could see. The Brits are drearily literal on the subject of royalty. I suppose they have cause, what with recent events, what with the sheer expense of their royal house. But it’s disappointing. There are much more interesting discussions to be had about royalty than the rather obvious tut-tutting over items in the news.

Royalty came late to the Netherlands, installed after Napoleon was pushed out. But its roots reached all the way back to the sixteenth century and the Dutch fight for independence. It reached back to Willem of Orange, known as Willem the Silent, stadtholder of Holland. The latter position became a hereditary position for his family and a subtle form of royalty among the staunchly independent Dutch. Something about the Napoleonic experience made them ready to call their king a king.

The era of Willem the Silent is endlessly interesting to me. The Reformation was still raging on. Indeed, it provided the first impetus for Dutch rebellion against the Spanish. Religion was redrawing the map of Europe. Aristocracies continued their post-medieval grabs for status and territory, aligning and re-aligning with each generation. The scientific revolution was underway. Combined with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this is the classical era of European civilization, when it was most vital and weirdest.

Travelogue 1086 – 23 April

La Scala

Part Three

Cracking my head on the pavement gave me more than a pretty scar. It left me with a small lesson in complacency. It’s so easy for the human mind to forget things. If anything puts paid to a philosophy based on human wisdom and the human capacity to learn, it’s the balancing capacity to forget.

I’ve had my challenges in recent years – dealing with the short and the long versions of COVID, for example, – but none of my challenges have upset the safe home. The day-to-day in Holland is a far-cry from the primeval struggle to survive that may be our common heritage. I’ve become lulled by inactivity and safety into a kind of sleepy confidence in my own physical coordination. I have plenty of memories of clumsy accidents and the feeling of helplessness that accompanied those, but it took an effort to summon up that sense of falling, out of control of one’s own body. Until a few weeks ago.

I was trying a little stunt, skipping to one side on the scooter as I tried to escape getting tagged ‘it’ by Baby Jos, and suddenly I was falling. A part of my mind watched the fall with fascination. Somehow my limbs became pinned or tangled with the scooter, or with each other, and so I had no way to brace myself as I fell. During that instant, I was reminded what it felt like to be helpless. The laws of physics do take precedence, after all, over human ideas of justice and what’s commensurate. “I was just playing around,” doesn’t fly in the court of gravity and concrete.

It's a good reminder. We hurried to the hospital, and the girls watched the doctor delicately sew my face together again. I got to see a monster in the mirror for a week or so. That part was fun, and a harmless lesson that there is plenty of harm to be had. There will even be lethal harm some day.

The final struggle forms our hearts from a distance, the event that is, in fact, no event for the self, but a ceasing of events. It forms our perspective on “the other”, being perhaps the most frightening among the ranks of others. Perhaps he’s their general. He is strange, and we can't be sure how deeply his strangeness has permeated things.

Travelogue 1085 – 12 April

La Scala

Part Two

It was Easter weekend, and I was playing with the girls out front. Things got out of hand, and I took a dive while riding one of their scooters, bashing my head against a concrete curb. I had to get a few stitches and wear lots of bandages. Now my eye is black and swollen. I look into the mirror, and I’m fascinated by the new face. This kind of accident really does change your features, temporarily. My wife looks at me in wonder. Who is this guy?

I’ve always thought it a bit tedious to see the same face in the mirror every day. Does anyone else feel that way? I observe the mania for selfies, and I think not. In any case, this little injury is kind of entertaining as an exercise in variety. I want to enjoy it, but when I go out, I feel compelled to hide it. I don a cap and look at the ground. I cover the bloody stitches with bandages. I turn away from people I have to talk to. We do these things instinctively: injuries are shameful. We might be marked for culling from the herd.

Do we read history like a mirror? Are we looking for different versions of ourselves? Sometimes I feel most fascinated by the most alien and the weirdest in history. But even then, it might be a drive to assimilate what I see, shape it into comprehensibility, make it a version of myself. It’s a metaphorical search for the self.

Some people shove past the metaphor. They literally see themselves in the faces of historical figures. Those faces they call past lives. “I have lived before. I have lived inside those faces. That is me.” It’s such an interesting form of appropriation. It reminds me of the Biblical literalists. Every religious program must have its literalists. “That really happened. That is me.”

As you open the programs of these religions, you find plenty of code designed to appropriate the other, from conversion to conquest to submission, extending to the ethical claim of the Golden Rule. Ethics itself could be read as a means of assimilating or appropriating the other. A literal claim to be the other becomes just a matter of degree.

Travelogue 1084 – 9 April
La Scala
Part One

I had no idea what a fun pastime looking for past lives was! I found one buried in the seventeenth century, and I was quite excited! And I’m not even sure I believe in reincarnation.

Believing is a mysterious act. It comes easily to some people, but, for me, belief is something down a long road. Concepts, like stars, need to align. So, a soul passes from one life to another, learning lessons as it goes. That seems simple enough. But there are lots of assumptions underpinning the idea that I find difficult to gloss over, assumptions concerning linear time, evolution, and consciousness that behaves like indivisible atoms.

I’m a teacher. If there is a metaphysics built on learning and evolution, I should have one response: “Sign me up!” But beliefs are jealous little genies, and they don’t like giving up secrets. Souls are born to learn, but what are the yardsticks, if most of existence is unconsciousness? What are the incentives? Is the reward really beating the system thousands of years from now? Why does it take so long? The range of human virtues seems to me so narrow, I can’t imagine what occupies us for thousands of lives.

My thoughts about religion are naïve. I know they are. It’s one reason I gave up. No matter what religion I approached, something like the reverse side of Woody Allen’s dictum applied. He said that he would never join a club that would have him. The religious version might be: a religion could never open the door to someone who was outside to begin with. I just couldn’t manufacture the feeling of faith or the correct spiritual experience.

Maybe it’s just the spirit of the Easter Egg Hunt, but I was pumped to have found a past life! And it was much easier than I thought! I had no clues. I had no evidence, not even the ethereal sort that sails over the bar of most believers. No dreams or flashbacks or goosebumps. My only supporting evidence was a cool bio.

Travelogue 1083 – 31 March

A Time of Frolics

It’s spring; it’s time to cavort. Nay it’s a time to frolic. I’ll use a word with Dutch roots. We frolic in the mud that never dries, frolicking in the damp woods (of city parks,) where forest sprites still inspire us with mischief.

Can we visualise spring as an fairy or sprite like Ariel or Puck, frolicking? Then we can ask him about his gods, knowing he would lie. It’s okay to be Puck and lie about love. He’ll say the sun is the god of spring frolics, and then he’ll deny it. He’ll say that the rains rule spring.

We’ll ask Puck to tell us the name of his rain god. Which one? he might reply. He’ll reply from a height, I’m thinking. He can’t sit still. He is restless, the way sprites are. How were we to know rain gods numbered more than one?

There’s no reason for rain to have one god but there are too many reasons for many. We may ask Puck whether they are classified by geography or by storm. My hypothesis will be that they are divided by the rhythms of the rain, and I will ask for an introduction to the goddess of drizzles. Puck will not commit.

Puck will giggle, and he will evade our questions, be careless even with his lies. We will have been fine with lies, and that’s why he is coy. He giggles, and I will suspect the goddess is hovering over his shoulder. He will anticipate my question: why lie about the rains?

“It’s simply the abundance of them. How would you catch every drop?”

But that’s a dream. The mundane is something more magical. Our flat looks like spring, scattered as if with cherry petals. But no, that’s just paper. Scraps and bits and corners and strips of white paper. The girls have become obsessed with origami. They watch videos, and they create planes and birds and dogs and princess crowns. We live among the snowy scraps of pretty things.

Travelogue 1082 – 19 March

How Much Busy

We’re busy writing about love. It occupies our time this spring. While cherry blossoms are finally budding under grey skies, while ducklings paddle their tiny circles in the canals, at last safe from this winter’s late freezes, we are making a haste of slow questions. It’s a lazy time of being busy, routine asserting itself among the signs of novelty.

The winds have come and gone, making for us for a season of falling. I walked my bicycle up the steep slope of the Erasmus Bridge after work, while the sun battled clouds over the river, because pedalling was too precarious, tipping us over like toys. We citizens of Rotterdam walked our bikes in a long row over the span. The sky was too big for us.

The girls are teasing us, saying we’re too serious for spring. They’re making up songs and asking us to sing along. They’re jumping in our laps when we’re relaxing, and playing ninja around us when we work. They’re asking for ice cream when we go out; they’re asking for ice cream when we’re inside. I’m enjoying every minute, even as the tension of being alive is paralysing; even when the tension of the next moment is pressing in on my lungs, I am thankful.

We’re busy writing truth and lies about love. It takes up all our time. This is a topic I’m interested in. I want to write about our truth and lies about love. I will pursue this in a separate document, and I’ll publish when the tension of love ebbs, perhaps among summer’s pauses, when dimension wavers and seems ready to fail.

Travelogue 1081 – 22 February

Strike

It’s not the best time of year to let yourself go. Ageing winter leaves the ground muddy, people weary, prospects grey, and tempers short. Yet this is the moment that sanitation workers chose to go on strike. The strike lasted only five days, but by the fifth day mounds of trash had begun gathering by the garbage chutes.

Strikes in the Netherlands are very scripted. Dates are set, and the city government announces them. Advice is published on how to survive the inconvenience. The press pitches in with sidebars and commentary. Employers and school administrators make contingency plans. There’s nothing very wild about these cats.

It’s enough to make one question: did I ever really understand the point of a strike? Was it to cripple the employer? It seems to cripple everyone else more. Was it to stress the importance of the work that labourers do? It seems to put people in mind of what’s not being done. Is the point to make the public think that the workers deserve more money? It seems designed rather to put people in mind of budgets, of all the money being spent on allowances and adjustments required by the strike and on the subsequent clean-up.

After the strike was done, things only got worse. Of course, not all neighbourhoods could be cleaned the minute the strike ended. In fact, many areas went another five days without pickup, even though the city mobilized extra workers. Garbage bags piled up higher. Some bags broke, and trash drifted across the roads and squares. This is our city as winter limps into its final weeks.

Travelogue 1080 – 19 February

Longing

This package was taking too long! Little Ren and I had picked out a pretty, red dress for her online. She had seen something on TV, I’m guessing, and so, suddenly, she had determined that she had an urgent need for a long dress. And so we did it; we ordered something online for her. Every day afterward, she asked whether the dress had arrived.

She decided the time had come for action. She picked out some paper and pens. She sat on the floor and began drawing capital letters in bold marker colours. It took her twenty minutes, but she painstakingly produced a colourful letter to the postman. “Postman,” she wrote, “please give me my dress.” She even folded a sheet of paper to make an envelope. She put the whole package together and pushed it into the mail slot in our front door. Later, I discreetly removed it. “The mailman must have picked it up,” I told her.

It’s a season of longing. February teases us with thaws and breaks in the clouds. The winds pick up and make us restless. I hear birdsong in the morning. Night is in retreat. We cycle to school in daylight. There’s some sun in the windows when I cook dinner.

The weather is changeable as a pinwheel. You can follow the path of blue patches of sky among the clouds, even as a barely perceptible mist falls on your face. You can warm yourself in a patch of sunlight, even as a wall of dark clouds approaches from the west. There’s something enjoyable about the capriciousness of it, after weeks of consolidated weather fronts: raining for days, then clear and cold for days. Nothing expresses the longing for spring better than the protean, seaside weather of February, blustery and shedding its fleeting light showers on us, while the seagulls wheel and cry overhead.

The day is coming. The cherry blossoms will open, and Little Ren will take her first spring promenade in a long red dress. The postman will deliver.

Travelogue 1079 – 7 February

Fog and Frost

Baby Josie takes too much enjoyment in correcting her little sister. Now Little Ren is crying because she wanted to believe that the thin layer of white on the ground was snow. She has an affection for snow: she identifies as a winter baby. Winter is her season. During the rest of the year, she looks forward to seeing snow. This year we have not been fortunate. Even now, during our second cold snap of the season, we aren’t seeing any precipitation. Only this lowering fog, and the white condensation on cars and road and grass. There’s no snow, but only frost.

It's a word Baby takes up, as we set out on bikes, to her little sister’s increasing agitation. “It’s just frost, Ren.” They’re at an age when taunting each other is entertaining. Entertaining, and hurtful. Ren is heart-broken. “It’s just like snow, isn’t it?” I say, trying to lift her spirits. It’s just ice from the sky. Ren isn’t buying it.

“Look at the sky,” I say. This is a game we play often, while we cycle to school. At this time of year, we often catch pretty sunrises. Today, the fog is too thick. But instead of casting colours into an open sky, the sun is playing tricks with the fog. To the right, over the river, the light glows in a kind of archway among the fog. I’m not sure how that happens – the sun rises to our left, – but it’s a lovely sight. Little Ren is quiet now, riding complacently in the child’s seat behind me, watching the morning unfold. The frost is forgotten.

Later, after dropping the girls at school, I’m crossing the Erasmusbrug just as the fog is breaking. The sun sends long rays through the remains of the low clouds, reflecting off the high pillar of the bridge, racing across the road, and striking the waters of the wide river below.

Travelogue 1078 – 24 January

The Wobbly Gum

I must understand this one thing. She won’t go to bed until she has explained it very well. She has realized the cause of the phenomenon she is calling her ‘wobbly gum’.

Little Ren stands before me in her pyjamas, which consist of a violet Minnie Mouse onesy, while I sit on the side of her little bed. The night is black outside our window. Winter is in full black-night swing, and all our memories from this season are dim interiors and grey middays.

Ren’s eyes are wide with serious intent. She demonstrates her point with her hands, which are held vertically with fingers together and straight, palms toward me. One hand points to the side, and the other, just below the first, points up.

You see? Here’s the new tooth. The gum is in the way. How can the new tooth come up if the gum is here. So she carefully turns her hand to indicate that the gum has made way for the tooth. She raises the tooth hand, and then the two hands are side by side, co-existing in peace. She shrugs to show how simple it all is, the mystery of our bodies. Everything will be fine.

This demonstration accomplished, she comes back to me, and she sits in my lap. The night is pressing in on the windows. We are alone, huddling in our circles of light and warmth while winter proceeds outside the windows, like a long migration of nocturnal herds. We must stay inside and out of their way.

Little Ren is still afraid to sleep alone. She has nightmares. Animals and monsters prowl in her sleep. In the middle of the night, she calls for us. She doesn’t want to be alone. For now, she is free to sit in my lap as long as she wants, chatting and swinging her legs, leaning her head into my chest, even falling asleep if she likes. My back is to the dark window, and no monsters are getting in.

Travelogue 1077 – 20 January

The Way There

On the contrary, my girls and I enjoy our commute to school. We take our time, and we talk. Baby Jos pedals forward on her little, pink bicycle. Little Ren rides behind me in the children’s seat. We ride together at Jos’s pace. Usually, we ride side by side, but sometimes Jos sings to herself, and she dawdles. When she slows down, I pull ahead and to the right, to give more space to passing cyclists.

For the Dutch, the bike paths are just another opportunity to hurry. Hurrying is a favourite pastime here. The most Dutch among them seem positively righteous in their rushing, loved and affirmed by a rushing God. For others, less exalted, the race is a contest of some sort, with themselves or with the clock or with the ghosts of their ancestors. Some pedal with anxiety, working out a pressing algebraic equation with their feet. The road could never be long enough for those. The common denominator is their solitude. Their eyes register no recognition of humanity among the race participants. People are pylons on the obstacle course. The only reason my little family draws attention is that we don’t conform to the usual rules of motion. We catch the eye as randomized elements on the course. Passer-by stare at us like creatures who have wandered into the wrong ecosystem.

But, for all that, we enjoy our time on the bike path. We are well used to the routine by now, venturing out into the cold and climbing up on the bikes. The girls play; they talk. As we pedal along, they sing or they chatter. They are in an expository phase now, compelled to explain or describe. They provide long taxonomies of their teachers, friends and classmates, naming them, describing them, and correcting each other. They lay out precise moralities of playground behaviour. They review agendas for me. They remind when their birthdays are. They count off the days until cherished activities are planned.

Baby Jos is the scientist. When I say, “Look at the pretty sky!” Baby Jos catalogues all the colours we see in the sunrise. She has lots of ideas. She explains the prototype of a phone she wants to build. It involves cans and a wire that will bounce signals off a satellite. That seems to sum up the leap in imagination we’ve made in the decades since I was a child.

Travelogue 1076 – 15 January

The Urgency of Winter

Winter has something to say, but who has the time for the small talk? It’s Sunday evening, and I am wiped out. I am more exhausted than I was on Friday. So far, I have completed exactly … one week (!) since school and the kids’ activities started up again. How will I make it to June?

The clouds are flying low, and every day sees some rain. It rained all day yesterday and when night set in, you could still see it billowing in the light of the streetlamps, clouds of white stipples in the sky.

The grey clouds hanging low, the gentle hiss of rain, the patient face of the waters in the canals and in the rivers, the longsuffering trees sleeping until spring, the whispering voice of Winter, they are inviting you to slow down, take some tea, think about nothing. But you have a schedule. You walk through your daily circuit with your head down, considering the damp pavements, the puddles, and the dim sky reflected in them. You feel your burdens acutely, weighted with the damp as they are.

There’s no season in which our lives of urgency seem more incongruous than during winter. Nature proceeds with a hushed voice, and we insist on noise. The quiet clouds and the soft hazes nudge us toward gentle behaviours, but ours are harsh. All of Nature’s obstacles should encourage less movement, and yet we insist on running the maze, proud that no season has privilege with us. We consult our data on productivity, while the wild is dozing.

If, in our excesses, we threaten the Earth’s natural balance, then mightn’t it be worthwhile listening? When the sky is grey with muffling clouds, we might lower our voices. When there is ice, we might stay home. When a light rain raps at the window, we might just meditate on the rhythm.

These are moods, it might be argued, and how are we to regulate our lives by moods? But the Earth might counter: what vanity drives you out of the house before dawn? If we robbed humanity of mood and emotion, mightn’t you just sleep for a few months and then look out the window of your high-rise cottage to watch the clouds and marvel at what you see? Is the fluorescent-lit office the haven of rationality? Doubtless we confound necessity with rationality there. Is it cool and rational to tumble forward every day through rain and snow to beat the clock? Is it necessity or reason? Is it fear? Is that the smell of intellect in the crowded Metro during rush hour?

Travelogue 1075 – 31 December

Good Day for a Drizzle

It’s a day for contemplation, walking in a light drizzle under noon skies no lighter than a summer dawn, quiet in my mind even while foot traffic along the Nieuwe Binnenweg is at a holiday pitch. I’ve come out for groceries. My stomach hurts because I’m recovering from a winter bug. I’m thinking about light things and dark, the way rainy days can be so pleasant, the way gloomy days can be sweet.

I’m walking slowly, even for the holiday crowd. There is a narrow section of the pavement where a few local bars have tables along the street. I am forcing people to alter their pace while I crawl along with my heavy bags. I sense the restlessness of people dealing poorly with the stress of a day off.

Maybe we thought life was too easy, having been reared in a time of uncommon concord and peace. Maybe we forgot that life was struggle.

Maybe we thought life was too hard, raised by parents for whom struggle was romance and fact. Agon was the way of all life and, as long as you were on the results side of the agon, as my parents were, it was a romantic notion, worthy of great puddles of sentiment.

In the end, we make it down the pavement safely. We have our provisions for New Year’s dinner. We have the change in our electronic purses for a treat and a coffee. What need is there for tears today? Whence the inspiration for conspiracy? We are strolling toward goals in sight, chins high to the light touch of rain, and hearts unexpectedly touched by the sight of the low clouds, swept quickly along by the wind.

Travelogue 1074 – 30 December

Rebels Popping

What can we expect in the new year? Shall we read the reports of the firecrackers? There must be a code behind them, even if it’s the cosmic code of chance. In interval or in series or in number or in volume, these explosions from every side must communicate something. Otherwise, what would that signify about fireworks at New Years, that it’s all meaningless mayhem, the handiwork of real children and grown children who are entertained by noise, and not in isolation, but in endless repetition? That if firecrackers were in infinite supply and free, this sub-class of the planet’s most intelligent species would set them off and watch them with every free minute, perhaps for the rest of their lives, trance-like smiles frozen on their washed-out faces? What a disillusionment that would be for optimists about human nature! Better we resolve that the relentless pop-pop-pop tells us about creation and the spirit that enlivens the universe.

Are there portents for the new year in the news? We find that the QAnon prophets were right, after all, that politicians and celebrities were lying, and that they were trafficking in children. It turns out it wasn’t Hillary Clinton or Tom Hanks, however, but in fact members of their own cult. In just the last week or two, we discover a Republican got elected to Congress lying about his education, his work experience, and his ethnicity. He even lied about how and when his mother died. And a high-profile right-wing nutbag, last seen taunting Greta Thunberg with his collection of high-polluting autos, has been detained in Romania in connection with human trafficking, joining QAnon darling Congressman Matt Gaetz in this exclusive club of accusers being accused. Fair enough: when we search for effective insults, we catalogue our own darkest drives. But now, with QAnon freaks taking over the swing vote in Congress, shall we see normalization of their sins?

Is there a silver lining in the cascade of bad news? There might be. Whether we speak about COVID or politics, culture wars or real wars, we see that one persistent human trait prevails: contrariness. As a parent, I have certainly become refamiliarized with this human impulse, the need to rebel against authority. So far, we’ve seen a preponderance of the negative side of that trait, like death threats to poor Dr Fauci for daring to be an expert, or power handed to the likes of Marjorie Taylor-Greene, whose sole qualification is relentless contrariness. But we’ve also seen some rebellion that makes more sense, rebellion against the Trumpian crime-family code, rebellion against Putin’s violent realpolitik, and rebellion against easy cultural codes of virtue offered by either side of the political divide.

There’s been a lot of chatter about the death of democracy. But rebellion and human contrariness are building blocks of democracy. I have been as sensitive as anyone to the fears of growing authoritarianism in world politics. Now I see things a little differently. I think democracy is forever resurgent. Sadly, the darker impulses among us are stronger than we thought, and the work of buttressing democracy is harder than we thought, but we may discover surprising allies in the fight, given that the instinct to rebel is in everyone.

Travelogue 1073 – 22 December

An Age of Amazement

It’s an age of amazement. Little Ren has become very chatty, and she likes to recount to me short stories with her eyes wide with wonder. She’ll recall what happened on some TV show, or she’ll tell me something that happened to a friend at school. That she still wants to share these confidences with her papa makes me absolutely delighted. Her big sister is at an age where most of the things she shares are snarky. She means them in good humour, but they are self-aware and wry. That’s fine, and of course it’s fun. But I will miss the earnestness of their early years.

I’m practicing writing letters of the alphabet with Little Ren. It’s astounding how deeply these lines and squiggles are ingrained into our minds. I could never see them the way Little Ren does. She has to ask which way the little ‘b’ or the ‘d’ faces, and I sense in that moment how arbitrary it is, the shape and orientation of any of these tiny signs. But so powerful! No wonder we imagine magic in the form of signs, runes and numbers and letters drawn with dark purpose. Written language, our scribbling, is so trivial, and yet so mysterious in it effects. In its particular, writing is idiosyncrasy. In its aggregate, it is like a flood, an unstoppable force.

I picked up something by Philip Roth at a second-hand shop recently. I had my doubts, but I liked the first page or two well enough, and I bought it. When its turn came among my queue of books, I gave it a sincere effort, but I couldn’t finish. There’s something about the middle-class realism of the post-war American novelists from the Northeast that just dries my eyes and makes me doubt myself. It’s plain how good they are as craftsmen, but also plain how particular their world was to them. How is it that something written within living memory is less accessible than something written hundreds of years ago?

The subjects of these earnest authors are not obscure, the stories not arcane; they just don’t inspire the same passion for me as they apparently did for the authors. Roth’s first strike with me: his novel is a story about an author. Something in my mind withers when faced with fiction or poetry about writers. It never works. I got as far as a scene in which Roth’s character is peppered with naïve questions about writing by a new friend. Oh, the trials of the artist! I really had to set the book down. I felt guilty doing it, but my recovery was accomplished quickly with a bitter anodyne of Anthony Burgess.

Travelogue 1072 – 10 December

Fatigue Plus

Yes, it’s a time of fatigue and viruses, but it’s also a time of fireworks. I speak from personal experience: a few have just been set off outside my window. These fireworks, I will interpret, were meant to celebrate Morocco’s win over Portugal in the World Cup. This advances them to the semi-finals. Anything that Morocco’s fine team of eleven does excites the huge Moroccan community in this town. Fireworks are the preferred method of expressing excitement at this time of year. Since communities in the Netherlands have begun shutting down the beloved tradition of New Year’s bedlam, our good citizens have responded by setting them off on every other day between October and February.

For our family, it’s been a time of birthday cheer. Little Ren wanted a special party this year. She informed us of this in the summer. She reminded us at least weekly since the summer. We scheduled a party at “Bounce Valley” for her and half a dozen friends, and we think it was a success. Little Ren is modest with her enthusiasm, but we could tell by that special, shy, and contained smile of hers that she was happy. And every one of her friends showed up, even though most of them had not showed up at school that day. … The next day, on her actual birthday, Little Ren was already sniffling.

It’s been a season of viruses and fatigue, but the winter World Cup has been a comfort. I have stood firmly with those who are curling their lips over Qatar, the scandals, the human rights abuses, and the interruption of the international football schedule; but I have to confess that the ritual has been a comfort during the darkening of the days. I have been an avid fan despite myself, and this Cup will be one we remember as a family.

Travelogue 1071 – 7 December

Back to Sea

Sinterklaas has left the Netherlands, steaming back toward Spain, and we enter the twilight between Sinter and Santa. It’s the lingering half-light we stumble through toward the end of the year, a bitter final stretch in which the last day of work before holidays acts as a sort of finish line. It feels like a scene from Squid Game, in which we limp forward among a cohort of the distressed and wounded toward sanctuary. The reward will be some sleep and a new year.

There are gaps in every line-up. Class attendance is spotty. Teachers are tag-teaming like tired athletes. The girls’ hockey teams can barely meet quorum for their games. Friends vanish and arise again, as though we’re an army making our way through marshes, sinking suddenly and climbing back to our feet again. We trade quick nods, and we march on.

Is the natural state of life and matter motion or stillness? This is a season to wonder. We long for the still state, though we are trapped in motion. If we had time to reminisce about our last vacation, we might remember the moment we became restless. Stillness has its term, too. Moving water rarely freezes, and this is a region defined by its moving water. It drops from the skies, and it joins rushing waters toward the sea. When it empties out to the sea, it discovers stillness. It’s a relative stillness. Absorbing sea salt, it resists freezing again, resists real stillness, to swirl and drift in its long, quiet meditation on arrival.

Travelogue 1070 – 28 November

Verlegen Licht

The sun is verlegen, a toddler hiding from strangers, hiding behind the knees of mother earth and mother storm. Morning is a long, attenuated dawn, while light leaks ever so slowly into the fog and into the clouds, by such tiny increments that the streetlamps don’t know when to switch off. Photon by photon, the day advances, and the colours of late autumn emerge. Yellow leaves clog the rain gutters. The trees are almost bare. Rose light glows in the fog along the brick alleyways, violet light along the canals. There are fewer people on the bike paths, but the those who are pedal intensely toward their goal, heads down. We are the only ones still taking our time, Baby Jos signing songs while she pedals and Little Ren sitting quietly behind me in her bicycle seat, hands in her mittens, hands in her lap.

Change is memory. That’s the beautiful thing about seasons. The physical sensations of change – the bracing chill on the cheek, the foggy breath in the crisp air – awaken feelings that have been dormant. Winter has winter thoughts. The cold brings winter meditations. The holidays remember other holidays. We think of the past.

Timelines converge. The holiday season coincides with the arrival of winter and with the end of the calendar year and the end of the school semester. We’re spiralling into a calendar singularity. The pressure is intense, and yet the rituals of weather are a sort of salvation: the lights, the gifts, and all the clothing. Leaving the house takes time. It involves some challenging inventories. Life slows down at the door; it sets a pace for us. Do we have everything? Often enough, we do. It’s satisfying.

Travelogue 1069 – 16 November

Beautiful Ideas

“I love Sinterklaas so much!” Baby Jos squeals in the morning. For once, I agree with her. It’s not just that Sinterklaas and I are, in fact, the same person. I have been converted; I love Sinterklaas.

The holiday has come on quickly, as it has every year. By mid-November, Sinterklaas was departing from Spain, making his way to the Netherlands. Before I’ve prepared myself, mentally or emotionally, the girls are placing their shoes in the entryway of our apartment. I have no candy or gifts at the ready. The ritual has begun! For several weeks before the day that the Dutch call ‘Sinterklaas’, the old man stops by during the night and leave treats in children’s shoes.

Once I’ve gotten over the calendar shock, I find myself enjoying it. There’s something fun, if I must admit it, to the mad dash for treats and gifts for the girls. And suddenly I feel rather sentimental, as I contemplate the possibility that this might be the last one. Baby Jos will one day become too cool for the children’s holiday, wise to the ruse that an old saint and his dubious Sancho Panza would travel miles in the night for the sake of my beautiful girls. I wish for them it were so.

It’s a bit like believing in democracy. For a brief, mad moment, as the US midterm election results poured in, one could almost believe in the nobility of an infectious idea. Democracy might survive. And fairness, rationality, sanity, justice! One wishes for the power to stop time, to be able to relish the illusion that humanity mattered, freeze one headline before the next comes, feel some hope.

Travelogue 1068 – 5 November

Dark Auguries

“Everything is changing.” Sometimes when children speak, it feels like prophecy. This morning, Baby Jos almost stepped onto the wrong escalator in the Metro. There are two escalators. The one carrying people down to the train platforms is usually on the right. This morning, it was on the left. Baby Jos was spacy, and I had to pull her back with one foot out over the rolling track. We laughed, and all the way down on the correct escalator, she kept repeating the refrain, “Everything is changing.”

In our Metro station, the platforms for both directions are on a central island. In two rows down the entire islands are squat, round pillars. They are white, but lights are placed in the housing at the tops of the pillars. The lights change colours in a slow cycle, lightly tinting the white pillars. Baby Jos likes holding her hands below those changing colours. Today, the first colour was red, and she shouted, “I have blood on my hands!” That was a chilling pronouncement from a child. Of course, she went on to say she had water on her hands and then grass, as the colours changed.

My girl’s words rang like dark auguries in my ears. I’m on edge, I think, because of the news from America. The mid-term elections are finally drawing nigh, and I find it unnerving. It’s not as though I was ever optimistic. Two years ago, I was already sure that the Blue Wave was only a short respite for the failing republic. I was already sure that 2022 would see the descent of a long night in American politics. But no one really wants to be right with predictions like that. And it all feels differently when it’s imminent.

I think the worst part of living through these sea changes is the gritty detail of it. You just want to hit fast forward. If we’re entering the new dark ages, then let’s just get on with it. Which is my mud hut? And the absolute worst of it is experiencing the personalities that will bring on the night. Jesus, what a pack of feral rodents! Where are the smooth evil geniuses, the ones who make you like them despite yourself, suave and polished? Or maybe even Eggman from Sonic. He has the virtue of some humour. Instead, we are herded into oblivion by the likes of Oz and Taylor Greene and Walker and Lake. And Trump, the ultimate painted clown who doesn’t have the wit to know he’s evil.

Lake in Arizona is particularly off-putting. If Trump is arrogant, it’s for lack of any perspective or introspection. He’s almost endearing in his primitive unconsciousness, his one-dimensionality. Lake sneers at us. She hungers for power with a maliciousness born of human intelligence. Lake wants you to know that she knows better, and that she freely chooses the path into the brambles. I’ll go on record with my prediction that, if elected, Lake will be the evil queen in our rapidly approaching American Gothic morality tale.

Travelogue 1067 – 27 Oktober
The Voice of Authority

Questions have been posed. They hang suspended above the Greek landscape like arrows released from a hundred bows and arcing across the blue sky.

When is the passive voice used? It is recommended for situations in which the subject of the verb is not known, or is obvious, or is unimportant. It’s October break, and I’m writing grammar lessons. Due to lack of time and funds, our travel plans have been abandoned, and I’ve been reassigned to extended papa duty and to lesson planning for next term.

It is stipulated that the passive voice should stand as a voice of authority. Laws are passed, as though by agency of gods. Your proposal has been denied, your application has been rejected, very rarely by anyone with a name. The curbs and guidelines for life are presented to us in this voice.

The sophists’ work was done. The youth of Athens had been corrupted. The questions had been posed, and they hung suspended above the Greek landscape like - it’s only fair that a martial analogy be chosen because the ancient Greeks were a warlike people, and because the classical age was put to an end by the Peloponnesian Wars – like arrows released from a hundred bows and arcing across the sky.

An opposing force is needed for a good martial analogy. That force will be called the conservatives. The sophists shall be acknowledged as the radicals, the ones for whom the prevailing social order is no good until stirred and rebuked. Stability, on the other hand, is solidly determined to be the first priority by the conservatives. The past is inextricably linked to the future. Where conservative thought can be seen to diverge is in how to define tradition. For the analogy’s sake, the conservative army will be cloven into two divisions. The first division is already routed. For this faction, the past must be preserved exactly as it was, without change. That’s understood to be impossible even by the soldiers themselves, even before those arrows suspended above earth have been seized by gravity. They are defeated.

Enter Plato, leader of the second faction. Yes, he was a conservative, someone for whom social order and coherent philosophical systems were culture’s treasures to be guarded. He was forced to acknowledge that the world had been irreversibly changed by the sophists and by the classical epoch. But city-states could not be governed by chaos. Tradition can be kept, he announced, if it is reinvented. Listen to Socrates, he said, but listen to my Socrates, the one who believed in souls and heaven. Let the arrows fall, he cried. Not all of us will be killed. Those who are left will fight, and the arrows will be turned to our own use.

Was the Socrates we know a fabrication? I’m sure of it. Was the Jesus that we know edited and re-edited? And all the great agitators, as passed down to us by historical record? There’s no better sign of the true radical than his or her indifference to the historical record. The radical is indifferent to systems of thought or answers to big questions. The question is the important thing, the provocation, the action. The one we are given to know is Plato.

Travelogue 1066 – 25 Oktober

Rose and Blue

It’s October. It’s a beautiful month freighted with the dread of winter. It’s a pretty season cursed to bear the angst of our frenzied lives. September may have been a gentle start, but October sees us at full throttle. Work has become manic. School has resumed for children, and so have all their myriad activities. What may have begun as a delight in being busy again has become something more like a runaway train. We’re hanging on for dear life. History mocks poor October by pinning Halloween to its final day, a holiday that serves as a kind of witch’s mirror reflecting to us our distorted lives and our tortured souls.

In fact, it is a pretty season. The showers come and go, it’s true, but the girls and I have discovered big, glorious rainbows in the sky on a number of occasions. The temperatures are dropping, it’s true, but slowly enough for open jackets. We can still stop for ice cream. The days are getting shorter, it’s true, and that may be the worst of it. But the leaves are turning. Yesterday, the girls brought home three huge leaves they had found, fallen from a plane tree, leaves turned bright red.

And there’s a light to the air in this season that I love. It’s as though everything has a rose tint. The colours in our brick lanes come alive. I find myself entranced by this light and wondering if the architects in our past were inspired when they chose the colours for their work. Were their choices unconscious? Are the colours as much a part of us as they are of the autumnal air? It all seems part of a magical formula.

Travelogue 1065 – 22 Oktober

The Grifter’s Way

And why did Saul Goodman make me think of Socrates and the sophists? He was a questioner. Kind of like the sophists, but different. Overall, I would say the sophists had a positive impact. They may have been self-interested, but they concerned themselves with issues like the public good. The sophists tested the boundaries of tradition to expand the mind. It was an optimistic, expansive project.

There is a darker type of questioner, who preys upon the weaknesses in systems for personal gain. Saul, for example, tested the boundaries of the law in a pessimistic drive for self-aggrandizement.

What made the TV series work was the tension between his better and worse natures. His darker nature prevailed. That’s the nature of Gilligan’s enterprise. In Saul’s story and “Breaking Bad”, viewers understand things will turn out badly, but they are still transfixed by the prospect of redemption.

In America, the dark questioners flock to the law. It’s only natural. They’re taught on TV that the law is a matter of semantics. Twist a word here, compromise a phrase there, and they’re free on all charges. There’s an entire life of crime there in the questioning of legal boundaries. Donald Trump, a supremely cynical questioner himself, was tutored early in life by the sleazy lawyer Roy Kohn. In a matter of four short years, he found every curb to presidential power that for two hundred years had relied on tradition and honour. He found and exploited every flaw in the electoral system. The inherited norms were left in tatters.

Saul at least had the grace to own his selfishness and even to do the right thing once in a while. That was because other people were flesh and blood. To the Trumpistas, the world is a stage set and people have no feelings.

Trump’s 30% of the electorate are vulnerable to the grifter’s cynicism because they need scapegoats for their disappointments. The Reagan Revolution taught them that business was the model for life. ‘Business’ was code for authoritarianism. The social media revolution has taught them that rage is good business. If life lets you down, lash out. It’s philosophically sound. Rage is efficacious and, by extension, it doesn’t matter what you say or how consistent your rhetoric. Words have been proven by the grifter’s law to be unreliable. Emotion is reliable, and self-interest is the moral compass.

Travelogue 1064 – 21 Oktober

Perverse

Healthy, robust, safe and secure. Prosperous. Growing. How often do we see all these descriptors put together? It’s a rare convergence, rare enough in the life of an individual, and even more so in the history of civilizations. Spinning the globe now, where do we feel comfortable putting a finger down, identifying the classic up-and-coming society? Even China, darling of every unoriginal prophet, doesn’t meet those criteria, with its new, house-of-cards look.

Greece in the fifth century BC fit the profile pretty well. Fresh from unexpected victories over the massive Persian army, they were feeling their oats. They were a successful civilization, accruing wealth and achievement and status. They looked outward rather than inward, curious about the world, building a cosmopolitan society. And that golden era was the heyday of the sophists.

I’m contending that it’s these societal phases that produce history’s great questioners. They captivate the zeitgeist in times of growth. They’re the pop stars. Everything is in expansion, including the collective mind. It’s an exciting time to be alive, and questioning is a stimulating exercise.

To be fair, broadly speaking, the sophists were everything their adversaries said they were, perverse corrupters of the minds of the youth. Yes, perverse in the sense that they undermined prevailing values and belief systems. Every society spends its youth under fairly ironclad regimes of religious and political belief. Those beliefs provided a foundation for their success. Suddenly, in times of prosperity and wider commerce, they become less necessary. The old beliefs also begin to seem faintly ridiculous in a cosmopolitan society, in which new influences are many and compelling. And of course the youth are particularly keen to break conventions.

Questioners don’t need to be reliable or provide answers. That explains their freedom of spirit. It also explains why we find them frustrating. It’s impossible to run society on questions. Eventually we need answers. The popularity of questioners has a short term.

One breed of conservatives perishes before the onslaught of the questioners, the ones enforcing tradition. A new breed arises, the ones who make new systems out of the mess. Enter Plato, the codifier.

Travelogue 1063 – 16 Oktober

Elementary Questions

I can recommend having kids as a course in humility. Young children ask lots of questions. My girls are at an age where the questions are becoming intelligent and very urgent. They must have knowledge, and I am coming up short. It can be frustrating. The things they ask are often things I should know, things I tell myself I did know at one time.

We boil eggs; suddenly I’m on the spot. What is the difference between the yellow part and the white part? Which one is healthier for you? Where is the baby chicken? What does each part of the egg do for the baby chicken? How long does it take to hatch? What is the membrane just inside the shell? Why don’t we see it when we crack the egg before it’s cooked? Why would a chicken lay an egg without a baby inside?

“Look at the moon, Baby Jos!” Suddenly, I need to explain the phases of the moon, and why sometimes we see the moon during daylight hours and sometimes we don’t. She needs to know when the next eclipse is. She wants to know if I’ve seen an eclipse. I say yes. When? I can’t remember. Why not? “Where were you?” she asks. I’m embarrassed. “I don’t remember.”

Papa feels his hold on knowledge slipping: his hold on memory, identity, sanity. How could it have all been so fragile?

Socrates had children. Maybe the dialogues with his sons inspired all the later dialogues. The boys had convinced him he knew nothing. It inspired rather than humiliated him, and he turned it into a method of forming knowledge. Or maybe he was just embittered by his humiliation at the hands of his own children, and he looked to inflict the same on his friends. Who knows?

One has an opportunity in the Socrates story to see how adults who are not your parents react to intensive questioning. Not well. They convict you of perversity and sentence you to death by poisoning. That’s a very literal form of punishment, administering a deadly chemical to the human infectant.

As we age, we become comfortable being authority figures. We feel authority is our due. But to shoulder authority is to take on a certain vulnerability. Anyone honest feels insecure exercising authority. Humility bonds well with insecurity, creating a stable compound that won’t flare up or become corrosive. Then authority can alloy with innovation. Brittle pride, on the other hand, is unstable and doesn’t bond well. It repels anything new. It defends positions arbitrarily. It challenges all questions as irreligious or unpatriotic. It reduces itself to juvenile slogans some idiot has printed on a red baseball cap.

What makes the egg yolk yellow? What does “great” mean? Why isn’t the white part of the egg white? If you don’t know what “great” means, then how do you know America was great … or isn’t now … or can ever be again?

Travelogue 1062 – 7 October

The Questioner

She was crying with such abandon. Her magnet set had failed her, providing one less bar than she had needed to complete a tower she was building. Then my sweet Baby Jos was in her mother’s arms crying. She had so surrendered to her heartbreak, that I could only marvel. She cried and cried.

Baby Jos was tired. She becomes easily frustrated, tears of protest coming to her during violin practice or when she is trying to learn something new. But this is heartbreak of a different order. She is grieving the humiliating state of being human, feeble and fallible. We all fell silent in the presence of this pain, even Little Ren, who is usually critical of Jos’s tantrums.

Some of this we retain in age. We throw on the ground some task our fingers are fumbling over, punch the pillow that will not take the right shape in the middle of the night. Is there any communication in that? I feel real protest in Baby Jos’s tears. It is so sad to realize that we are something less in the world than we had hoped. Adults can feel the same. We think we know our limits and powers, but they shift. When I am tired, I can barely walk straight, I bump into everything in the tight little space we call home.

We turn to our parents. We cry a question. It could be, why? It could be, what; like, what do I have to do? We know there are no answers.

But to question is our power. It expresses our true position in the world, as novice and suppliant and child. When humans give answers, there is something grey and impotent to them. The answerer is off-putting. The questioner is our friend and comforter.

That is why I think there is something to the rhetoric of the question. It is the tool of the teacher, like Socrates. It’s the tool of the counsellor, like Erasmus. It is also the tool of the charlatan, like Trump. The questioner in history leaves a mark.

It is a thought that came to me when “Better Call Saul” was over, and I mourned it. The character was a kind of tribute to the questioner. I want to explore the thought a little more.

Travelogue 1061 – 2 October

The Questions and the Frogs

We start with stories; we move to the ring. We play a game, and then we snack. It’s all outlined in pictures up above Meester Jim’s smart screen. Each day follows the same pattern.

Last week was an opportunity for parents to sit in class and observe. Little Ren asked me to go. She was so happy I came that she held my hand in class most of the morning.

As other children came in, they had a choice among areas of the room, sectioned by activity. In one area, they could play with puzzles. In another, there were blocks. In another they could draw. Ren wanted to read. We read a story about little children (in animal form) deciding what they wanted to be when they grew up. The only one I remember is the bulldog who wanted to be a dancer. The book depicted her in a tutu, frowning like a bulldog and bursting out of her little costume. Was that meant as a joke?

The class gathered in a circle. It took a while. Meester Jim gently guided the children as they put toys away and they moved chairs into a circle. Once everyone was seated, the meester went through a series of little lessons, structured with questions, turning attendance into a math problem, reviewing the days of the week, and setting the agenda for the day. Nicely done.

Again, the class broke, and children chose their activity. Johanna had asked Little Ren as we walked in if they could play together, and so the two sought each other out. They decided to choose a game from the cabinets. They chose the game in which you make little frogs jump by pressing down on them with your finger, trying to land them all in a small bowl. My frogs always flew off the table, but I was enjoying myself. Johanna wasn’t great at the game, either. She became absorbed in arraying her little team of frogs in neat little lines.

The frogs taught me I need help with motor skills and teamwork. Johanna needs some help staying on task. Little Ren showed great team and leadership skills, picking up my frogs and encouraging me, gently reminding Johanna that it was her turn. And she won every game. I was proud.

Education is friendly questions and friendly frogs. Our Socratic heritage tells us that knowledge is in us; or, at least, the urge to knowledge is in us. The meester leads us with gentle questions; he creates an environment of learning opportunities.