Travelogue 1131 – 29 April
Strange Bedfellows

The negotiations over Malta in the 1520s were fascinating. The Knights Hospitaller were homeless, having been expelled from Rhodes by the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. They were officially guests of Clement VII, who was an honorary Hospitaller himself. They had installed themselves in Italy, and their Grand Master, rather grandly named Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam, travelled Europe more or less begging for a home for their order.

The idea of Malta was raised early on, suggested by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The Knights were surprisingly picky about the offers made them. They refused Cerigo, Elba, Suda in Crete, Minorca, Ponza and Ischia. They weren’t too crazy about the Malta idea when it was first brought up in 1524. The harbours were good, but the soil was infertile; there wasn’t enough running water. The natives barely grew enough food for themselves. So they took a pass. It’s amazing to remark all the doors that still opened for the old Crusading order. It demonstrates something of the power of the medieval paradigm of Christian knights and lords, courts and privilege, surviving well past their practical lifespan, into the commercial age.

In 1527, the German troops of Charles V sacked Clement VII’s Rome in a bizarre narrative turn during a dispute among these two allies against Protestantism. The German troops who dominated this army were in mutiny against Charles over lack of pay. Many of those soldiers (of the Catholic emperor) were Lutheran, and they found a certain righteousness in doing violence to the papal city. Charles V had been unhappy with Clement because of his politicking against the emperor in northern Italy. He had never intended an attack on Rome, but he found himself holding a terrible power over the Church, a power he was not going to disavow or sully with apologies or defences.

It's one of the sad ironies of history that a nice guy pope was elected just as the Lutheran cry of “anti-Christ” was reaching a crescendo. A century of decadence in the Vatican was laid on the shoulders of this cultured and moderate man. He did what he had to: he paid off the German soldiers, he surrendered territory to the Emperor, and he bided his time.

He didn’t abandon the Knights Hospitaller. He interceded with Charles on their behalf when the Grand Master finally decided to negotiate in earnest for Malta. The Knights wanted autonomy. The emperor sought feudal servants. In the end, Charles decided he could forego all traditional tribute but the gift of one Maltese falcon every year.

Travelogue 1130 – 25 April
The Knights

Suleiman the Magnificent came to power in 1520, almost seventy years after the Ottomans had taken Constantinople. The Turks had become a force for Europe to contend with. Before the end of the same decade, Suleiman and his armies would be laying siege to Vienna.

In 1522, it was the island of Rhodes that would fall to the Turks. The Christians had held on there remarkably long, considering that it was just off the coast of Asia Minor, already surviving one siege in 1480. The enemy the Turks faced on that island was the order of the Knights Hospitallers, who had retreated there from Palestine two hundred years before. They were still a formidable force.

Suleiman was triumphant, riding a wave of manifest destiny for the Turks. With the graciousness of a conqueror who had history behind him, he offered clemency. He allowed the Knights Hospitallers to leave the island in orderly fashion after their defeat. They moved to Italy first, but they moved again when they were gifted Malta by Charles V and a pope who was himself a Knight.

Suleiman ruled the Turks until 1566, roaming Hungary, challenging the Persians, taking war to the Abyssinians. In 1565, the Turks paid a visit to the Knights Hospitaller again, besieging Malta unsuccessfully. I’m thinking a few people sighed with relief when Suleiman passed away a year later. It wouldn’t be until 1683 that another attempt at Vienna could be mounted.

Advance a few generations, and the Knights of Malta are led by their 54th Grand Master, a proud man named Alof de Wignacourt, a French nobleman who had fought in the siege of 1565. He was much revered by the Maltese and by the Knights, resolute and generous. He built fortifications and an aqueduct. He was a patron of the arts. In 1608, he obtained permission from the pope to admit an artist into the order who would normally not have been eligible. He would not have been eligible because he had been charged with murder in Rome and was fleeing justice.

Within months, Caravaggio would be on the run again, having participated in, or perhaps instigated, a brawl in which a number of Knights were injured. Fleeing to Sicily, he would leave behind in Malta a number of brilliant pieces, like “The Beheading of St John the Baptist” and several portraits of Wignacourt, one as St Jerome writing and one standing beside a pretty page boy, suggestively looking at the painter. The canvases are huge, rich in the dark colours of a century.

Travelogue 1129 – 13 April

Bombs in the East

Bombs are dropping in the Middle East, and I’m reading about the invasion of Egypt. That’s the invasion in 1798, the one that most people know about from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The conquest of Egypt was the odd and disfigured brainchild of two men, Napoleon, inspired by his fetishist reading about Alexander the Great, and that cunning old fox and consummate survivor, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The idea had, in fact, been bandied about since the 1770s, since before the Revolution, but it took the overheated atmosphere of the Revolution to bring gravity to the crazy. (We think we live in a time of extremism. Many of us could measure our likely survival in the furnace of 1790s Paris in terms of weeks.)

Napoleon had survived the Terror, his Jacobin credentials bonafide. He had served Robespierre’s regime in suppressing rebellion in the south of France. He had survived the reaction after Robespierre’s fall, although just barely. Then the Directory had entrusted him with the Italian campaign, which had made him a celebrity. Now he schemed with Talleyrand to cut an Alexandrian figure in the exotic East. It didn’t work out so well.

Napoleon and his army were made for the big set pieces, and when they were offered opportunities for those, they won. They ‘conquered’ Egypt. But it was an ephemeral sort of victory. After the artillery went quiet, there was plenty of culture shock to go around. The day-to-day news was awfully modern in tone. Napoleon stepped clumsily all over Muslim sensitivities. The Egyptians proved quite impervious to the grand ideals of the French Revolution. Furthermore, as a people who had been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Mamluks for quite a few centuries, they showed a disappointing lack of interest in the romance of a new Alexander. They resisted. Horatio Nelson appeared with the British fleet shut and down the Nile Delta. The French were trapped while the locals rebelled and the Ottomans prepared an offensive. So far from home, the enlightened conquerors turned rather quickly into cruel oppressors. Many people died for the sake of this vanity project.

There was a strategy of sorts behind it. The French had visions of disrupting English trade with the East, of establishing for themselves a trade route along the future course of the Suez Canal, of fomenting resistance to the Brits all the way to India. Napoleon had an image of Alexander on banks the Indus River etched indelibly into his imagination.

But the only waters Napoleon crossed were the Nile and the Mediterranean. He crossed each first in triumph and then in disgrace. His triumphs in the Mediterranean were in Malta and Crete; he swept up these islands like forgotten treasures, as he had gathered ancient cities in Italy several years before.

The Revolution boldly positioned itself as new, as opposed to all things medieval. Napoleon inherited this mission and executed it with a vengeance. He walked the continent as Reaper to all institutions feudal, aristocratic, religious, or mercantile. In the previous year, he had brought down the thousand-year Republic of Venice. In 1798, he invaded the shores of Malta, bringing modern war to the Knights Hospitaller. They couldn’t resist him. After the French took over, the order left the island, many to settle in Russia as guests of the czar.

Travelogue 1128 – 30 March
On the Water

It is Easter weekend, and the town is quiet. The early morning is particularly subdued because a drizzling rain is falling. I decide on a trip to the store before the girls wake. I throw on my running gear because it is easily available. I pull rain gear on over that, and I am ready for the bike.

I enjoy cycling in this weather, provided I don’t have far to go, provided I am not pedalling toward my work. A light, misty spring rain is refreshing. It dampens sound, and it slows time. It is contemplative. I slow as I cross the Beukelsbrug, taking a moment to catch my breath and look at the river. I see something there in the surface never still.

When I return, Little Ren is up and no one else. She is busy drawing. She has found a cartoon of a fairy that her big sister finished yesterday. In the quiet of the morning, she wants to replicate it. She asks my help. She stops me when I’ve done enough, and she carries on. She sings while she draws. She can’t sit still. She rolls back and forth on her knees. She tosses her head to the left and the right.

I feel obliged to record every stage of our girls’ growth. Things change so quickly. What I find to be the essence of this little girl now, aspects of her that I can’t imagine ever changing, her songs, her restless fidgeting, they will slip away. I’ll be reminded of them years from now, and I will be overcome with gratitude and sorrow, regret for things gone; we are allowed nothing in the transit of time.

When she has done something well, when she has played a song well for her piano teacher, when he praises her, Little Ren has a smile that is radiant and innocent. It is burned into my imagination. I think it is a part of everything I do. It’s an image floating on surface of the river in the morning.

Travelogue 1127 – 20 March
Lighting the Set

Napoleon never woke up with “Ziggy Played Guitar” looping in his mind. I’m comfortable saying that this experience separates me from the Emperor of the French. I don’t remember where or when I heard the song, but the central guitar riff has become lodged in my brain, and I cannot let it go. I sing the song to my girls in the mornings as we prepare them for school. I sing, “Oh yea-ah, Baby plays vio-o-ol.”

There are more substantial life circumstances, you may counter, that separate me from Napoleon Bonaparte. I have never led an army, it’s true. I’ve never been to Corsica. I have not yet been chased out of Russia. But then again, I could be. These are things I could do. Though the odds are so long that they approach infinity, the chance remains. And still there survives not one chance that Napoleon heard David Bowie sing. He never once heard an electric guitar. Through all the shouting and screaming in battle, he never heard an electronically amplified voice. He famously pleaded with Goethe to join him in Paris, but he never even once asked Bowie.

That guitar riff is my privilege, living two hundred years later than Napoleon.

I can think of another person who never heard of Ziggy Stardust. Old Scaliger pottering around his garden in Leiden in the early seventeenth century never heard of Ziggy Stardust. Maybe he whistled some old folk tune in the morning, a hymn, or a madrigal that haunted him when he woke. I like the image of the ageing professor alone in his garden, kneeling among the cabbage, poking at the dirt, pulling up weeds. In the garden, he might grumble about politics among the faculty. He might labour over some point of Latin grammar. Or he might just feel the dirt between his fingers, breaking apart the clods, looking for signs that Death had been creeping around his window again. He glances up at the misty sky, wondering how long he has.

I don’t know if anyone else has the impression that each century of the second millennium has a characteristic light. I have been to too many museums, I think. The seventeenth century is definitely darker than most. The light is Rembrandt’s and Caravaggio’s, full of shadow. The weather is Dutch, attenuated daylight under scudding clouds.

The nineteenth century is also dark. It’s Neo-Gothic and Heathcliff-on-the-moors dark. The exception would be Napoleon’s era, during which the atmosphere is early-spring-morning-before the-battle. It’s a holdover from the summer of the eighteenth century.

Travelogue 1126 – 15 March
Napoleon in a Wig

Baby Jos is bringing home news from the world. She is old enough to be learning names and facts and ideas. She has told me about Keith Haring, of all people; she has told me about dresses during the Victorian era. She has told me about rain and condensation; she has told me about planets and stars. She is telling me about Napoleon.

“He was selfish,” she says. “He brought back slavery.” This is what her teacher has told her about Napoleon Bonaparte. It is an interesting pair of factoids about the Emperor of the French. Neither factoid can be discounted, but the historian in me is instantly irritated. “Tell me more.” There is one more: many people died in war.

Coincidentally, the Little Corporal has been on my mind. I had had a certain fascination for the man when I was a child. And the recent trip to Paris has brought him back to my thoughts. It is hard not to think of him at the Louvre (named the Musée Napoléon during the Empire) even if only in the salon with the huge canvases by Gros and David, depicting grand battles and the glorious coronation. (“That’s the Empress Joséphine!”)

“Napoleon was a selfish man,” she said. That is true enough, Baby Jos, but please just remember that history is more complicated.

Why does it bother me so much? I get protective. History is like the abandoned house where kids cannot help but play reckless pranks. People are children when it comes to history; they are seduced by their power over it. They emotionalize history; they sentimentalize it. They gather facts under umbrellas to make pretty terraces among the wild garden. They psychoanalyse historical figures. They twist history into morality tales.

This latter, the moralizing, is the trend of our day. It is an embarrassing and a frustrating practice; embarrassing because it is the most transparent and clumsy sort of editorializing the human mind employs. We are in a sad state if we think we have an edge on the people of eighteenth-century France, whether in wisdom or in experience. And it is frustrating because it occludes clear sight. Moralizing is the woman with the tall wig at the theatre, succeeding less in getting attention than in forcing everyone to crane their necks to see around her.

Travelogue 1125 – 3 March
A Spring Cloud

Thermometer readings are slightly different than they have been. The clouds come and go. But it’s a Sunday, and there are a few hours in the early afternoon when the clouds retreat into a haze, and when the sun imparts a certain warmth on the back. The people of the city respond incommensurately, shucking jackets, appearing in shorts, sitting on terraces outside. They sense a change. Elianne’s papa informs us, before ballet class, that meteorological spring, unlike astronomical spring, begins on the first of March. It’s spring! That’s certainly the consensus of the people outside, to judge by their behaviour.

Change is like that, a judgement formed by impressions, impressions founded on vapours.

Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is already dead, that we are living in a new age. He cites a historical example. The Greek writer offers the year 1776: all evidence surrounding the observer would suggest it was an age of feudalism. There were kings and queens, lords and ladies. Lords lived on great estates of land, worked by peasants born to peasant families who had worked the lands for hundreds of years. The nobility seemed to be in charge of politics and of all opinion and fashion. By outward signs, it was a feudal society, but in fact the capitalist age had dawned, and was already firmly in charge of humanity’s destiny.

Change is like that, the germ inside constancy. Every moment steals in under guide of sameness.

Varoufakis has a theory he’s promoting, and the narrative serves that purpose, but it does still make sense. His theory is that we have entered another feudal age, effectively falling back in evolution. But this forma of feudalism serves a different set of lords, this time the tech aristocracy. Effectively, according to Varoufakis, doomed capital opted to take its own life, funding the turnover itself. It’s a theory, and not a very romantic one. But it’s as good as any other. There’s obviously something in the air, meteorological, if not astronomical. Consider the dubious Lord Musk, nudging the Ukraine war this way and that with his satellite services, offering them to one combatant and then the other in a partisan bid to seem above the fray, far above, high as the spring cloud.

Travelogue 1124 – 26 February
Beweeglijkheid

It’s a still morning. It’s always a still morning after a holiday, isn’t it? At least if you get up as early as I do on a workday. The streets outside are quiet. Even with the equinox approaching, the mornings are dark. The windows are blank, suggesting either hope or depression, depending on the inclination of one’s mind. I sense the weight that depression has put on while I was away, chewing anxiously in anticipation of the return to the mundane, but I can balance her sway with a renewed will. I will turn resolutely toward hope. I don’t need the day to be a lark; what I need is to see that it unfolds with purpose. The week must be set on a steady course.

We arrived home on Saturday. Sunday morning, the girls had ballet. There was no rain, so I tossed Little Ren onto the back of my bicycle. By ten, we were rolling alongside the Westersingel in the centre. The Westersingel is a nineteenth-century canal that now features a small sculpture garden along its banks. The last sculpture we pass is my favourite, Rodin’s “L’homme qui marche”, an armless and headless body in bronze, a man stepping forward. We just saw another version of the same statue by the same artist last week in the Musèe d’Orsay.

It's a lovely piece. It's quiet, and it’s still, as most statues are, but it was created as a study of movement. The torso turns; missing its arms, the motion seems awkward. The torso was left unfinished. I quote from Dutch prose about the Rotterdam piece, because Dutch is the language for rough exteriors: “Door de afwisseling van lichte vlakken en donkere schaduwen zorgt de lichtval voor beweeglijkheid in het beeld.” Roughly, that means that the rough surface creates a feeling of motion with its alternating light and shadow.

Travelogue 1123 – 18 February
Plus Ça Change

We’re off to Paris in a few days, so why not break out a few words in the beautiful language? Add a few more, and you have my entire French vocabulary. I’m not proud; the Parisians will be sure of that.

It’s spring break – though it’s still winter, - and the girls still have ballet classes in their calendars. We still dress in our layers and our jackets, and when we leave the flat, we bow our heads into the light rain and a chilly wind.

The ballet school is in the city centre, upstairs in a small brick building near Eendrachtsplein. It’s a small old building, with small, old rooms. We ride the cramped elevator, and, walking down the narrow yellow hallway, we pass a locker room, and we pass a few open studios with bars and mirrors. At the end of the hall, there are some steps leading up into a foyer serving a set of small studios for children’s lessons.

We enter and we are greeted by familiar faces. We’ve been attending weekly for more than five years. One of the new faces is an old face, a girl who attended school with Baby Jos but then transferred to another school. I sit with her father, and he shows me the spreadsheets he’s working on. His daughter takes two classes, so he spends a good part of his morning in that bleak room.

We work and we play. The two activities are colours succeeding each other on a pinwheel, accelerating, and finally blurring.

During breaks in my own workday, breaks between classes, I take walks. Nearby is the Erasmus University campus. Even among the brutalist architecture of the university, I find spots of charm. There’s a long reflecting pool in the centre, surrounded by lawns, and divided in the middle by a curving pedestrian bridge. I enjoy walking around the perimeter. Beyond, there’s a canal, and, beside the road along the campus’s verge, there is a gravel walking path among saplings and grass. That path is for long breaks. I don’t get many of those anymore.

Sometimes I stop to reflect during those walks. I say to myself, “I woke up this morning, and I am still here.” It’s a generic thought. It could be said with contentment or disappointment. It might refer to Planet Earth or might refer to Rotterdam. It might refer to the state of living. I say it with one meaning or the other; I say it with all meanings. I don’t know.

I think change is like that. It is the germ inside constancy. There is no stasis, in fact. Every same thing stands in a different moment; every moment steals in under guide of sameness.

Travelogue 1122 – 14 February
Attentive

There’s been a change in the air, something subtle, something gentle: a slight access of light, a brighter shade among the clouds, a shot of colour, a shot of oxygen, maybe. One can breathe a little more easily. I have seen a few crocuses among the grass. I have noticed birdsong in the courtyard of my building. I look up for birds among the dark skeletal branches of our trees.

This is how things start. Small signs are stirring, and you notice. It helps if you are quiet and attentive. Voices change.

Baby Jos has brought home a variety of new tones this school year. Out of the blue, she will reason with me like a young adult. The tone catches me by surprise, and I smile. She frowns; she wants to be taken seriously. I adjust, and I listen. She’s got so many things to say. In other moments, she’s a girl again. She imagines things, and she tells stories. She observes things as we walk, and I have to be attentive. Her vocabulary shifts almost weekly. A great number of things are now “adorable”: small dogs and children and toys and cartoons and jewellery and styles. Then, “come on, girl!” she declares. And she can chatter all the way there, all on her own steam, pausing only to shush her little sister when Little Ren dares to contribute.

Travelogue 1121 – 31 January
This Is Europe

I’m shopping near the university, in a cosy little neighbourhood of Rotterdam known to be on the posh side. Posh or not there’s a man who is tottering and mumbling. He is dressed fine and groomed, but there’s something wrong with him. He confronts an elderly pair sitting on an outdoor bench. They are speaking in Italian. He interrupts them and starts in a reasonable tone, informing them that they are in the Netherlands, advising them they should speak Dutch. The couple are confused; they question; then they protest. He raises his voice. “Oh, Dio,” complains the woman. This is Europe now. It’s a tiny country on a continent that is a patchwork of languages, but, sure, Holland for the Dutch! To be sure, this man was unbalanced in some way, and he was put in his place by a few locals, in Dutch. “Sod off,” yelled one ordinary-looking bystander in Dutch. “They’re in the Netherlands,” the poor man replied, thinking we needed one more reminder.

In Italy, meanwhile, a museum director in Florence complains that tourism has turned the city into a ‘prostitute’, and this brings down upon her head a frightful torrent of outrage. Maybe that was to be expected; it was strong language. But the story becomes confusing when you look at who complained loudest: a lot of right-wing allies of Italian Prime Minister and Mussolini fan, Giorgia Meloni. It might have seemed at first blush like a sentiment they would applaud: damn those foreign interlopers. You wonder if it might have become economic. Tourists provide profit. But no, you only need look as far as the museum director’s surname: Hollberg. It turns out that Meloni’s government has been trying to push non-Italians out of top cultural jobs so they can be filled by sympathetic cultural warriors. Ms Hollberg chose a bad moment to voice her opinion, especially in such colourful terms.

Travelogue 1120 – 20 January
Twist and Shout

We will be tortured for ages by the image of Trump awkwardly dancing to “YMCA” on rally stages. We will be tortured for generations by the memory of Trump recommending bleach for COVID.

I’ve always wondered about the paradigm established among the shouting social media cliques for evaluating the COVID response. It was always a question of who was right. As a topic, that’s fair enough: in retrospect, both sides ought to be able to admit they were wrong on some points, medical and historical. But what an odd sum to take as the final measure! Right and wrong are material for discussions about lessons learned for the next time, not for moral judgement of humanity, or leadership, or the medical establishment struggling with crisis and fear.

The fact is, we succeeded. We succeeded in caring. The world mobilised to protect men, women, and children. The details of implementation pale in importance next to this singular achievement. The efforts made to save lives were authentically remarkable.

The social compact relies on the impulse of charity. And, yes, charity does exist. It’s not the time to hash over adolescent debate topics like “altruism is really ego in disguise”. There was never a need to make great efforts to dress up greed as charity, as the fleshy former president demonstrates for us every day.

Please, with one internal eye always on the horror of Trump’s herky jerky Twist, let’s give our academic cynicism a rest, when all that’s good is already under attack. Let’s forego the self-conscious poring over brain scans for the chemical signature of caring; let’s take a break from the tiresome campaigns to impugn everyone’s honour and intentions. Everyone’s doing the best they can. And the finest human systems are still flawed. Corruption and ignorance and waste find their way into any environment, and good people can do no more than minimize it. Baby might still rate more than the bathwater, say.

I’m not Christian, but I think of a Biblical author. Paul had his moments. He wrote, “And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.” He also wrote, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Children shout over each other; adults ask them to stop and listen.

Dancing Trump is a totem of bad times. Dancing Trump is the gargoyle. Cement him into the wall of the temple as a reminder. Look upon him and shudder.

Travelogue 1119 – 18 January
Just a Drop

When in Holland, look for signs of change in the forms of the water. Now the water has become white, and when it falls, it falls in pellets. On the ground it crunches and causes hazards. On playgrounds, it lies in patches of white. On the canals, there are thin sheets of ice on the surface. Seagulls stand on it, looking uncertain.

Big changes, we describe in terms of floods. Floods of immigrants, for example. Or we whisper about the literal tide predicted with climate change, quite possibly the final one for low-lying towns like The Hague.

But a big change is already upon us, isn’t it? Flood tides rising and threatening to overcome their barriers and run free. They swept over Iowa this week; we spot them in Europe, too. These are the waters of Narcissus, rising to their highest mark in decades. They claim a few inches every month, a few dozen souls every week, victims of the Narcissian malady, the crippling trance of self-regard. Victims are mesmerised by their image, hypnotised by their voices, enraptured by their opinions.

Liberals have loudly declared – and, bless them, the libs can be counted on to be loud, in all seasons – that Trump is a threat to democracy. That begs the question: do you believe them? The Trumpist right has only two answers to choose from: no we don’t, or yes but we don’t care. It’s a tragic binary, both sides founded on discord, distrust, defiance, and nihilistic abandon. It’s not the most inspiring political programme: there’s little to recognise as optimism there.

The “Trump or democracy” dynamic seems familiar to me, parallel to the dynamic formed during the COVID crisis. Do you believe in the public health officials responding to the crisis? No we don’t, or yes but we find it very inconvenient. It’s dark reasoning. It has some parallels with the bedrock position of Republicanism: do you believe that paying taxes provides for the public good? No it’s a conspiracy among civil servants, or yes but we don’t want to pay.

In none of these litanies is space allowed for a pause. Narcissus responds without hesitation, self first with immediacy, self first without reflection.

Society might require an antidote to the Narcissian waters. In crisis, one must care first for the welfare of others. One forgets the self for a moment, releases ambition and self-expression, sets aside righteousness, and settles a gentle focus on the needs of other human beings. No need to proselytise, no need to debate.

I’m prescribing a drop from waters of Lethe, the peaceful sleep of forgetfulness. We do so love our “ideas”; and they will return to us once the medicine wears off. There is nothing to fear.

Travelogue 1118 – 7 January
The Orthodox Holiday

We successfully negotiated Janus’s gate. We are in a new year. As though straining to differentiate itself from 2023, January’s temperatures have taken a dip. Last night, I detected a taste of Minnesota as I breathed deeply of the crisp night air over Rotterdam. I could see stars. That was itself a delight in this season of clouds.

But the calendar still plays its tricks. In an act of mirroring worthy of two-faced Janus, or perhaps of all the water still on the ground, today is Christmas. It’s Orthodox Christmas this time. We, in our exhaustion, defy the mirror. We spent our energy early, starting with the Dutch holiday, Sinterklaas, in early December. There’s little left for December’s Christmas, and less for New Year’s. Orthodox Christmas is just a pleasant occasion for wishing everyone well.

Is Janus still watching? Every day is a gateway, after all, and this is his month. The two-headed god is charged with gates and transitions. What moment is not a transition? His very physiognomy suggests his function, with four eyes to watch. So we must be seen nearly every day, tripping through a doorway.

Furthermore, everything we pass has a god or goddess attached, the trees, the banks, every field buried under a street, every river. Understanding their function is challenging. What did the ancients imagine their gods did from day to day? Did they live in Olympus or were they everywhere? Did they form the essence of the thing they represented? Was Janus simply a deformed citizen of Olympus, or was his spirit inside every doorway? Or maybe both? Why not? Was he just a bureaucrat, a manager of sorts? Was it his job to ensure that doorways didn’t malfunction, perhaps turning people back the way they came? Or was he some sort of Heisenbergian observer, making everything possible just by his eyes? Would the gates dissolve without his gaze? The mystery formed a part of their divinity, I suppose.

One hardly knows what to reverence anymore. On these cold mornings, so slow to warm into day, one ventures out in layers against the weather, and a longing dawns inside, as slowly as the light, to offer devotion, to find the loitering god like Janus and leave something at his feet. It arises from one’s vulnerability, and it only seeks the worthy object.

I hear the answer that is obvious to the secular group mind: reverence everything. Love all, tread lightly, be gracious. And I admit it makes sense. I also admit I make a rather poor model of these virtues, especially during Janus’s own month. I am irritated with city life, and, as far as I can tell, so is everyone else. The winter has become unkind, and it lingers too long. Not even the tardy Orthodox Christmas has much power to lift spirits.

Travelogue 1117 – 3 January
God of Gates

Janus looks forward and back at the same time. At midnight of the new year, I wonder what there might be to see. I imagine only tunnels of wind in both directions, rippling through the veils of rain. One year becomes another on a wet, winter night, and old Janus presides.

Newscasters make the most of the change, trumpeting the drama of our times, but they discover the truer note when they drink on air and enact silly sketches. Joy becomes enjoyment, and celebration becomes self-indulgence. Fireworks are a handy substitute for hope.

The first day of this year offered us one small and singular note of optimism. It was right away, as we left the house. To get to Metro, we have to pass through a narrow square of sorts, a span of pavement between two low buildings of residencies. It’s a depressing stretch, usually littered with trash. On New Year’s Day, in particular, it’s an unpleasant sight, full of the remains of fireworks, remains that decay in the rain into an ugly sludge.

That morning, and it was early for a holiday, we encountered a sole neighbour with a trash bag in one hand and a garbage picker in the other, moving methodically across the plein. He had clearly begun his work much earlier; the plaza was uncommonly clean, even for a regular weekday. He cut a lonely figure in the heavy air of a morning after. But he had a patient smile, and we were sure to give him a salute for his service. Here was my first hero of 2024.

He continued his labours as we carried on, emerging from the plaza into the broad open space before the transit centre, climbing the wide steps up to the tram lines. Janus is the god of gates; we advanced under his watchful eye. Our neighbour lingered behind in the shadows of the square. Had Janus seen him yet?

Travelogue 1116 – 29 December
The Questions

Hey ho, the wind and the rain. It's been a Shakespearean Christmas season, even the Netherlands feeling the stress of too much water. River levels in the east reached fourteen metres above NAP. NAP means the Normal Amsterdam Level, which is the standard in the Netherlands, a measure just below sea level.

I’ve been spending vacation time working on a research paper about assessment. This is for professional development. I’m analysing an exam given last year in a course that I supervise. That means going over the exam again and again, examining the questions that make it up. I find weak questions, and I make recommendations for improvement.

At night, the rain strikes up a steady rhythm. It falls on the roof and patters against the windows. The drops become so many questions falling on me from the sky.

I’ve also been using vacation time to catch up on dental work. I sit in the chair as they work in my mouth, staring into the bright light over the dentist’s shoulder, asking myself questions. “What am I doing here?” is a prominent one. I reflect, not for the first time, that what distinguishes the human from the animal is the ability to submit oneself to pain, to appoint a time when another human will inflict pain, to contentedly submit to the administration of pain, motivated only by an abstract idea of health. I feel some amazement every time I ease myself into that oversized chair.

Seeing doctors and dentists more often than friends does something to your head. You begin to think a lot about mortality. There was a time I thought questions came with answers. The two were complements, like protons and electrons: free in space to match when the time was right. Now it looks like a universe of protons. They fall from the sky, upsetting the NAP and lulling us finally to sleep.

Travelogue 1115 – 19 December
Pooling

The water that lured Narcissus didn’t necessarily run deep, but it was still, still as a mirror. It captured him as surely as a fly in honey, trapped him in its pool of pure mood. Narcissus was the son of a god, and he was a beautiful man. He had many admirers, including the timid mountain nymph Echo, who pined away for him until she was nothing but sound. Nothing would save him from himself, or from the terrifying power of water. Prophecy warned that he should avoid his reflection, and yet the picture of oneself is too seductive – count the people you pass in one day checking themselves out in their phones. And - let’s be fair - avoiding all water is rather difficult. The mood mirror catches us all eventually.

The subject of an article I read recently in the Guardian was the shift in global power relationships around the world. It was a legitimately interesting topic, the shift away from binary Cold-War models and toward a multipolar order in which smaller powers mix and match their alignments, meaning economic alignments with China and military agreements with America, for example. Biden had recently met with Xi in San Francisco, as the author mentioned in the introduction. But none of this was the lead. The pretext for the article was a poll.

Among the findings in this European Council on Foreign Relations and Oxford University project were that big chunks of “those we asked” in a selection of countries (1) believed the U.S. was at war with Russia; (2) believed Russia would win its war against Ukraine; (3) thought the U.S. would go to war with China over Taiwan in the near future; (4) believed the E.U. would fall apart. Most of “those we asked” would prefer to live in Europe or the U.S. but would rather trade with China. And so on. (Here is a nice essay about the role polls play in news cycles.)

This sort of poll, so ubiquitous now, begins to sound comical to me. I picture a Kimmel sketch in which people on the street outside his studio are peppered with random questions. Ask people questions, they answer. No matter how distant the topic; no matter how little they cared a moment before; no matter how fantastical the topic, they will manufacture an opinion. A poll is more Rorschach test than exercise in thought, but the very seriousness with which polls are treated emboldens people to confuse impulse and reason. Democracy stands at risk of devolving into opinion polls, which are at best, let’s admit it, nothing more than barometers of fleeting emotion.

We read polls the way Narcissus read the waters. What matters is our glorious selves. Polls that support our assumptions make us glow with affirmation; polls that counter our assumptions make us glow with indignation. The latter is more addictive than the former. In either case, we have learned nothing, accomplished nothing, exercised no critical-thinking or problem-solving skills.

Travelogue 1114 – 13 December
Coolhaven

Our routine this autumn has been to take the Metro to school, two stops to Coolhaven Station. We cross the bridge, and then we descend to the waterside. It’s not the most direct way, but I find walking along the water peaceful.

The Coolhaven, or Cool Harbour (‘Cool’ pronounced like ‘coal’), was dug about a hundred years ago. It appears as nothing more special than a widening of the River Schie before that river turns south and empties into the Nieuwe Maas. The stretch of open water separates Delfshaven from what once were the furthest western stretches of Rotterdam, and it’s peaceful because there isn’t much traffic anymore. There’s nothing particularly scenic; it’s lined along most of its banks by calm residential areas. But this place has been so central in the geography of my life in this town, its meaning enhances its beauty. It’s like Loring Park in Minneapolis, a place I saw almost every day for years.

I walk the same way after dropping the girls. It’s only been ten minutes, but the light has changed. On the way to school, we walk under dawn’s first light. The night has not yet been overcome. By the time I’m walking back toward the Metro Station, the dawning day has become ascendant, and the sky is more blue than black, more day than night. The waters are calm, and I drink in the sight of them, absorbing quiet contentment.

They say water is a symbol of mood. I accept the gift of stillness from the Coolhaven this morning, this whisper of comfort during a time of year that feels chaotic.

Travelogue 1113 – 3 December
Be Real

“Why are younger voters flocking to the far right?” worries the Guardian.

I thought I had better check Instagram for an answer. There, a young lady told me with a blissful smile that she had been sent to this earth to experience ‘every human emotion’. Odd that human emotions comprise such an exotic menu for all the disembodied souls. Is it that much of a privilege, given the scope of this universe? After the hormonal cascade of emotions in adolescence, what is left but dread and anxiety? But there you have it: those tears at the high school prom are a real draw.

It would seem that popular scifi mythology has seeped into general culture. We are now encouraged to believe, from the cold lips of Spock and other alien boosters, that we are a savage but a special species, so violent but so romantic. Visiting extra-terrestrials marvel that one human stops to drop a coin in the cap of another human … who was abandoned by the rest and sleeps on the pavement; are astonished by the little girl who feeds the baby birds left motherless … by her big brother and his slingshot.

I thought I had better check the hard news, instead. Headline: disgraced former congressman George Santos is talking to the press. He is quite indignant about the way he was treated. And now Santos, this man who conned an Amish man out of his puppies and who used donor money for Botox, is scandalised by the behaviour of his former colleagues, and he promises to tell all. Scrolling down the page, I find out that there is an international conference on climate solutions going on. Oh! It seems quite a number of experts feel we’re approaching a crisis point, and all of civilization is on the line. Hm!

Anyway, young people are voting for right wing parties again. “…the woke ones from the big cities,” says one, “care about the climate and gender stuff but they are ignoring the real problems that we have here and now.”

Travelogue 1112 – 1 December
Dark and Light

The winter cold has descended. Rain has become intermittent hail. We have fished out our gloves and hats. And now everyone is counting the days until holidays. The youngest eagerly anticipate Sinterklaas, or ‘pakjesavond’, which is only a few days away. Little Ren is counting the days until her birthday, which happens soon after Sinterklaas. And I’m counting days until our winter break. I don’t think I’m alone in that.

It’s a time of close spaces and crowds. The cold drives us inside. It drives us into the Metros and trams and buses, all of us together, made bulky in our coats, awkward in our boots, carrying umbrellas, made grumpy by the intrusion of winter. The season drives us into stores, where the aisles are crowded, and the stock is becoming thin. We’re wet; we’re shivering. We are unusually tired, simply from the lack of light and from all the minor discomforts that follow us among our errands, like the gnats of summer, but more persistent.

That said, there are surprising appearances of good cheer. Everywhere there is sudden largesse. Last night, Little Ren had her gymnastics class. The teenage girls who run the class had turned the school gym in Blijdorp into a fun obstacle course. A contingent of Piets arrived and handed out little craft kits. At the end, the older girls distributed bags of candy. The little girls were very excited.

It's a funny season, full of contradictions. We do our best to spark other types of illumination as the sun withdraws its light.

Travelogue 1111 – 29 November
Messy

It was a jarring sight. Teachers from the girls’ school were gathered in front of the main entrance, sitting on the ground in a semi-circle. They had set small tents up, and they sat in sleeping bags. As the children began to gather and stare at them, the teachers sang songs. The children were entranced.

My girls had to explain to me. The teachers were camping out here to prevent Rommel Piet from getting into the school. Sinterklaas arrived in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. The saint travels with a coterie of ‘Piets’, who are his assistants. One of those Piets is notorious now and may be known to my readers: ‘Zwarte Piet’ or Black Piet. Because he has become so controversial, Zwarte Piet keeps a low profile these days, at least in urban Holland. Another of the Piets is Rommel Piet. ‘Rommel’ means mess, and Rommel Piet likes to steal into homes and schools and leave a huge mess, mischievously tipping chairs over and hiding things. Every year he seems to break in somehow, to make a 'rommel' of the classrooms, and every year the teachers try to thwart him.

I enjoy this small survival of the trickster in a culture so dedicated to order. It speaks in some way to my soul, so lost in the thicket called November. What was so jarring about the sight of teachers sitting on the ground was the season. It was near freezing, and chilly showers had been coming and going. Seeing them on the ground was to empathically feel the cold and wet concrete against one’s tender morning skin. And yet, those dedicated teachers smiled and welcomed the children, and they cheerfully offered up songs about the saint.

Travelogue 1110 – 28 November
Candles

Dante is reciting from the “Inferno” from the shelter of an open portico. The cobble stones in this piazza tilt upward, as they did in the last one, and as we follow the incline, past the steps of a medieval church toward a passage between the side of the church and the shops lining the lane, we climb to another piazza at another level. Two high, square towers rise above us, like a medieval version of New York’s ill-fated Twin Towers. We are nearing the top of the hill.

Is it a dream, Dante reciting for coins, and tourists queueing up a hundred metres for gelato? No, this is a memory. I am recapturing bits from my trip in October. This is the hike through the village of San Gimignano, a funny and lovely little place an hour or so outside Florence in Tuscany, where the burgers of the Middle Ages competed with each other to build the highest tower. At one time there were 72 of them standing on this Tuscan hill. These days, it’s the tourists fighting for attention, shopping for boar’s sausage or elbowing in at a vista for their selfie. But still it’s a beautiful village with long views of the green hills and their vineyards round about.

Like consciousness itself, memory occupies an ambiguous position between light and its shadows, retreating one way from noxious fogs generated by stress or virus, retreating another from their abrupt seizure and distortion during sleep, advancing toward the light whenever the force of neglect threatens to drown it forever in the unconscious.

As in the case of the mysterious unconscious, memory inspires all manner of theories. Whole memories exist somewhere, like Plato’s perfect forms; memories are glimpses of a universal tapestry, containing all the data of life; memories suggest in their ephemeral nature the final extinguishing of self. They are special sight; they are psychic rubbish. But certainly memories come to comprise so much of the content of thought that they assume a special place in the day. We come to be living in memory as much as living in experience.

Perhaps one day, sorting through the bits and bobs of childhood, I find a trapdoor. And I open the door to see Scaliger looking back. Is he as lonely as I am, he in his time, and I in mine? He has celebrated his last Christmas. It’s grey winter, and he sits alone in his study. Young Heinsius has been by to check on him, but now he must return to his work. Instead, he studies the wavering flame of a candle. He does this to recover his focus. The house in Leiden is gloomy in winter, even in the afternoon. He has one candle against the darkness.

Travelogue 1109 – 24 November
Nothing

I was too hopeful, it seems. We all were in thinking that the nominal centrist Pieter Omtzigt would be the big winner on Wednesday. Instead, it was Holland’s longstanding crazy uncle, Geert Wilders. It only made sense. Rutte had spent most of his career fighting off the steady encroachment by Wilders into the mainstream. We had placed too much faith in centrism and too little in Rutte’s political skills. So the genie of hate is out of his bottle. It will be hard now to dismiss him as a crank, but it does remain to be seen how stable any government Wilders could assemble would actually be. His sort of provocative rhetoric plays well to a crowd but may not get him far in negotiations with serious politicos when the press is outside the room. It’s a corollary of the new politics, best demonstrated by congressional Republicans in the U.S. ‘Vote for me, I’ll achieve nothing!’ could be their slogan. They still win elections. The twenty-first-century electorate is made up of cackling masochists. Modern voters seem to take as their model 80s football hooligans, happy to trash their own stadium for a laugh. There’s no shame the morning after. It’s part of the game; it’s someone else’s job to clean up.

I woke again to the pitter-pat of little raindrops on the dark panes of our windows. I’m up hours before first light in this season, and my first task is Sinterklaas duty. The girls’ shoes are in the entryway, and I have to quietly drop gifts into the shoes. First, I get to read the heart-breakingly sweet notes my girls have written to the saint. Little Ren is just learning to write, and her notes are sometimes cryptic, always illustrated with her drawings, asking for some gift, astonishingly cute. I am alone in the morning with these notes in the morning, wishing time would stop.

In some sense time has already stopped. The month of November is a kind of sinkhole of consciousness, even when it doesn’t begin with convalescence from COVID. November is always a convalescence, existentially, a convalescence from itself, from decay. Its darkness is a course of treatment, a round of waters from Lethe, a dip in chilly waters, a subsidence of consciousness. We are reminded that living is experiencing the shifting boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. We spend the years explaining that moving line to each other. The unconscious is inside us. It is the divine; it is the true consciousness. It is the blackness from which consciousness miraculously arose and which will swallow us again. It is a source of wisdom. We own it. God owns it. It is literally nothing. All these things we tell each other, explaining a mystery that – if there is in fact design to the universe – was specifically designed to be unknowable.

Travelogue 1108 – 21 November

Self-Determination

When we emerge from the Metro station, there is a collection of campaign workers ready with leaflets and smiles. They represent half a dozen parties vying for seats in Parliament tomorrow. They are friendly. The stakes in this election are higher than usual because of the resignation of our long-time premier, Mark Rutte, who seemed like the old oak tree of politics. It’s a moment of change. But the mood among the campaign workers is light. They aren’t aggressive. They are enjoying themselves.

Pieter Omtzigt seems the favourite to take Rutte’s place, presenting himself as the amiable face of centrism. The Dutch can’t really countenance extremism, after all. They flirt with it, but they can’t yet stomach the wild narcissism of a demagogue like Trump. Sadly, being a centrist in our time means taking positions that used to be solidly right-wing. For example, he has to be tough on immigrants. Further, he has to be sceptical about international education. There’s a whole choir of demagogues who want to limit higher education in English. I’m not sure who forms their political base here; in more than ten years, I’ve never met a Dutch person who was at all bothered about the ubiquity of English in Holland. If anything, they seem proud of it. But self-defeating nationalism seems the cause of the day.

Today Little Ren starts her day at the gym, which stands apart from the school building, across the small courtyard and playground. Because we usually arrive early, she stands among a small group of young ones at the door, waiting for the gym teacher. She says, “Papa, please wave to me by the school.” I don’t like leaving for work until I see the gym has been opened, and the children are safely inside. And I always kiss my girls before they go into school, and we wave to each other every day. “You can stay, but stand by the school, Papa.” She’s embarrassed to have me stand with her at the gym. My heart breaks a little, but I say all right. She stills gives me my kiss, and she waves good-bye as she walks across the playground and toward the gym.

Travelogue 1107 – 18 November
The Toggles

The Netherlands is a caricature of itself in this year’s November, dripping, drizzling, grey and dark. It never stops. I rode home on the bike this afternoon, all the way from Blaak, struggling with the hood of my rain jacket. The jacket is a voluminous thing that wraps around me in such an excess of material that I can rarely identify the ends of it. It flaps as I ride, something like Batman’s cape, or so I imagine. It is probably less romantic than that to fellow cyclists, more of a nuisance. And the hood is a shapeless sack that refuses to cooperate. More often than not, I have to hold it closed at my neck with one hand as I ride, adding that much more to my nuisance factor on the road. Why can’t it simply snap shut? Instead, there are two odd little toggles on strings that tighten the rim of the hood but then release it when you let go. I’ve tried too often to tie these accursed cords together while riding, entirely unsuccessfully. But that is daily life in rainy Holland, raingear on and off, fiddling with zippers and toggles, carrying a bag of raingear everywhere I go, jackets and pants for myself and the girls, just so I never find myself wanting. I’m running to work, or I’m picking girls from school, rucksacks and gym bag hanging off me. That is daily life in the rain and cold, constrictions and weight on your back. I wonder if native Nederlanders who grew up in this climate feel the burden. I wonder if their sight is unchanged. I can’t help the feeling of horizons closing in, the rain pushing my head down, the fogs and clouds obscuring distances, my errant hood pulled tight around my head for as long as I can manage, eyes on the road so I don’t splash or slip. It’s the physical analogue for the work COVID did on me after coming home from Italia. Memories are weakened as much as the lungs, and the boundaries of life and consciousness close in. What is it to be alive? One wonders when those horizons contract, when one hardly sees past the first three metres before your front tire.

Travelogue 1106 – 14 November
But, Soft!

And the skies closed in again. One day of (qualified) sunshine was enough. The rats had received their rewards, their small pellets of psychic sugar, and then it was back to the maze. Fogs returned, as though rising from the ground, while clouds were driven eastward over us, driven by the darkness at their heels. They brought mists and showers.

Time gets lost in these vapours. Was it summer once? When did school start up again? It seems as though I was always getting up at 5:30 and preparing lunches. My girls and I have walked together, hand in hand, for an unending series of mornings, through the misty air to the Metro, while rush hour surged around us. But, soft! what light through faded memory breaks? Just one month ago, we were leaving for Italia. Jumbled pictures emerge from the clouded mind, the cold and echoing space of Schiphol, a narrow, cobbled lane outside a small hotel, the fountain in the Piazza della Signoria. But the dim Dutch light of the day won’t sustain it. The memories dissipate.

The vapours and the showers have collaborators. Now I recall: the day we returned from abroad, I was already sick. I was in bed for three days with COVID, and, by the time I stood again, the beautiful trip had faded among the feverish dreams of unhappy returns. I was straight back into work, braving the heavy shadows of November.

Travelogue 1105 – 12 November
Rain Shy

The shreds of blue sky were a surprise. The bits of sunshine on the pavement were disorienting. The sustained appearance of the sun – all day! – left us startled, standing still with an anticipation of disappointment, something like dread. If we were not careful, we might drive away this strange advent of luck.

The wind and the rain had been plaguing us, following us for weeks, rarely leaving us in peace. Glancing outside while preparing to go accomplished nothing but the awakening of curses. If the air was still outside the window, the rains would start before we made it a hundred metres from home. If it was raining, it would only persist, while the wind pulled at our umbrellas.

Venturing out into the sunshine was unnerving. There were clouds on the horizon that caused us to flinch. We packed all our rain gear. But even when we were furthest from shelter, crossing the widest square, circling construction sites and diverted by malfunctioning doors, the skies stayed benevolent. I stopped to stare at the patches of blue. Was this a new style of torment? Watch the rain-shy dash for cover for no reason, just as a trauma reflex! It would have amused a cruel god.

Resentment aside, it was a day of wonder. The forecast for the morrow was gloomy, but we enjoyed the moment. Some people showed a doomsday instinct, acting recklessly, wild gleam in their eye. But most of us walked in a daze, not sure what to do with the good fortune in November.

Travelogue 1104 – 1 October
Bright Spots

The day after the violence, I was struggling through my schedule. I was struggling against a headache, persistent and aggressive; I was struggling against a streak of petty bad luck that was just as persistent, like a worm in my gut. I didn’t want to admit that I was also struggling against an emotion, an abiding despair left by the events of the day before, the violence.

Little Ren had hockey in the morning, and she was having her own struggles. I didn’t know it yet, but she was fighting against a resurgent flu bug. She was cranky and recalcitrant, and she cried over every obstruction to her cravings for sweets and comforts and every colourful distraction.

I had to step in as coach for the girls’ team, and, though we enjoyed our time on the pitch, getting off the hockey club property was arduous. Little Ren wouldn’t budge without chips from the concession inside, but the clubhouse was mad with crowds and my head was throbbing. I stood in line two different times, the unmoving line amid screaming kids and jostling parents, until I finally bailed and insisted that we go. Little Ren sulked and balked.

Once I had finally cajoled her onto the bike, once I had pedalled away from the club, up the long hill to the bridge across the highway, and pedalled halfway across the Erasmus University campus, I realized that, in the confusion, I had left behind my jacket and, in my jacket pocket, my wallet. It’s a good thing it was Saturday, and the campus was nearly empty, because I gave way to a fit of shouting into the winds that I am not proud of, particularly with my child as witness. “This is a terrible day!” Things to that effect.

Some time after that, having stopped for one more among a loathsome list of errands, we exited the store to find our bike blocked by a wheelchair. I was not gracious; I uttered some unkind observations. A man settled into that wheelchair just as I was trying to unlock my bike, squeezed into an uncomfortable corner. The man did not apologize. In fact, he asked for help putting on his jacket.

Surprisingly, my mood completely changed. I helped him. He was not the most charming man; he was brusque in his orders. This jacket, apparently gifted from a local delivery service, had two zippers, and both were difficult to line up and to pull. He was impatient and gruff, and I didn’t mind at all. I don’t know why, but this was one of the few bright moments of the day, perhaps because I was allowed to escape my own misery. 

The other brief moment of sunshine on that day came after a particularly painful cleaning at the hygienist. I gathered up Little Ren, who waited patiently for me through my suffering. We left the building and walked immediately to the closest chocolate shop, where we ordered cannoli’s, coffee, and sugary drinks. Was it a thought that I had earned some credits, or was it a guilty pleasure? Whatever the case, the day ended on a happy note. We sat at the window, watched the shoppers stroll by in the afternoon light, and did bad things to our teeth.

Travelogue 1103 – 29 September

Animal Cruelty

 

There was violence in the city yesterday. The city observed it, gave a shiver. The city absorbed it, bit its lip, bundled us off to work nevertheless under overcast skies. We submitted to the drizzle absently, steps unsure, distracted, wondering where our train of thoughts had been broken that day.

Kafka describes the day a lazy day butcher led a live ox into his shop for people to tear their meat from it alive. “I lay for a whole hour flat on the floor at the back of my workshop with my head muffled in all the clothes and rugs and pillows I had simply to keep from hearing the bellowing of that ox ….”

The man who went on a mad shooting spree in Rotterdam yesterday was known to the police. He had been charged with animal cruelty two years previously. Some of the parents at my daughters’ school knew exactly who he was, the man with angry eyes who beat his dog. He lived around the corner from the school. The woman he shot and killed had complained about him. Something snapped, and he went after the woman. He also killed the woman’s 14-year-old daughter. Then he torched their flat. All this happened while children left several schools a few hundred metres away, in two directions. Then the madman ran to the hospital where he had been failing in his studies. He shot a teacher and attempted to start another fire.

The helicopters and convoys of emergency vehicles were a society’s testimony that we weren’t falling apart. Who was convinced? People were edgy, glaring at each other angrily and fearfully.

One parent texted, “Zal denken dat is meer een verhaal van America dan van Rotterdam.” But America limps on, and we do, too. The city takes it, absorbs it. We survive. We survive in the company of the murderer, a reminder of the terrible face of survival.

Travelogue 1102 – 9 September
Capricious Spirits

These summer interludes, when all day long the skies are clear and the temperatures are high, they inspire in me some sentimentality. Maybe it’s nostalgia. I’ve lived long, nearly equal periods of life settled in places known for their weather, either for glorious sunshine or for inclement weather. I’ve been ten years now in one of the latter, in a place famous for its dreary stretches of the wet and overcast. A day of rain would be another day of rain. But a day of sunshine is special. For people who have always lived here, it’s a day of release, a day to party. For me, it’s an echo of other places and times. Perhaps, in a similar way, a rainy day releases melancholy reflections in those who have moved to L.A.

The ghost is restless again. In the middle of the night, it found Josie’s doggie toy, the one that walks and barks, while its eyes light up. I had to stumble out of bed and down the stairs to turn the toy off. These are odd gestures. I continue to wonder about the modus operandi of ghosts. I find their logic really fascinating. What do these weird little gestures add up to?

In a similar spirit, I’ve been drawn into the recent media discussions about UFOs. We are positing that aliens have solved the enormous problems posed by the vastness of the universe and discovered a primitive intelligence that cannot seriously represent much of a puzzle for them. And what do they do with this discovery? Oh, they hang around, much in the manner of ghosts, playing hide and seek for fifty years, pranking our navy pilots and pantsing our farmers, leaving puzzles in the form of crop circles, and generally being silly. I think I would take a shine to an interstellar species that was this frivolous.

Travelogue 1101 – 29 August
Old As Time

Did Adam and Eve invent walking? That was Baby Jos’s question this morning as we walked to the tram. I didn’t know what to answer. She is usually insistent upon an answer but spared me her habitual discipline because I was sick. I had been up half the night with a stomach bug, and I was miserable. I had been retching so violently the night before my throat was too sore to speak. I was shuffling along behind them, whereas I am generally the one urging them to speed up. “Or did we invent walking in modern times?” The second question made my task easier. Given that choice, it was definitely Adam and Eve. Baby Jos made a good point: they had to be able to walk to leave Eden. “That means,” she said, rolling her eyes in a silly suggestion that she would faint away with the enormity of the thought, “that walking is as old as time.” In a traditional Christian timeframe, she is right.

There is something timeless to being outside when you are sick. To move is to float, and to think is to slide downhill in mud. You haven’t the energy for ranging thought. What concentration you have is tightly focussed: must get to the tram. But the effort of even that is exhausting. Mostly you drift along in a fog. At the hour of school drop-off, everyone in Rotterdam is adrenalized and intent. They hustle and they march and they lean into the winds of their ambition, and the drifting sick man is traversing their red-dotted-line pathways in slow motion. It is dreamlike.

There is something timeless about the weather, this early autumnal cool and these early autumnal clouds. The weather does not vary for days, even weeks. The mornings dawn in grey light, and you reluctantly reach for your jackets. If there is variety, it lies in the unpredictable light showers that catch up to you while you are walking. We caught a few light drops this morning. By the time I had registered it and lifted my distracted gaze up into the mysteries of the grey mists, they had gone.

Travelogue 1100 – 27 August
Sunday Echoes

I wake to the brassy, slurring voice of a neighbour on his balcony, speaking loudly on his mobile. It’s 7am on a Sunday, the Sunday after our first week of school and work, and, as it happened, not the fun week it should have been: Ren was sick, and I had an unhappy start at work. Opening the front door to investigate, I watch him sway on his balcony, holding the mobile away from him, dancing for his auditor, laughing, waving. The courtyard rings with his shouts.

Above and around him, nature has woken. The sky is light, though full of clouds like grey pillow stuffing. The air is cool with a hint of autumn. The seagulls are whistling and laughing. Below, the pavements are damp. Surrounding him is the usual silence of a Sunday morning. He doesn’t hear the morning; he hears the cackling from the mobile.

The work week could have been better. Our return to our home campus, moving into our new building, was marred by politics - the keynote of our times. We’re sorely understaffed, after management’s budget panic last year. Management itself has been shuffled, and we’re starting the year short-staffed above as well as below. We met in unfinished rooms, taking inventories of people missing, listening to our echoes in the new rooms, where wires still hung out of ceilings and walls. We inventoried our teaching schedules, overloaded to compensate for the decimation. One colleague, hearing me say my schedule didn’t seem bad, ran straight to the only manager working that day to request in echoes that I be given her classes to teach.

Travelogue 1099 – 20 August
Playing With Dolls

Suddenly, the girls are playing with dolls. They each have a baby doll; they’ve had them for a while, though they didn’t play much with them before. Now the two sisters are very busy together, dressing up their babies, crafting for them cribs and buggies from cardboard boxes and luggage trolleys, and acting out the things that mamas do, lulling the babies to sleep, feeding them, scolding them. And keeping up long dialogues between them, involving mommies and poppies and babies and their sisters. It’s an all-consuming activity; we have trouble breaking in and getting their attention when it’s time to eat. They insist the babies must accompany them to the table. It’s a mania. It’s fun. And I wonder what their subjective experience is playing these games. I contend that the wall in our heads between what is real and what is not real is not so solid as we maintain. By the time we’re adults, perhaps we channel that experience into story-telling, surrendering to our books and movies, "suspending disbelief", as the theory goes. But fundamentally, things can be real and unreal at the same time. Maturity lies in the faith that there is a difference.

Reading the British press, a breaking and disturbing story in recent weeks has been the trial and sentencing of Lucy Letby, a nurse who murdered seven babies while on the job and attempted to kill six more. It’s a bizarre and heart-breaking story. It’s also puzzling, in the usual way with serial killers. There were no indications to friends or co-workers that this rather bland personality – nicknamed the ‘beige nurse’ by the police investigator on the case – was dangerous. A Guardian writer watched the accused during her trial for tell-tale signs of motive. He could reach no conclusion. He did offer some odd observations. During the trial, the murderous nurse didn’t cry at the testimony of her crimes, but cried during recounting of her rather ordinary life and her pathetic affair with a married colleague. She was inspired to a showy kind of pride when questioned about medical procedure. It suggests a disturbing psychological profile. Her parents were in the gallery every day. What were their thoughts?

I was put in mind, when Kundera passed, of the phrase he borrowed for the title of his novel, “the unbearable lightness of being”. I have reason to contemplate it every day. If every age distinguishes itself by finding new ways to be careless with the real lives of others, ours may prove to be one of the more creative ones. We enshrine the narcissistic complex bred by post-war prosperity, we institutionalize it and allow it rampant gambols round the globe, inverting measures of reality, until the interior story of the world is more real than objective evidence. A nurse cries herself to sleep over disappointing romances, and when she wakes she plots the death of innocents. Captured, she pities herself; accused, she pities herself. Shame is stunted. We treat guilt therapeutically so that the ego may have more range for play.

Travelogue 1098 – 3 August
Humans

The girls have dug up last year’s tails. They’re watching “Trolls” on TV, contentedly stretched out in their life-size, elastic mermaid tails. I’m not sure where the mer-impulse came from, but their whims turn with dizzying speed these days. The tails extend, in their blue and purple glory, from the hip all the way past their toes. They wave the tails like ‘real’ mermaids. “Are mermaids real?” Little Ren asks earnestly.

Maybe the minor mermaid craze arose from Baby Jos’s short obsession with tails. “What if I wake up one day, and I have a tail?” she asked with a big smile. She wished it would happen. “What would my teacher think?” she asked. I’m stumped by questions like those. But I am getting used to staggering amounts of questions from the girls. They are factories of wondering questions. I thought the questions were a phase; that was a few years ago. No one told me the questions phase was … childhood. At the end of the day, when I’m tired, I’m usually two questions behind, answering on a delay, answering the rainbow question when they’ve already moved on to fairies. “Where do fairies live, Papa?” “You can never really find the ends,” I answer. Somehow it all meshes into its own sense.

But I do remember the power of these childhood passions. I am reminded of the things I wished for at a similar age, and wished for with intensity. I wanted to fly, and I wanted to be able to time travel. I wanted to be able to change into animal form whenever I wanted. The possible and the impossible existed together in the same thought. I ‘knew’ the things I wanted were impossible, but it was within a child’s power to believe in possibility. Growing older, I remember deciding that if I believed in something strongly enough, it would be required to manifest. Then I concluded that believing strongly enough was knowing. And knowing something was possible meant forgetting that it was ever impossible. That negated the magic, and I lost interest.

While Baby Jos wanted a tail, Little Ren wanted a unicorn horn. That would give her magical powers. Little Ren is mercurial. She moves from unicorns to sombrely posing the question, “But I just want to know why I exist.” Wow, I say, that’s a big question. When you figure it out, let me know. “Why am I me?” she asks.

Little Ren is the philosopher, it seems. She’s the one who has wrestled with the term “human”. When she was younger, she used ‘human’ to describe adults. There were children, and there were humans. I was a bit mortified by that, but I don’t like rushing in with a negative: “don’t say that!” The word naturally evolved into a descriptor of people – “there are so many humans on the street” – to a somewhat fluid identifier to draw contrast with animals – “fluid” because sometimes nice animals can sometimes be human.

Travelogue 1097 – 1 August
Summer Vacation?

It’s the first of August. That date is a signal to the mood centres of the brain, a trigger for depression. I’m a teacher, and I’m a teacher in a country in which school years stretch from mid-August to mid-July.

School years in America started in September and ended in June. By the time September came, there was a hint of autumn in the air, you were rested, and you were eager to get started again. In the Netherlands, summer vacation feels just long enough to run some errands, catch up with your team of doctors and dentists, see a few friends … once each, and perhaps squeeze in a rushed and tense trip in order to store images in your phone for winter.

July turns to August, and you find the “vacation” unconvincing. Work is a beast already catching up on you, its hot breath on your neck. And it’s a formidable beast, whose tail reaches deep into the summer of the next year. One returns to work with a half-charged battery. I’ve noticed that European school years start slowly and quietly, taking a good month to build momentum. I remember American school years galloping out of the gate.

It doesn’t help that the last day of July was a rainy one. It was chilly; the rain barely paused all day. The girls and I ventured out to buy last minute party items; it was Menna’s birthday. We surprised her when she arrived home. We lit the candles on the cake, and the clouds outside made the house as dark as though it were October.

Travelogue 1096 – 23 July
The Butcher

I had a session with Dirk the Butcher yesterday. He was so enthusiastic, he found extra pain to inflict. One cavity was not enough. He found a series of them in my front teeth, and he was reluctant to let me up from his chair. “I have so much time left in our appointment. Why don’t we take care of it?” I submitted reluctantly. The truth is, I have found some appreciation for the Butcher, his ham-handed Dutchness, his sad blue eyes, his rough grace. There’s no disputing his efficiency as a dentist. He attacks with a sure hand, and the results are solid. The pain was intense after the session, but it passed quickly. I looked into the mirror and saw a cleaner smile.

I wondered what sort of psychology lurked in the long narrow skull of the Butcher. Who does this job for so long? People fear you; they tremble as they sit in your chair. You have short, emotional encounters with people, during which they cannot speak. They walk out in a daze of pain and violation. The meetings are physically intimate but formal and impersonal. I can’t imagine there’s much variety in the work.

Out in the world, people must shudder when a dentist shares with them his or her profession. It’s a bit like being an undertaker. Dirk the Butcher looks the part, somewhat underworldly, tall and pale, back a bit hunched with age and work, his eyes pale and watery and staring, his smile unsettling. He’s ageing. His arms are so scrawny, I don’t know whence the strength he exhibits when he pries open my jaw. “Relax, relax” he says curtly, as he jams one more instrument into my mouth. It’s his version of reassurance, which must, in the offices of the Butcher, be delivered in the imperative.

Travelogue 1095 – 17 July

Kundera

A favourite author passed away last week. I want to write something about Milan Kundera, and yet I find it challenging. He was a favourite in my youth; he’s someone I’ve taken for granted since then. He informs me from that distance in time, as do a set of authors who affected me powerfully back then, people as varied as Durrell and Dostoevsky, Kerouac and Eliot.

I felt I had a special right to him, I suppose, being of Czech heritage. He was one of the giants of his generation, the last Samizdat generation, the Chapter 77 generation (though he didn’t sign), the generation that also produced Havel and the writers of the new Czech constitution. Ironically, though he was possibly the most famous Czech artist at the time, he was shunned by the others for having left Czechia. I defended him. He had become an ‘international’ author, writing in French in his later years. Born to be an expat, I felt instant sympathy for his position.

The themes of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ are a young person’s themes, which is a reason it’s remained in my past. There are novels that I have brought along with me as I aged, and novels I didn’t. This is one of the latter, like, say, “On the Road”. Dostoevsky survived into my late 30s, but still fell away. Still, something of Kundera’s novel stayed with me, something of its moral courage and its frankness. I was delighted by its philosophical frame, its unembarrassed discourse on the significance of life and what was significant about living. He seemed refreshingly free of the self-conscious jadedness I was used to, and far from devaluing what he said, his ‘naivete’ was pulled off with clarity, wit and sophistication.

It was a special time. The present times have become so dark, these dire 2020s become so much more like the 1930s than the Roaring 20s, so serious, so portentous, that I think we have grown to distrust the preceding decades. They plotted against us. Everything that seemed cheery was a wink among conspirators. Politics and climate and globalism and the tech revolution were all poisoned, and done so deliberately. But it was a special time. I was in Slovakia in the early 90s. I would never have known that certain emotions were actually possible if I hadn’t been there. Labelling them as optimism or hope would only make me a target for trolling in the Bitter 20s. I’ll keep my counsel. But I regret sometimes how Eastern Europe became so overshadowed by Ethiopia in my own story. I haven’t often had the opportunity to contemplate and appreciate the former. Thinking of Kundera brings something back.

Travelogue 1094 – 12 July

Restart, Please

This is how our summer started. Thursday was the girls’ last day at school. Baby Jos celebrated with stunts off the group swing in the playground out front. She fell badly and broke her arm. We spent the afternoon at the hospital getting x-rays, a cast, and unwelcome doses of Dutch bedside manner, which sound to the uninitiated like the grim voice of Dread. They made her cry.

The next morning, we had to bring her in for an operation. I was emotional. She had to be put under general anaesthetic. It’s the second time already Baby Jos has had to be put under. I find it too hard to take. Menna stayed with Baby Jos, and I was put in charge of her little sister. Little Ren and I explored the hospital. We had snacks in the café. We bought balloons. When it was time, we raced up to her room. Baby Jos was groggy but already cheerful. Good!

That was Friday, my last day of work during this school year. I had been scheduled to meet with my supervisor for my appraisal, on literally the last possible day. We postponed until the fall. I was able to make my second meeting of the day, late in the afternoon. This meeting was a mentor session with a literary agent. I had scheduled the meeting weeks earlier, thinking I would be in a great headspace, summer started and my writing in full swing. Instead, I was drained and distracted. I hadn’t scheduled one of these meetings in a long time because I had undertaken a major edit of the book. Not so humbly, I expected a glowing word or two. Not so humbly, she trashed it. I left the call more than schooled and defeated.

Saturday was a hot one; the temperatures stifled all thought. Sunday was busy with kids’ activities for the girls, a birthday party and a final ballet class. I spent the day worrying about Baby Jos.

Monday started with an email from my employer announcing that my supervisor was leaving. What happened? I thought. Was it me? Now I’ll start the year with an appraisal from a stranger, looking over the notes from an odd year, a year full of medical issues and tumult.

Later in the morning, I had a dental appointment scheduled. I had been unhappy with this dentist, but I only had a few cavities to fill. What could go wrong? The dentist quickly answered that unfortunate question, throwing up her hands halfway through the filling operation and saying she would go no further. She treated me like a recalcitrant school child, crossing her arms, and crying that the operation was too difficult. She would stuff in a temporary filling and refer me to her colleague Dirk, whom I call “The Butcher”. I will see him Friday.

Tuesday morning, I woke feeling odd. Still, I hefted Baby Jos on the bike to run some errands. Feeling light-headed, I stopped for coffee and snacks. The dizziness only increased. I rushed home, sweating for fear of losing my balance while carrying my delicate little girl on the back with a cast on her arm. Back at home, I popped the thermometer in my mouth: 39.5˚C. The rest of the day, I tossed and turned in bed, fighting nausea and fevers.

Okay, so, have I cleaned the cosmic slate? Shall a fresh morning dawn when the songbirds greet me, dropping laurels leaves in my hair, leading my family along a garden path to the beach? My faith in the Great Season is faltering.

Travelogue 1093 – 28 June

Fire!

When I opened the front door this morning, ready to take the girls to school, I was stunned by the sight. There was a huge column of black smoke rising from the south. The wind was blowing the smoke past us to the northeast. It was a sight to arrest the heart for a moment, The girls rushed out because I had cried out. They stared in wonder. The blaze was so intense, we could see the smoke glowing red underneath.

We had to move in the direction of the fire to go to school. Thanks to social media, I already knew what was burning. It was a building we passed every day, a colourful building in an up-and-coming little borough called Keilewerf. It was a builder’s yard, piled high with lumber. The place had a hippyish vibe, something happy and communal about it. Baby Jos would not accept that that was the building that was burning. It made her too sad. The police had cordoned off our usual route to school, so we only saw the fire from a distance. That could be any other building, Baby Jos insisted.

Think of the terror that sight would have inspired in Scaliger’s day! Fire killed. It wiped out cities. In 1452, just a century and a half before Scaliger’s day, two-thirds of Amsterdam had burned down. It was this fire we have to thank for the beautiful city we still see today. They mandated building in stone afterward, but stone was too heavy for the marshy Dutch earth. They built with brick.

Travelogue 1092 – 19 June

Baby’s Spring

It’s June. Gentle winds are shaking the leaves of the poplars, making a sound like rain. Red poppies are in bloom. There are scents of freshly cut grass in the air; there are scents of lilac. The summer hush has begun to settle over the city. This is one of my favourite times of year.

If the city has quieted, it’s not a quiet season for the girls. Their school takes them to amusement parks. Their hockey teams have picnics. They have recitals downtown. And Baby Jos celebrates her birthday. A child’s birthday is never just one day. It’s a celebration in waves. The joyous wave this week was the party for her friends. She invited her closest school friends to an adventure park, where they climbed walls and jumped on trampolines and scared themselves on obstacle courses high above the ground. They indulged in cake and cupcakes. Parents sat together and shared their exhaustion, shared photos, complained about the school and still managed to laugh.

We’re in constant motion, slaves to our springtime activities. The new summer sun has shone on all of it, imbuing everything with a surfeit of light, like living photos that were overexposed, abundant with sunshine and smiles, overwhelming the sombre Dutch colour palette with yellows, whites and greens; like memories washed out by sun and time; like the photos from our trip to Rome, in which everyone is squinting and the colours are fading into gold.

There was some concern that none of this would happen for Baby Jos because she suffered an injury to her foot a few weeks ago, having caught it in a bicycle wheel while riding behind her papa to hockey. Nothing was broken, but the doctors put her in a cast to keep the foot still while it healed. She was at first proud to be walking on crutches into school, and then she was bored and frustrated when she couldn’t play. Fortunately, it only took two weeks to get back on her feet, just in time for the parties.

The latest celebration was the recital. It fell on Father’s Day. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to commemorate the day. The girls were excited to wear make-up, proud to be on stage, transfixed by the crowds of parents cheering them on.

Baby Jos tells me it’s my best Father’s Day ever, and she’s immediately right. It was true before she said it. It is true because she says it. I’m perfectly happy.

Travelogue 1091 – 28 May

La Scala

Part Eight

Suddenly I’m alone. Menna and the girls have gone to a church camp. The flat is eerily silent. I haven’t been alone like this in a long time, and it’s disorienting.

I miss them. I pause to think about what they would be doing at each moment. When I should be catching up on my own work, I stop to clean up, picking up the girls’ things, which lie scattered around the flat as though there were an explosion.

One thing I find is their jar of snails. Last week, they became unaccountably fascinated by snails and slugs. I suppose it was because of the advent of spring, and the work their mother had initiated on the potted plants outside. Among the leaves, in the soil, and underneath the pots were all kinds of fun little creatures. Baby Jos fancies herself a scientist and has no fear of slimy things. Little Ren loves whatever her sister loves. They have decided that snails are cute. They have decided that slugs are cute. In fact, they are desperate for pets; they have been for a while. Unfortunately, their papa is allergic to half the animal kingdom and is too grouchy to deal with the rituals that would no doubt devolve upon him.

Concurrent with their snails-for-pets moment came their lemonade-stand moment. It made for a strange alignment. They set up a table outside our door last weekend, but not for lemonade. It was for a view of their snails, set out for public inspection on a pair of plastic beach shovels, filled with mud and their creeping pets. They made a cute sign asking for two euros. But then when neighbours did stop to look, they were too shy to ask for their fee.

I’m laughing at the memory, sitting alone at my computer. The solitude doesn’t weigh on me yet, but it is insistent. It is an insistent fact of life, isn’t it? From the moment one becomes aware of one’s essential solitude, one is never allowed to forget it. It’s as concrete an aspect of life as there is. An argument could be made that solitude is the central problem we seek to solve with religion.

Religion tells us that we are never actually alone, and not just sentimentally but metaphysically: there are invisible beings around us all the time. It makes a certain intuitive sense, doesn’t it? As singular as we are in our heads, in our bodies, we never quite achieve absolute solitude. Even an atheist would concede that life is a continual negotiation with others.

And if one were to concede the rather elementary metaphysical point implied by an all-powerful God that exists untouched by time, that all things exist at once, then the space we inhabit becomes very crowded. Perhaps it’s religion’s most salient point: we are not alone. One might expect that an afterlife would offer a lifting of the veils, the veil that separates us from one another, and the veil that separates us in time.

This idea of timelessness does complicate the idea of reincarnation a bit. In actuality, Scaliger and I exist simultaneously. So his scepticism that I represent “progress” is justified. And it essentially posits that one soul is a community, and a fairly large one at that, according to most accounts of reincarnation that I’m familiar with. It not only puts into question the idea of progress, in time without time, but the idea of an atomized soul that requires hard boundaries with other atomized souls.

What the reincarnationist theory still represents to me is the drive to domesticate the other by calling it all “me”. It’s the cannibal’s solution to solitude.

Travelogue 1090 – 20 May

La Scala

Part Seven

When Scaliger died in Leiden, it was in January. Such a grey and desolate time in Holland: I’m not sure that it was the winter that killed him, but it was certainly a sad backdrop for what looks to have been a lonely death. Apparently, the great man was a bit of a curmudgeon. (The evidence is mounting!) He had resisted the idea of moving to Leiden, but the university raised such a sweet and enticing siren song. He would take over the chair formerly belonging to the great Lipsius. He would be the only professor allowed to wear the red gown. He would be exempted from lecturing. He would be allowed to hand-select his students (among whom would be Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch humanist). He was finally lured, but one senses that he never quite settled in or felt at home. He complained bitterly about the Dutch (the resemblance is uncanny!), describing Leiden as “one crowded pub” and complaining about the noise. “On days of fasting” he wrote, “they start drinking very early in the morning.” He had the university move him from house to house, because he longed for more space and peace of mind. His last house he described as a hovel. It was cold, and it leaked, which is no small matter in the Netherlands. This is where he died in mid-winter. It sounds miserable.

Can two bios be the same soul, I have asked? The question is condensed, and yet it contains within its several words so many big assumptions. Belief is a complicated machine, hiding many working gears inside. It reminds me of the twentieth-century shell game of finding the smallest particle, leading us from molecules to atoms, to protons, to quarks until suddenly we were saddled with an uncanny new world view, or set of world views, thrust upon us by quantum mechanics. It’s exhausting. We might have been happier with molecules.

Scaliger looks down the centuries at me, and he asks, “Is that me?” Between us is an unfathomable gap, and the concept of “me” is instantly swallowed up in it. Whatever we may decide the soul is, we don’t get to say it’s Scaliger. Scaliger died when the animal body died. The man was the man, and whatever escaped at death was not the man. When we mourn, we mourn truly: the human life has ended. What’s more, if we find ourselves alienated – even unconsciously – by the “other” in human form, then any meditation on the concept of a soul ought to be a very sober one. It’s a ‘thing’ as alien as possible, and probably itself gave rise as much to our terrors of ghosts and demons as to visions of celestial angels gaining their wings.

It’s just that this problem of finite life is too often approached from the perspective of death. When our purpose is to defang death, our dreams about the afterlife are two-dimensional and cartoonish. We approach the light, essentially still human. But death is not the "other"; life is. Life is the uncanny. Death is a placeholder like zero. Life is strange and prolific. It surges and resurges in weird shapes, hungry and irresistible.

Travelogue 1089 – 13 May

La Scala

Part Six

What would Scaliger have to say, if I laid claim to his life? He expected to find himself in Christian heaven, but here I am telling him he’s evolved into … me. “This is evolution?” he will ask. And how shall I answer?

I had no idea what a fun pastime looking for past lives was! But do I believe in reincarnation? Do I believe that two bios could be the same soul? Well … there are some fundamental problems with the questions, and they begin, like most problems, with the assumptions behind the terms.

People are surprisingly promiscuous with their ‘beliefs’. I am more conservative. Maybe I’m the one taking the term too seriously. What is a belief? It’s so insubstantial, I wonder the purpose. I have no reason to doubt someone who says they ‘believe’ in reincarnation. Not only am I unable to disprove what they believe; I am unable to disprove that they believe. So what role does the confession “I believe” take? I suppose it sets up a contrast. “I believe” suggests “unlike others” or “unlike you”. The confessional purpose then becomes either persuasion or defence. Saying it internally, it may be an avowal or a vow, again separating one from others.

Removing belief from the thing believed, what is it? Is it a kind of warm feeling of confidence or security? If I say, “I think”, it affirms an opinion and admits its basis in logical thought; it admits a vulnerability to persuasion. If I say, “I wish”, it allows for absence of validity. If I say, “I know”, it claims verifiability. Many mystics will use that tactically: “I know, and you could know, too.” Verifiability lies in the mystic experience, spoken of on this plane, proven on another. Two people who have met on another plane can wink about it here, but that’s about the sum value of it on this plane.

Language gives us away. While a conspiracy theorist can claim any wild source and any level of cognitive relationship with the information, a rational person can only claim knowledge with a plural subject.

“I know the election was fair,” or “I know climate change is real” sounds a bit overwrought. Instead, you hear, “We know that climate change is real”. Why? Because most knowledge is communal. The principle that knowledge is verifiable makes it communal. It’s one of the beauties of knowledge.

For me, the phrase “I believe” ends up being little more than a rhetorical device. Like, I have come to this conclusion instinctively.