Travelogue 1177 – 5 April
A Fable for Rich Men

The powerful man has a thought. It’s not a very original thought, but he can deliver it with a wink. It’s only important that the man seem smart.

 

Our twitchy CEO, co-Majesty of the Untied States, Elonng Muisk, took to *their* (shall we try nonbinary pronouns for the father who has renounced a trans daughter) took to *their* inhouse chatbox to type a message to … no one? *They* wrote, “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence”

 

It's the appearance of smart, with the wink of a thief, cheap tech bro wisdom delivered with a shrug. Insouciance is the signature. The aphorism must be self-consciously disingenuous, a patently false sentiment from the hybrid engineer.

 

The rich man is scornful. Humanity has been found wanting. Our tale is found to be one full of sound of fury, and the rich man just might be the idiot telling it. “It appears that humanity is a biological bootloader.”

 

Notice, by the way, the rich man’s punctuation, comma in its proper spot, but leaving off the full stop – just the hint of rebellion, –leaving us always breathless in suspense. The comma is a sign he knows how to do it correctly, and the dropped point is a hint of his delicious roguishness.

 

The appearance of smart, with the wink of a thief. Here’s the pose of a thinker, our premier waxing dystopian between mainstage appearances at political rallies, where he jumps around in short Ts and whoop for the crowd, waxing dystopian in a kind of weak-tea homage to Rutger Hauer in “Blade Runner”, while lowering himself wistfully to the toilet seat backstage to issue off-handed disdain for the rally crowd, disdain for being mere … humanity.

One might wonder then, who is the audience for *their* aphorisms? Mme Muskoinette has already said that the world is inhabited largely by NPCs (nonplayer characters). “If you don’t think there’s at least a tiny chance you’re an NPC … you’re an NPC,” the Countess does “tweet”. One might just ask, “Who the fX is the “you” in *their* sage utterances?” – if one were to question a … genius.

At a Code Conference, some nine or ten years ago, the Countess Musk proclaimed that the likelihood that we are living in “base reality” was just “one in billions”. Meaning, all this is a computer simulation. (Run by a Muskovite teen in an alternate sphere?) It’s a terrible thought that might move a humble NPC to tears, but the Countess is fortified by nothingness. *They* survey all and see glorious Nothing, worlds emptied of soul. (The psychoanalyst of X punctuation might diagnose that void as the experience of pure ego.)

Among the poor suckers (NPCs every one of them) cheering on the Dark-MAGA hero are thousands of evangelical Christians who sit piously among their embroidered pillows reading devotional books like the one penned by the pious Jack Posobiec, entitled “Unhumans”, a book endorsed by Steve Bannon and JD Vance.

“For the last couple centuries,” those Christians read, “we’ve known them as communists. Socialists, with extra steps. And of course, leftists. Radicals and revolutionaries as well. A hundred years ago, Marxist Leninists, then more recently, Cultural Marxists. Even as, without irony and not as a joke, ‘progressives.’ For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans.”

We the obedient are losing track of the ways in which we don’t count. We may require a Venn diagram now, explaining the overlap between NPCs and unhumans. If we have to ask, are we unhuman? Or is that only when we speak openly about “the people”, which, the Countess and Posobiec inform us, doesn’t exist? We must resign ourselves to having become a fable for rich men.

Travelogue 1176 – 30 March
Sunday Morning

This morning, the cloud cover has returned, and there is a wind rising. The temperature is up, the day starting at 10˚C. The first birds that I hear are crows. That’s neither a good sign nor particularly cheering. But behind them come the distant cries of seagulls, reminding me that the beach is still out there. It’s probably as quiet as the city. People are desperate for sleep; you can feel it, like a fog over the region. Ramadan is entering its final days. The day’s earliest sun, especially on a Sunday, strikes with withering force, even in misty Holland, when spring fever combines with Ramadan. People are shrinking from it, turning over in bed. The night was all too short. Shorter still because the clock changed last night. One hour of sleep evaporated into Daylight Savings Time.

Yesterday was sunny. The city was lively. The cover story from February’s Atlantic magazine has been telling me that we’re lonelier than ever, but you wouldn’t have observed it yesterday. The centre of the city was crowded with people promenading, shopping, gathering on terraces to have a drink. Here in our apartment complex, one couple sets up a pop-up café on Saturdays. Outside the window where they take orders, there is a terrace with half a dozen picnic tables. In the afternoon, that terrace was full. No one sat alone. The cheerful buzz of conversation carried across the broad plein at the heart of our complex, and I wondered that this was the same place that grey winter had rendered so dreary.

But that is the Dutch way. Anywhere, if the café has enough space – often when it doesn’t, there is at least one table where strangers sit together. They may never do more than greet each other as they open their laptop, but they share the space. More often than not those tables host some lively chatter, even in winter.

Travelogue 1175 – 23 March
Blind in One Eye

My daughter made a cheerful observation yesterday that I found strangely chilling. We were descending on the roltrap toward the Metro platform. Apparently, she had been mulling over a quick conversation that we had had days earlier. The topic had been, “How would a blind person describe blue?” Now Baby Jos asked me, out of the blue, “Can someone be half blind? Can they see with one eye?” I answered that it was possible, and she asked how that happened. I didn’t really know how to answer. “Can they be born that way?” I guessed it was possible. She happily came to her conclusion. “Then that person can know what colours look like with one eye and what nothing looks like with the other eye.”

I was stunned by the thought. Taken literally, the statement may not stand; once a person has seen colours, they cannot unsee them. But I didn’t refute the thought because the moral truth of it was overwhelming. Yes, we could both know and not know the colours of our world, and, in fact, it wasn’t just true. It was the overwhelming truth of our existence. We are able and unable, wise and unwise, and we indulge ourselves in elaborate play between our two natures. I gave Baby Jos a big hug, and praised her, but I didn’t say much. The thought stood complete. She was proud of it, and I was oppressed by it. The image captured our misfortune as a species, the stubbornness of Nature, the stark brutality of existence.

I woke from a dream this morning. In the dream, I had been standing at the window of a vacation rental, overlooking a beach. Scrolled over the beach scene was the word Peace. Inside, the roses had wilted from lack of water. The ceilings were stippled, and among the patterns there were scribblings of regrets. Tears were coming to me as I stood at the window with a view of the sea. I had only to move to the door and leave, take a walk along the beach, but I stood at the window.

Travelogue 1174 – 15 March
I’m Not Your NPC

If a Dutch student is especially adept at English, if their accent is near perfect, if their vocabulary is impressive, I’ll ask them how they became so good. The most common answer is a surprising one: video games.

The video game world is so alien to me, I can’t imagine how language skills factor in. I imagine kids sitting at consoles for long stretches in trances. But the answer I get is that they develop international communities via the games. They make friends around the world, and English is often the lingua franca.

When video games became popular, we sensed there was something amiss. The way it took hold among the young was scary. We all wondered what ill effects might manifest in tender psyches nursed on the violent fantasies there, in the games. Debates and studies ensued. Conclusions and cautions were issued and forgotten. Some advocated for the games, saying they enhanced intelligence and motor skills. Other still felt ill at ease.

It reminded me of the debates about violence in the movies. In the action movies of my own youth, unnamed thugs and cops were gunned down by the hundreds in a single movie. The victims were the very image of dispensability. People wrung their hands about the violence back then, too, reaching no clear conclusions. Common sense just suggested that it wasn’t healthy.

We may have arrived at the moment in which answers are provided. The gaming dweeb who would be emperor of the world is making of himself a live chyron on the state of our cultural id.

Most revealing might be his weird metaphysics. Heather Cox Richardson writes, “ … political writers have called attention to the tendency of billionaire Elon Musk to refer to his political opponents as ‘NPCs.’” NPC, she has to explain to me, “refers to a nonplayer character, a character that follows a scripted path and cannot think or act on its own, and is there only to populate the world of the game for the actual players.”

“If you don’t think there’s at least a tiny chance you’re an NPC … you’re an NPC,” Muisk has tweeted. Disregarding the adolescent tone of the stunted boy trying to mansplain, the assumptions behind the statement – the programming, if you will – is troubling.

It was never the violence that was the problem. It was the consistent, unvarying reinforcement of the notion that other people are objects. There is something in the primitive mind that reduces people to obstacles and threats in a black-and-white struggle for survival.

It’s a very natural impulse, difficult to abandon entirely, even for the best of us. And yet, it is, almost by definition, the enemy of civilization. We expect our thinkers and artists and leaders to fight against the impulse to objectify people. We expect it from them for a reason: we need civilization. We believe in it. We expect them to protect and advance it.

There are dark, Lethean historical moments in which we falter, lose or even reject our humanity. But our impulse toward civilization also runs deep. We sense that something is wrong. Even in the grip of wild selfishness, the diminished voice of conscience is trying to be heard.

Travelogue 1173 – 8 March
Hope is the Thing with Feathers

I awoke at 5am, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t think the songbird woke me, but I didn’t mind if he had. He was close, perhaps perched on the roof above our window. He was loud, and he was enjoying himself. He scarcely took a break for the next hour.

The songbird made my thoughts sweet, lulled my mind into a few shallow dozings threaded with pleasant dreams. The song became accompaniment to light imaginings: meadows and street fairs, places my daughters would have enjoyed.

Baby Jos is a chatterbox in the mornings. On the way to school, she voices all kinds of musings. One day she was curious about feathers. Why were they so light? What were they made of? Would they float forever if they were light enough? I tried to explain the Emily Dickinson line, “hope is the thing with feathers,” but the sense of it was elusive. She wanted something more concrete. Poetry might have to wait.

Is spring a time of hope, or a time of fatigue? If the bird is a metaphor for hope, is it a metaphor for spring? Or would mine be rather a fox at dawn, having dashed here and there all night, blinking in the new light? It’s hard for me to tell anymore, whether light brings dark or dark brings light. The line of shadows turns upon itself, and I get turned around.

The songbird is helping me to figure things out.

Travelogue 1172 – 6 March 

Make Me Again

It’s been sunny. Near freezing in the mornings, but warming up to 15˚C or better in the afternoons. People are stumbling around like they’re dreaming. Comfort feels like a guilty pleasure here. And one treats it with either abandon or the delicacy of trying not to break a charm.

Still it is chilly in the mornings. I wanted to stay warm in bed a few extra minutes. I dozed again, and I had a brief dream. We wanted some photos for some reason. In my dream photography became “ridefia”. I was delighted when I woke: such a beautiful word! I broke it into pseudo-Latinate pieces and interpreted it as the art of being God again, God the Creator. Photography was, in fact, a re-creation, a re-imagining, a re-making.

Swipe the phone carelessly, and I get the “Siri Suggestions”. Among the apps offered automatically is the camera in selfie mode. It’s hard to get rid of that screen. Inevitably, I end up recording a shot of my hairline trying to get rid of it. Just like that, I am re-imagined. Without a nose, or a chin.

Selfies are a routine for many people. It’s stunning how integral the mechanism is to millions: focus and shoot. Include the many who use the camera as a mirror on the train in the morning; it’s a rehearsal for the big click, the re-imagining, the Great Awakening – every morning, – the Great (re-)Shuttering. Make me again!

I’ve been indulging in some photographic browsing. I like street scenes. The algorithms give me more and more, and I always stop to admire them. Cities are conjured, re-imagined in a flash, and one can admire them as new things, while they are nostalgic for old things. Interestingly, these street scenes are almost always sterilised of people. The streets are quiet and abandoned.

Travelogue 1171 – 25 February
Close-Up

The Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam is a large public square, laid with colourful concrete. Here it was painted a grassy green. It was raining today, and we watched out the window of the tea house as the showers swept across the city, raindrops splashing on the concrete meadow. It’s a meditative scene. Except for the drunk pacing just by the door, shouting into his mobile in some Slavic language.

This is no ordinary tea house. On Little Ren’s insistence, we are trying bubble tea for the first time. I did my daddy’s due diligence, looking up where to go in Rotterdam. I wanted to be sure it was the best and, more importantly, the cutest. Cute it certainly was, walls painted pink, with rows of hearts, balloons and neon rainbows, light fixtures hung with fluffy cotton to look like clouds. There were pink menu boards with loads of options, and a sweet barista to help my girls make their choices. Little Ren was starstruck. She was walking in a dream.

There is a Schouwburgplein in many Dutch cities. That is usually where the town’s theatre stands. On either side of Rotterdam’s square is the city’s concert hall and the city’s main theatre. (The theatre was first established, I’m reading, in the eighteenth century!) But what catches the eye is the Pathé movie theatre, with its huge sign and garish advertisements. We couldn’t resist. It was vacation time. We ran across the rainy square and into the warmth of its high lobby, volumes of space resounding with movie scores, flashing with the reflected light of previews and ads for snacks.

We chose the film “Flow”, a Latvian animated film about a cat stranded in a flood. It was a beautiful film. We sat up front, and we enthusiastically dove into our snacks. I was swept away by popcorn and animation. The animation style was different, unusual. The figures of the animals glowed. Their features washed out the closer they came to the “camera”, detail giving way to the glowing topography of their hides. Only the glowing eyes stayed consistent. I found this technique engaging, reminding me how paintings of striking realism break down into brush strokes up close; reminding me how my own weakening eyes interact with the universe; reminding me of Slavoj Žižek lectures about reality being unfinished, comparing it to the architecture of video games.

Job well done. The cartoon cat survived. We survived. We made it home alive and puffed up with bubble tea and popcorn. The girls refused to drink from any cup but their plastic bubble tea cups for the rest of the evening. And they spent hours playing kitty cats.

Travelogue 1170 – 17 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Five

Polite and softening language are standard parts of the curriculum in Business English. Polite language shows respect. You say, “would you please?” instead of “give me that!” because it establishes respect. It lends power to your counterpart, establishes equality and camaraderie.

More important is the softening language: “I’m afraid that won’t be possible” and “we were thinking differently” instead of “never going to happen.” It signals regret and a willingness to negotiate. It signals an acknowledgement that adversaries in a negotiation have valid concerns and interests. That keeps people at the table.

Students balk. How is this lesson useful? Why can’t we speak directly? I like being blunt, they say. “Blunt” has become a favourite word of mine. Dutch people deploy it quite frequently, and with pride. Yes, you enjoy being blunt, don’t you? How do you think your interlocutor likes it? Answer: everyone likes it. They know where they stand. Yes, I say, indeed they do. They stand next to someone who will always go through the door first, who will never offer a seat on the Metro, and who is never going to think about a conversation a second time. So how do you think that will influence their business decisions about you moving forward?

I’ve been picking on poor, happy-go-lucky Mel Gibson, who let drop his wide-eyed observation about Trump coming to California after the fires, that it was like daddy arriving, “and he’s taking his belt off.” There is something sweet and innocent about Mel, even when he’s letting these sorts of inanities fly. Rogan and his ilk indulge poor fools like Mel, milking them for every half-thought. The right sets these fools up to be shamans because they live in a stream-of-consciousness dream. In Mel’s press packet, “blurt” is his official verb of attribution. One moment he seems profound, the next we’re cringing. And Mel is just shaking his head at the wonder of it all.

There’s privilege to being a right-wing shaman. You get to shout down your network interviewer with savage righteousness. You get to swagger into government offices, chase employees out, and shut them down. You get to call people names. Not only do you get to victimise innocent people, tearing up their employment or procurement contracts, you get to circle back and call them names, encouraging your bros to rain terror down on them. How cool is that?

“So cool,” murmur the basement-dwellers who idealise Trusk and Mump. They shake their heads with wonder and call them master politicians. In reality, the two co-queens have no idea what politics is. They play to exclusively to their own audience. They reach out a hand to no one. They burn every bridge. There’s no coalition. There are the rich bros, their sweaty shamans, and there is the mob.

Obviously, these guys don’t expect any real election in the future. They have made clear that they think the age of democracy is over. But the people haven’t spoken. Who is tracking all the enemies made in only one month in power? Even among their own audience. Most of their constituency are simple-minded ticket-holders to the circus. What happens when the big tent gets cold because there’s no one manning the heater? What happens when the wild animals get loose because the trainers have taken a NASCAR break? If they start grumbling, is daddy going to take off the belt?

Travelogue 1169 – 11 February
Do I Love?

My country, open plains hours long in the night. They are most dark during my daylight hours here. Underneath the plains, there are glass wires crackling with danger. The little black spiders of someone’s broken psyche are skittering along them, quick with their poison.

I feel something like my Ukrainian students now as I monitor the news from my home country. The news is war news. It’s not as bloody, not so classic in its story structure as the horrible Russian invasion, the empire sending an army to burn villages and kill children. The suffering in the Ukrainian war zones is keen; the story is horrific, and it’s not fair to make the comparison.

But we wait for reports, raids on the cities and on the offices, no sirens going off, just the shuffling of boys with laptops. But the mind of the expat pictures the laying down of bombs, those flowers opening far below across the target zone. And there are casualties. There will be stories of the innocents far afield who died, abandoned by my compatriots who had promised them food or medicine. The stories will emerge, and it will feel like war.

It's always night there for me. The country lies quietly, in something like innocence, prosperous land, alluring for pirates. It tries to sleep, but the raids keep coming, day after day since the inauguration. The King of the Bandits ran for president. He said he wasn’t the bandit; those people were the bandits. People were confused. It’s Kyiv. It’s Topeka. There is definitely war afoot.

Travelogue 1168 – 9 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Four

Form matters. There, I’ve said it. I’m something of an aesthete. I believe in paying attention to how things are done. I was the nerd in university more interested in Renaissance humanism than in the dashing philosophers of other ages. The latter seemed too explosive, too strident. Truth should demonstrate the quality of self-evidence; it only required the subtlest gesture. I was always suspicious of revolutionaries, zealots, and evangelicals. Passion in a cause led to aggression: the truth was required of you, even if it had to be introduced violently. And there is never a third party in these transactions. The purveyor of truth is in charge, simply because truth has authorised all means necessary.

The very urgency of King Dweeb, our South African toy soldier, the very urgency of his agenda is an indictment. It’s the behaviour of the IT guy at work who impatiently pushes you aside and commandeers the keyboard. There’s no pathos or humanity driving it. It’s a screaming neurosis wrapped in plastic. It cannot explain itself. The owner of the social media platform doesn’t know how to communicate human-to human. Hundreds of tweets a day, and he connects with no one.

That’s the trouble with the “genius” label. One skill, refined to absurdity by the white-hot compression of psychological disturbance does not a genius make. It’s only the Trumpian “mandate” at work. Genius in history was not a synonym for success. It was a term for the mind that had transcended our sets of ideas and brought back something really new, and something crystal clear. Leonardo and Einstein gave us visions of life and beauty, art and science, that revolutionised our ways of thinking and seeing. That does not mean they had a ketamine flash, and then aggressively took hold of the wheel of your car. The real genius has the skills of their art, and they also have the skill of inspired communication. It is we, the people, who are moved to respond to their visions.

All of this is so inelegant. A part of me thinks, if only there could be a dictator with some style, I might go in peace. Imagine if Stanley Tucci were a dictator. At least he would make the terror palatable because he was, well, Stanley Tucci. The aesthetics would be right. Even if I didn’t fit the décor and had to go, I could admire it wistfully as the door closed. Instead, we have the clumsy and the ill-formed, the shambling tire salesman with the orange face, and the reptilian, middle-aged boy-prodigy, still locked in a battle with his own adolescence. Everything about them is ugly and carnivalesque, and the insult to injury is the most painful part of losing to them. One’s last word is, “Really?”

Travelogue 1167 – 4 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Three

The MAGA origin story seems to be something like this: Democrats turned evil somewhere in the recent past. Specifically, they became paedophiles en masse, and, in order to cover their sudden predilections, they developed the “deep state”. That’s a sinister name for something, well, sinister, and something defying description. Discussion of it requires the methods of medieval theology. You cannot say what the deep state is, only what it is not. It is ineffable. Since the deep state was engineered by masters of governance and law, then the heroes of the resistance must be unschooled and unsystematic.

Enter Trump, who never really manages to strike a higher note than a drunken bigot at a Midtown bar. Enter the likes of Mel Gibson, who has the same tic as Rudy Giuliani of being amazed by what comes out of his mouth. “It’s like daddy arrived, and he’s taking his belt off.” Mel is the perfect avatar. He’s charismatic. He says whatever comes to mind. He denies evolution. The MAGA movement needs its shamans, the personalities inspired only by spirit and never by logic.

Let’s consider the “genius” of the movement, our friend Elon. I am baffled by the stubborn insistence, even by political foes, that he is a genius. I struggle for signs of it. Of course, the broader Republican movement had always worshipped rich people. The richer they are, the more surely they are “geniuses”. Mean, pushy, avaricious, aggressive, manipulative, even savvy, I can admit. But where are the signs of genius?

Lately, the Great One seems incapable of reasoned thought. I include a few samples: here he affirms that workers in the office is a moral issue. The interviewer tries to throw him a line back to shore – maybe you can refer to productivity as a concrete measure. No, he dismisses it. Then there’s Elon with a goofy smile telling advertisers to go f themselves. What a charming imp! Now he takes peremptory and unlawful action against USAID. He must have a reason. He must have a thoughtful way to communicate his misgivings about USAID and the work they do. A key to business communications is intelligent persuasion. Well …

So this is what falls under the behavioural rubric of genius? Maybe MAGA should stick to the bug-eyed pronouncements of Rudy and Mel.

Travelogue 1166 – 2 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Two

Please, teacher, how can I learn? The question is sincere, but asking it outside class implies one of two things. Either the student wants to do extra work to advance, which is admirable, or the student is thinking magically: class is great, but there must be a quicker way. I answer with the unpopular voice of expertise. There are things you can do, but they are laborious and painful. I offer tips, and I can sense how disappointing they are. If they listen to common sense, they know I am right, and it quiets their anxiety a bit. If they are impatient, they politely thank me, but dismiss what I have said. I am the voice of an entrenched establishment or profession. Even if I believe what I have said, I am blinded by my interests. There are always short cuts. That is the glory of human nature, they think.

I can cite my own failures in the Dutch language, and I often do during class to make them laugh. I have tried some of the new AI programs. I have tried most everything, but haven’t got the time, industry, or intelligence to conquer this language! And that’s where its stands.

People cast about for short cuts, special guidance, insider knowledge, tips and tricks, immersion, miracle treatments, magical links between diet and success. They want their trips to the gym to unlock secret potential. They want to look like movie superheroes because there is a magic to mimicry.

By mastering mimicry, Trump has become the model for mimics. In the back of his followers’ minds is an unsolvable paradox: they know he is not the man he poses as, and yet the pose itself is successful. He is powerful, and he is rich, which corresponds to the pose he has struck. The crimes, duplicity, betrayal, corruption, and Mephistophelean trade of his miserable soul lie in the shadows, occupying the space between the pose and the man, but shadows don’t register in binary thinking. Is he or is he not successful? Is he or is he not our darling orange Jesus?

All the sweaty bros in their Star-Trek-Captain seats at tech companies and behind podcast mics have taken the cue. Self-doubts have vanished as they realise, wait, we are Masters of the Universe! We wasted years feeling guilty because our riches were so obviously coincidence, meanness, happenstance and bullying, landing us on the biggest wave of wealth creation in a hundred years, while we secretly played role games and indulged in fantasies of an age of demi-gods. But look! It was all real! Look at the orange spectre in the White House. It was all real, after all! Where are my num-chuks? Where is my wizard hat? Where is my protein powder? It’s time to roll up our sleeves! We will save this world! There is no death!

Is it wild kismet that one of the MAGA heroes of J6 was the QAnon Shaman with his horns and spear? He wasn’t a bug in the big, weird system, but a feature of the system itself.

Travelogue 1165 – 29 January
A Quote from Mel
Part One

People look to authority. It’s natural. They identify a need, and they cast about for help.

I filled in for a colleague last night, teaching a class of English learners. It was such a nice class. About half the class were new to the Netherlands. All of them were new to English. When you are a beginner in a language, you are helpless. You look to the teacher for help, with a childlike innocence in your eyes. I’ve been there, multiple times. I know what it feels like. I’ve been the student in many language classes; I’ve been the immigrant. Their hopes are high, but the task is overwhelming.

I know that every one of those students has a specific set of reasons for being there. The course a shrewd calculation on their part. Their resources are limited, in both time and money, and this is way they have chosen to spend them. I take that seriously because I know they do. It’s not a frivolous decision to invest in a language. It can be a key to economic freedom, self-sufficiency.

One young man walked me all the way down the stairs after class, asking desperate questions about how he could master the language in the quickest possible way. He had come from Syria. He was married, though very young. He was eager. He believed that English would be instrumental to advancement, through study and through work.

I measure what I say. I have taught for many years. I know what it will take for him, how long it will take. I am positive and supportive. I want him to succeed. But I also have to be clear and transparent. Language study is a long road. I can explain how language learning really happens. There is no magic bullet.

Pundits have created a shorthand analysis for this last American election, repeating that it was all about the price of eggs. But there is precious little being said about prices during the grand Trump 2.0 rollout.

The new American president flies to California to survey the fire damage, and Mel Gibson says in an interview, “It’s like daddy arrived, and he’s taking his belt off.” Setting aside one’s gut reaction to another embarrassing quote from Gibson – wishing briefly one were a daddy who could collect all the microphones in the Republican daycare centre, – there are a few troubling levels to this statement, a statement that no doubt had a few boozy Trump voters cheering.

First is the sentiment that the people need a daddy. If the president is daddy for libs, he is daddy for red states, too. Is that somehow a comfort? The questions it raises about democracy are obvious. It ought to raise psychological questions. The metaphor Mel reaches for as California starts its recovery is, yes, a slimy 78-year-old man giving them all a spanking. Hearing it gives one a shudder. Delivering it and applauding ought to mandate intervention.

Another interpretation of Mel’s gross statement is that, for the gangsters managing this administration, governance is punishment. None of them would have been caught dead voting for assistance for anyone worth less than a hundred million, but those aid systems are a handy stick with which to beat vulnerable libs about the head and shoulders.

They survey the land, from the windows of the country club, and they see no one they want to help. They see only enemies. Is every window a mirror?

Travelogue 1164 – 25 January
Cruelty in Paradise

Before the inauguration, as L.A. was ablaze, Paul Krugman wrote a few articles for his substack analysing the role of California in the nation’s economy. It’s a huge economy, and it contributes mightily into the national pool. Going further, he showed how much more the blue states contribute than the red states, even to the extent that the blues could be said to subsidize the reds. In a quick tally of recent national disasters, it becomes apparent that red states have received much more relief than blues. The blues had not been complaining. Now, red-state Republicans tease California with national relief, holding it up like the treats they are withholding from their younger brothers. They want to attach conditions.

When children do it, we call it bullying. Why change the vocabulary when it’s politics? Who are we fooling? When bullies on the playground do it, they do it because they don’t believe in consequences. Is it different now?

What is behind the rise in public cruelty? I don’t require the chain of events, the blow-by-blow of Trump’s ascent. I want the mass psychology. If we meditate Krugman’s blue-state-red-state story, we understand that red-staters see no consequences to their behaviour. Their blindness operates on several levels. On the level closest to the surface, they are sure that nothing is likely to happen to red-staters for punishing blue states. The very stability of the postwar order has made us doubt even the concept of consequence. Red states will be fine. Disasters are another day, and the Fed is always there. Furthermore, even without their relief, California will be fine, right? It’s all a kind of magic show. Nothing onstage is real.

There’s a deeper level to their motivation, something more significant. The prevalent postwar stability has served to mask the delicacy and complexity of modern society. I see it on the streets. In a city population highly integrated and multi-functional, in which everyone contributes to a dynamic whole, and in which an intricate web of reliance exists, individuals are surprisingly callous and cavalier in their treatment of each other. The woman you push out of the way at the Metro turnstile might be the nurse who treats your child. The man whose music you hate might deliver the parcel you absolutely need to arrive on time. The driver you cut off in traffic might prepare your food. But none of that matters. We take each other for granted, and we have done so for a long time now.

It has gone further. Taking people for granted has advanced to a perverted state of innocence, a belief that we don’t need each other at all. And what does human nature do when liberated from … each other? Apparently, other human beings become as objects to be shunted about like stage furniture. If we judge by the Musk-Trump model, people are to be bought (Greenland), moved out of the way (immigrants), dismissed as inconvenient (inspectors-general), sadistically put in harm’s way (Fauci, Cheney), or made to dance for the price of a few empty promises (J6 protesters).

Liberation! This is the bro-call of the tech lords and the sweaty, right-wing podcast set. How is it that the landscape of their paradise is so arid and joyless and void of love?

Travelogue 1163 – 22 January
A Hint

Returning home from dropping the girls at school, I was startled to see a slanting line across the brick, cutting across the second floor of the building. Above the line was a discoloration, a lightening, a yellowing.

I stopped and looked up into the sky. Indeed, the mist was clearing, and the clouds above were broken. I had become so unaccustomed to seeing the sun, I was actually puzzled by the sight of a morning shadow thrown across the face of the building. It was an unsure line, watery and indistinct, but the sunlight had undeniably come!

Temperatures had stubbornly held around zero Celsius, so I stayed inside all morning, correcting exams. By the time that noon had passed, the scrap of sunshine had dissipated. Glancing outside, I saw that the pavements were wet. The clouds had returned and brought with them some showers.

My joints ache just thinking about the wet and cold city outside the window. The bicycle seats will be wet. Each one will have to be towelled off quickly. The damp will make the bike locks recalcitrant. My keys will be secured away under layers of rain gear. I will have to fiddle with those keys with bare, red fingers before I wrestle on the gloves. The gloves will be wet from the handlebars. My fingers will be hurting by the time I arrive at the school. I will arrive early and wait under the drizzling sky, studying the brick façade of the school, all grey with weather, showing no hint of sun.

Travelogue 1162 – 20 January
Cold on the Track

Yesterday, I was travelling between cities. It was a Sunday, and it was a cold day. There were disruptions in the train service. I was not sure which trains were running and when. The transportation system here is commendably transparent; one can check on the trains at any time. But I was also having trouble with my phone. The battery was not charging properly. I couldn’t be sure that I would find a clear path home. There was no pressing reason to be home early, but I felt adrift.

I stood on the platform at a small station on the outskirts of Leiden. The sun had set; the temperatures were dipping below freezing. A few people milled about on the platform, secure that a train was coming. I could have placed myself on a map, but I could not have assigned any value to the place, other than the name, other than the association with a friend who lived in a nearby high-rise. Across the track rose one of the buildings that make up the cluster of malls and apartment complexes that define the neighbourhood. It rose like a green animal that a giant child had made of Legos, a hammer-headed cow grazing, with stout legs and stretches of high floors suspended in the air, forming bridges above us. It had that industrial, tiled look of modernity. It had the effect of making a cold Sunday evening colder.

Being lost is a vanishing sensation. Our little phones tell us where we are at all times. The internet explains every place to us, offers pictures and tips and guides. It’s a pity, though, because there’s something pleasant in being lost. If you can allow the silence of being forgotten into your heart, it somehow comforts as it hurts, affirms one’s humanity. Being small in a big world can mend some things.

Each alone, we the cold wait on the train platform, waiting for the gears of the great modern project to click. A train will appear. And what if we are abandoned? All the efforts to make the vast machinery of transportation and communication reasonable and transparent are, at the end of the day, only a one-way transmission. It’s remarkably efficient, but it never quite salves the fear of abandonment. The trains could just stop. The phones could blink off. I wonder if the terror inside us doesn’t just build, the longer we are well-served. Because we are helpless.

There was trouble on the track somewhere that morning. There was an electrical disruption. There was maintenance. It was common sense, and it was alien at the same time.

The more successful the machine, the more we fear. Some elementary part of the mind rebels. We weren’t consulted; we did not participate. I shouldn’t wonder if this formed a part of the populist reaction against “elitism”, the urge to apply hands to the world we inhabit.

Travelogue 1161 – 16 January
A Monster Looms

Musk has entered my subconscious as a monster. He haunts my dreams, a monster you never see clearly, but lurks beyond the horizon. He has the dimensions of a Japanese monster, one you would catch glimpses of over the horizon, lurching through the bay, smirking at the planes buzzing around him. He’s the size of history. The film script requires lots of heroes because they are small, human size. They have grit and humour, but they are doomed.

In the book I’m finishing, a character wonders why recent generations have manifested in their entertainment such a need for superheroes. That character in the book has no answer, but I wonder now if it’s the product of history asserting itself in the generational mind, like a monster on the horizon. The Japanese imagined the biggest monster in postwar cinema, the kind that crushed city blocks beneath its feet. This is the culture that had looked into the face of horrific losses, of a defeat as epic as Troy’s, seen cities incinerated by the atom bomb.

History isn’t alive the way we are alive. It isn’t dead either, in the parallel sense that our parents are not dead, but are active in our minds and morals, shuffling around in the attic, as it were. History asserts itself in the imagination. If it isn’t given proper time and perspective, it moves from closet to closet, polymorphous and faceless. We catch sight of it in mirrors; sometimes it flatters us and sometimes it simply stares. When we think we are thinking about history, we are actually reviewing montages we have viewed in TV movies, montages in shadow.

Even in forgetting history, we never shake it. Remembering it, our negotiations never reach more than momentary agreements. History won’t stand still. It asserts itself in the mind of a people, half-digested stories that demand some lodging in the mind, stories that yield wisdom with time and contemplation, with the perspective of our own years. Too often, received history is TV montage, vignettes on the moors. While, down in the bay, a monstrous shadow looms.

Travelogue 1160 – 3 January
The Alien Speaks

Someone manufactures a video for social media. It is black and white and captions itself as recorded in 1964. The camera never moves; it is an interview scene. The subject is an alien, grey, big-headed, with glowing eyes. It speaks English somehow, though in a spooky, gravelly voice. I wish it were smoking a cigarette. Its demeanour is submissive, as an enemy captive’s should be, and it is longsuffering. But it is wise, and it is willing to talk. Naturally, the interviewer is less interested in where the monster came from or its technology than he is in philosophies of life and death.

The two have spent many hours in that room. Time has stopped. The alien explains in a languid manner how unjustified our existential fears have always been. Everything the gurus have told us is true. Death is an illusion, and love is the force that binds the universe together. The alien stares at the camera, docile, resigned, enlightened, and bored. This is what this particular life has come to. Captured by a benighted species of ape, his dashing days as an interstellar explorer have been cut short, and he will grow weak in a poorly lit prison light-years from home, tutoring his ill-mannered hosts in the basics of the spiritual sciences.

All right, I have the few minutes that the video requests. It is a successful bit of fiction: I am moved by the piece, acknowledging it as sophisticated schlock. I wonder who made the video and why. How long did it take? What was the motivation? I suppose it would be fun to animate a creepy alien figure. Then you have to figure out what it would say. The more the figure moves, the more you challenge belief, and thus the attitude of resignation arises. It is an alien; it is smart. It must say something wise. And the product is obvious. This is exactly the kind of thing we would like a wise and hard-bitten old pilot from Planet X to tell us. Relax, it says, the universe is a game, and you have won before you even started.

The video is posted in the manner of a leak. The audience knows it is fake; the author knows that the audience knows it is fake. We all enjoy the process. Inside, we reserve a secret space from doubt. It might be real. But “real” isn’t the issue, if we are to be honest with ourselves and each other. Social media was never a place to find truth or reality. It is a discursive medium. It is, in potential, a place to discuss truth or reality. That distinction is where our alien video finds its traction. It is a rhetorical ploy; it offers a proposition. Though the video is obviously a fake, it says to its audience, “this might be real”. And even though we all know it is fake, we respond with, “this might be real”. An exchange about reality has taken place, and we feel strangely satisfied.

Going further to examine the evidence that the video is fake misses the point. And it doesn’t affect whatsoever the conditional conclusion of the audience that “this is real”. Furthermore, going on to unpack the argument that “this is real”, to analyse the philosophy, to analyse the implications of captured alien intelligence, also misses the point. It misunderstands the method of social media. It’s not discursive in that way. Social media is made for call and response only. It posits a thought, elicits an emotional response. All other comments are meant only to echo and amuse.

Travelogue 1159 – 1 January
Return to Janus

Once again, we have slid through the gates of Janus. On this side of it, we witness a quiet morning. Only the wind by the door. But around the gate, there were such kinetics and noise that one wondered what purpose remained in the minds of the celebrants. People shouted, and people danced. There was joy, and there were noise-makers. In a snapshot of it, one searched for any sense.

In spite of the excess, the movement across the threshold was silent and internal. It happened, quite without volition, without knowledge, and, despite the atomic clocks, it happened without precision. One blinked to find the other side.

Now people sleep. I am left with the image of the Metro ride home yesterday, grim and portentous. It was four in the afternoon, and the many passengers around me were solemn. There was little sense of celebration, and if there was anticipation, it was the sort that dreads. They were people preparing for a storm.

But all right, let’s find some cheer. I stop by the café on the way to the barber. It’s a new year. The morning is quiet, but the line at the counter is long. Most cafes and shops are closed. Here, the customers wait patiently, and even with good humour. It’s a holiday ritual, of sorts. They stand, and they smile. They chat. After the long wait, there’s a table for me. Next to me is a couple of young women who haven’t seen each other in a while. They hug, and they exchange gifts. They catch up; they check their phones. They run out of things to say, but they are happy to see each other. A family settles at the long reading table. They are loud; their energy contrasts sharply with the subdued morning outside. No one is bothered at all.

Travelogue 1158 – 31 December
Echoes of Change

There have been only twenty-seven hours of sunlight here during the month of December. I have a pretty high tolerance for grey, but at last I find myself sinking beneath the unrelenting mood. This grey spell includes the longest streak since the 90s, eleven days without sun.

The gloom combines poorly with the swell of New Year’s sounds. I refer to the sound of fireworks. The cracking and booming do not communicate celebration under the unyielding clouds, but instead a kind of dread. The sounds assault the nerves. They seem violent; they remind one of war.

Losing Jimmy Carter at the end of a tough year, inheriting only the likes of Musk, it becomes hard to hold one’s head high. The low clouds are taunting us, reminding us we have been abandoned. When the crowds bowed to the orange idol, submitting voluntarily to the degradation of the “Trump Era” – the words feel dirty, - then the gods withdrew their favour. Sometimes children must experience the consequences of their decisions.

Searching the web for holiday activities, I noticed that local venues only published summertime photos. The change in seasons happens slowly so that we don’t grieve. But we evolved without photography. The contrast was too sudden for me; those photos drained my resolve. The clouds had stolen all the colour.

Travelogue 1157 – 27 December

The Tree Tries

Plastic trees have no roots. And yet, the roots of the living Christmas tree present the problem. They do not sustain the organism, and therefore the tradition. We have in the past kept our little, potted trees, replanted them and watered them, and still they do not survive until the next yuletide. How can the tradition survive when the living representative of it cannot?

Somehow, the inert green plastic we have erected in the place of a Christmas tree suffices. It does more than that; it triggers a sense of joy. This is the magic, I suppose, of the simulacrum. The actual and the breathing children singing at the base of the fake tree. My very real girls are changing year to year, and the family honours their maturing and also struggles with change itself, in acts such as this one, the raising the tree beside the bookshelves. We want tradition to stop time for just a moment. Step by step, we are losing our sweet little girls. Outside, the world we know is under attack by the unlikeliest revolutionaries in history. And for one week or two, we hang delicate ornaments from the stiff, plastic branches of our tree, in a ritual of familiarity.

The bleak weather holds. The sun I dreamt of two nights ago has not appeared. In that dream, I climbed three flights in order to find more sun but had to be content looking upon its light from within the shadow. We were attending an execution in that dream, an execution by guillotine. Oddly enough, the execution was scheduled to take place after a tennis tournament.

I write in the mornings before the family wakes. Sometimes I research into history, reading here or there, following links. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are favourite hunting grounds. Yesterday, after waking from that dream, I happened upon the story of the death of France’s Charles VIII. He was on his way to watch a game of tennis when he bashed his head against the top of a doorframe. It was April, in the first blush of spring. The plastic Christmas tree was well stowed away.

Travelogue 1156 – 26 December
The Sun Tries

We are on holiday. The sun has a chance to rise in peace. The Christmas tree stands in silhouette downstairs, its strings of lights switched off. The line of plushies underneath the tree stare vaguely from the shadows, taking form for the day ahead. The sky outside is becoming white.

Before the holiday, the sun has risen so late that we have been well along in our days. The flat has been abandoned by the time first light peeks in the window. And the choice of verb is just right, because the solstice sun is so timid. It has hidden behind mists all Christmas week. Light drizzles have fallen on us on every family excursion, though that has not stopped us from going out. Not has it stopped many other last-minute shoppers and families seeking some sweets for an afternoon.

We went for a plastic tree this year. It stands fully my height, which is a luxury for us. Without a car, we have been limited to potted trees that could be held in one’s lap on the Metro or gripped while cycling. The plastic tree came in a box with a handle. The girls fell upon the box immediately on its arrival home. They would not rest until the tree was assembled and every ornament or trimming hung. They even found precarious perches for their Christmas earrings. They did well; the tree is pretty. It stands proudly in its stance of tradition against change.

The sun shone in my last dream before waking. I encouraged us to climb to the third floor of the structure in my dream, hoping for more sunshine, but the structure itself put our faces into shadow, no matter how high we climbed. The land around us was bathed in warm sun light. That would have to do.

Travelogue 1155 – 6 December
Summer Furniture

Sinter Klaas has gone. As though in mourning, the skies above Rotterdam have released waves of showers that surged all night. This morning, the winds gust loudly. The roving air clings to night, seems to ward off day with its child-like caprice.

I’m as sad about the old man’s departure as the girls. For all I know, this may be the final time before he evaporates into the disillusionment of maturity. It may have been the last time I get to impersonate the fulfiller of dreams, the last time I get to sneak around in the early morning, leaving gifts. I feel grief.

There’s been a tune in my head, something from my childhood, an old Cat Stevens song I had forgotten about, a song I heard recently at a café, unexpectedly, randomly revived from deep memory. It opened a door in my mind, like opening an Egyptian tomb and releasing the air that preserved ancient things. The papyrus turns to dust instantly. I was flooded by impressions hearing the song at the café. Childhood was vividly present, and then it slowly sank back into its place under the desert.

I thought of my eldest brother. Somehow the song is linked to him in the crypt of memory. Long ago, I visited him when he went to university. We listened to music. He wanted to know what songs I liked. The lyrics of the song were mournful. I liked that.

As a child, I worshipped my big brothers. They were heroes; their characters were pure and good. In my teens, they let me down: they became human. We quarrelled. I was heart-broken, and I blamed them. I blamed them for years. I didn’t intend to, and I thought I was smarter than that, but the resentment settled into a section of the crypt for a long occupation. That there could be heroes was a keystone in the arch of my innocence. Nothing wounds us like our own innocence.

The night’s winds have blown through the open mezzanine and balconies of the complex, tipping over summer furniture, knocking plants over, sending empty flower pots and light plastic chairs skittering along the pavement. There will need to be some cleanup.

Travelogue 1154 – 29 November
Piets On the Map

Despite temperatures being close to zero, parents and their children were milling about in front of the school this morning. Juf Franca, Little Ren’s teacher, told us we were waiting for the Piets. She showed my girls a map on her phone, pinpointing just where the Piets were, across the river. They were running late.

The Piets are Sinter Klaas’s helpers. Sinter Klaas and the Piets have been in the Netherlands for several weeks already. They arrived from Spain in mid-November. That has meant gifts and candies at home (left by the Piets) for two weeks. But it has also meant lots of public appearances from our high-profile visitors, all leading up to Pakjesavond on December 5th, when big gifts will be delivered, and the whole merry crew will bid us adieu. “Hasta la vista!”

Now the Piets are on their way for a visit to our girls’ school. This is something I like about the Sinter Klaas tradition. It’s very concrete, and very Dutch. By contrast, though Santa Claus appears in movies and shopping malls, he is still something of a cross between mythical figure and celebrity, everywhere and nowhere. Sinter Klaas exists on the map. He lives in Spain. He arrives in the Netherlands every year in a very public way. You can go watch him chug into town on an old barge. You can follow his daily itinerary. The Piets are busy scampering around the towns, delivering gifts and engaging in mischief.

The story is absurd. Children scratch their heads at the many faces and shapes of the Piets and Sinter Klaas. They wonder at the timing, at the resemblances to Santa Claus. But they are very ready to roll with it. Why not? It’s less glamorous than nesting at the North Pole and soaring round the world behind rows of reindeer, but the rituals have a charm that excites a loyalty that I don’t think Santa ever achieves. We love the Santa story, but do we love Santa? He's venerable more than loveable, sparks a wistful affection more than a playful one, engages the fancy more than the mundane sense of fun. Sinter Klaas is a man of the people.

Travelogue 1153 – 20 November
Hailstones

The gentle showers of one day turned into hail the next. I had to travel to an appointment in The Hague, and the schedule was tight. The girls had a half day at school. Between dropping the girls off and picking them up, I had only a few hours. Everything – apart from the train between Rotterdam Centraal and The Hague Centraal - I did on bicycle. In Rotterdam, I rode my own bike, of course. In The Hague, I rented a bike. All in all, I spent over an hour pedalling in the weather.

The stinging impact of stones came and went. Sometimes the ice was traded for rain. I splashed through puddles, steering with one hand into the wind as I held the hood of my rain jacket, as I made slow progress toward the dentist’s office, amazed that I would go to this effort to sit quietly in a chair for the man who would tap at my broken tooth and prod my tender gums with a metal instrument manufactured for no other purpose than to jab at people’s gums. Pain upon pain, I meditated each. This is the life we lead.

Even so, I’m also enjoying myself. There’s a spark inside, a centre that I observe, and from which I observe. There’s some peace there. When my systems aren’t flooded by anxiety, there’s some peace. I’ve become such a practiced dentist’s patient that my anxiety is quieted. The hail picks up again. There’s nothing to be done but to keep pedalling, keeping the wheel straight in the wind.

Travelogue 1152 – 19 November
Complicated Skies

Before six, a gentle rain is tapping at the window. It will be cold out. The season has turned. Yesterday was a day of complex skies. The clouds were everywhere. The sun never quite found its patch of blue because it sails so low now, but it shone through the vaporous masses and lit them with pretty pastels, linking sunrise to sunset in a way only winter can do.

Sinter Klaas is in Holland, and I’m happy to report that the girls still believe. Baby Jos complains that many of her classmates don’t. She chooses to, and I’m pleased. It’s such a sweet tradition, and I’m grateful to have one more run. Already the girls giggle at the silly romances of cartoon characters, and I cringe at the relentless approach of the great introversion called adolescence. I have enjoyed their childhood at least as much as they have.

The teenage years orient us toward humanity, toward each other, toward society. It becomes a mania that defies recovery. Most of us have marks from those years, as though we survived a pox. I have an impulse to protect my girls, a wish to protect the magical realism of kids’ days. Of course it’s futile. And I can’t say there is no beauty among the clouds. There fly there ideals and passions, insubstantial things that fuel hope and renewal among people. Those are desperately needed.

Travelogue 1151 – 16 November
Wonders

Groggy, I’m up before six. On a Saturday. I’m up hours before light on a weekend for a sport that I had never heard of before moving to Holland. Or if I had, it had made the kind of impression that my dreams made last night, leaving a kind of echo of something, a reverberation to be picked up later in another form.

It’s not enough that I’m up before light, I have to get gear ready and pack fruit for the whole team. I have to be sure the girls are dressed for their games. I have to travel with Baby Jos to the far reaches of the metropolitan area on a long tram line. We will ride all the way to the last stop. Beyond the club’s fields are only parklands and farmers’ fields.

There will be a clubhouse next to the hockey fields. I will mill around with parents, hoping for coffee, while our daughters warm up in the cold outside. Afterwards, we parents will stand in the wind together, shivering in our coats, while our teams of young girls clash on the field. Baby Jos has reached the age where games occupy the full field and one full hour. That’s a long time. There are no benches; we stand beside the field.

The clubhouse there is comfortable enough. It’s newer than our clubhouse in the city. But we have more fields. And just a week ago, the dome went up. Every winter, the clubs all play ‘zaal’ (hall) hockey indoors. The bigger clubs, like ours, erect temporary halls for the purpose, arching, white, balloon-like structures with a rectangular base fitting snugly onto one of the regular playing fields. Inside are half a dozen smaller fields with smooth flooring to make the indoor game fast.

That a building like that goes up in a few days still amazes me. Maybe it’s because I am reading a lot of medieval history lately. In a modern setting, sure, why not? There’s construction everywhere. But I can’t help imagining the wonder this place would excite among Charlemagne’s masons. That hockey zaal would instantly be the biggest single room in the county, aside, perhaps, from a few basilicas in the most important towns. The age of the cathedrals was still centuries away. They would marvel at the ceilings held high without pillars. The biggest shock would be that the room was for children’s games.

Travelogue 1150 – 6 November

Elections

I was home ill on America’s election day. It seemed only fitting. Much of the campaign season sounded like the rantings of a man with a life-threatening fever.

Somehow everyone managed to stay healthy through our trip to Venice. We wore no masks. We ate whatever we liked. I made a list of everything we tasted the first night in Venice, sitting outside at a table by a quiet canal: octopus and squid, shrimp, sardine, mussels, clams, sea bass, polenta, lasagna, and mascarpone cream. We were offered five courses, and we never hesitated. Sure, we were slow moving in the morning, but we soldiered on, stepping right out for caffè and brioches filled with marmellata to fortify our aching bellies. Then we started our tour with the Ca d’Oro and a traghetto ride across the Grand Canal to the Rialto Market.

The next day, we had an appointment in a church in Mestre, where we would attend the battesimo of a sweet little girl growing up in the Netherlands, far from the beautiful land where her father grew up.

My original home is faraway, too, in many ways. It’s become a matter of language. “He speaks my language,” Trumpistas will say. “He says what I want to say.” If so, this is a code that I find indecipherable. On the surface, it’s a hotch-potch of insults and nonsense, belligerence and incoherent parables. But underneath, there must be a powerful code. So powerful it outweighs the speaker’s character, which the most debauched Roman emperor would have described as “filthy”. If it was a smell, it would be a penny lost in Vance’s sofa. If it were a clue in Pictionary, it would be a sketch of a soiled toilet brush.

I have read that this will be the criteria of our age, not credentials but authenticity. It’s a damning indictment of traditional politicians if the huckster rings to the ear as more authentic.

We have developed – maybe through film texts – a mythos that the criminal is, at the very least, sincere. According to this strange frame of reference, being openly evil spares the individual any need for artifice. Extending that logic, being good requires artifice. That’s how the average American feels. Civility is suspicious. Better to be evil than to be false. It’s a degrading ethos to live by – made more degrading by forcing others to live under the reign of criminals.

Travelogue 1149 – 1 November
Dark Edges

The darkness over the water is eloquent. It is not silent. The water laps there; the boats’ engines roar. The darkness does not speak, but it is expressive. In the distance, the city lights are chattering. The waters are watchful, and they keep their counsel.

The evening falls quickly over the lagoon. It is autumn, and the season’s night comes on early. We have travelled across the water to the island of Murano. We sat for snacks and drinks in a square there as the day drew to a close, the sky above the piazza changing colour, becoming violet and losing its light.

Afterward, we rode the water bus back to Venice in night. The lagoon was rung round with the yellow lights of towns and roads, but the blackness ate up all the space between. Lights were reflected upon the waves, then the darkness ate them again. Ahead, Venice was sparsely underlit, as though asleep already, brick towers over the jumble of rooftops, their white stone highlights, their history, obscured by the night.

There was life in the streets. It was early. But the crowds had dwindled. The people walking had purpose, as though, night drawing on, they must get home. Crossing bridges, we came upon darkness again. Canals that featured no access, where buildings walls dropped into the water, had no lighting. Shadows fell precipitously off the bridges. Above, there were ancient buildings we passed that had no lights in any windows. Many seemed abandoned above the ground-floor shops.

La Serenissima emerges from the shadows, the ancient city still there underneath the noise of the jaundiced lights of the modern.

Travelogue 1148 – 17 October
The Dark Ages

This is the season that I forget bike lights. Spring lights have been lost. The new ones I purchase, I forget at home because the routine is still new. I don’t attach lights to my bike because the frequent rains short them out. So I find myself out without lights in the dark. Everybody else has lights. I have to watch for police, who stop cyclists and fine them.

It’s more complicated because I have bikes in two locations. My life is west; my life is east. Home and work are on opposite sides of town. I stow a bike in a free garage at Kralingse Zoom Metro Station, dry and safe. My daily bike is sturdy and rusting and carries a heavy child seat on the back. Neither have a light.

The autumn dark creeps in, and, even home and dry and safe, the night seems to become deeper. The fall brought me a long series of nightmares a few nights ago. I had eaten late, and whatever was for dinner hadn’t agreed with me. The dreams were of the sort that repeated in sickening detail, branching endlessly. At some point, my dreaming mind began to believe in hell, the visions were so convincing and so persistent. I’m sure there was never another moment in my life I took the idea seriously. The idea of hell.

In one moment of isolation in dark semi-consciousness, I could be convinced that hell was as real as, say, Mar-a-Lago, and every bit as grotesque. It’s odd to think that such a bizarre concept could find an opportunity to become real. And, yes, I am speaking here about Mar-a-Lago.

It’s astonishing that one could be so easily convinced, even in a vulnerable moment of darkness and distress, that one could be damned. Not to claim that I’m no sinner, but, really, damned forever? Suffering pain forever? As it is, twenty minutes in a dentist’s chair is enough to push me to the edge of apathy or of swooning. What is eternity?

People believed in hell for centuries. When was the first time the concept of eternal punishment appeared in a human mind? One can just about imagine it. There was no moon to make shadows. There were no clouds to obscure the vastness of the night sky, the oppressing nullity enforced upon us by the Milky Way; no psychological safety nets in place: no science, no icons of the Virgin Mary, no karaoke. Add to that intestinal distress. I should think there were many opportunities for that in prehistory. The agonies would have been as relentless as the nights. The dreams engendered would have been tortuous. The notion of hell could have risen there as organically as salmonella.

Critically, the pain somehow became wed to an idea: “I deserve this.”

In this sense, night contrasts nicely with hell. It is impersonal, and it descends without an eye for the state of my soul. The very colour of the sky changes, and we are spectators, the sinful and the pure. The blue vibrancy of the day congeals and darkens, is shot through with red, while shadows creep forward. It is quite a show. One sees it better without bike lights.

Travelogue 1147 – 7 October
The Donation of Pepin

Until 751 CE, Rome had more or less always been Roman. Rome had belonged to Rome. For a thousand years after its founding, it had been autonomous and the centre of the early Roman Kingdom, then the Roman Republic, and then the Empire. Since the late days of the Roman Empire and then under the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, Rome had still been “Roman”. Suddenly, Rome being Roman was in question. The Lombards were at the gates; the Byzantines had been ejected from Italy.

In 754, the pope was in residence with the Frankish king. Pepin the Short was sending embassies to the stubborn king of the Lombards, who had conquered the Byzantine lands in Italy and was threatening Rome. Pepin was cajoling his own lords, convincing them that the pope’s interests were their own.

Finally, the Franks invaded in 755. They invaded again in 756. Apparently, one sound defeat each year was enough to convince Aistulf of the Lombards that the Franks were going to dictate their own terms. A treaty was signed in 756 that would become one of the foundational documents of the Middle Ages. It came to be known as the Donation of Pepin – a document that didn’t survive physically. The treaty awarded to the papacy the lands that were formally Byzantine in northern and central Italy. This was the beginning of the independent Papal States. Rome would be Roman again, this time until the nineteenth century.

Fascinating to me is the power of the Franks to make all this happen. There was no Caesar writing about the army’s crossing of the Alps. But we know that that was no mean feat; we learn that from classical authors before Pepin. The Frankish era is relatively silent; there are no epic poems or memoirs or verbose monuments. But clearly Francia was a martial power, restless and aggressive. Clearly, they had a reputation. They were intimidating. Aistulf did not need much convincing. And in another generation, Charles would simply put an end to the independent Lombard kingdom (taking the crown for himself). The Byzantines wanted to claim back the land that Pepin had rewon, but had no power to do it. They offered Pepin a fortune to return their lands, and he refused. That was that. The Franks were the new power in the West. And they would be the protector of the papacy.

Travelogue 1146 – 24 September
The House Guest

The story of the Bishops of Rome - the papacy - and the story of Northern Italy in general after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century is bound up with the story of the Byzantine Empire and the Exarchate of Ravenna. For two centuries the exarchate stood against the Goths, first the Ostrogoths and then the Lombards. As long as the choice was between Byzantine and Gothic rule, many places were happy to be counted among the Byzantine camp, even as they effectively rebelled against Byzantine control, as the Bishops of Rome did. The petty infighting only weakened the Exarchate. In 751, the post-Roman order finally collapsed, as the Lombard king Aistulf overcame the Byzantines and ejected them from Italy. As Aistulf turned his eye on the Duchy of Rome, the new pope, Stephen II, chosen in 752, looked outside Italy for a balancing power. It’s worth noting that Stephen II was an Orsini. The Orsini were an aristocratic Roman family that would dominate Roman politics for a millennium. It seems no accident that, when Rome was being threatened, the Roman nobility stepped forward. Stephen II appealed to Pepin, the king of the Franks. It had only been a year since Stephen’s predecessor, Zachary, had approved Pepin’s appropriation of the Frankish throne.

What follows is fascinating. Stephen II asks Pepin for safe conduct into Francia. He becomes the first pope to ever cross the Alps. And for at least two years, he is a guest of the royal family while Pepin negotiates with Aistulf. He shows the Pope great honour and respect. When the Pope arrives, he receives him as a supplicant, and he leads his horse to the palace. The Pope returns the favour with many honours. He formally anoints Pepin king of the Franks, and he similarly anoints his two sons. He names all three “patricians of Rome”. These honorifics would become important in the future, when Charles became king, and when he and his descendants became emperors. Charles would have been just a boy when the pope was a house guest. Imagine the effect on him.

Travelogue 1145 – 18 September
The Stage Was Set

Time erodes the features of the man, as though he were statuary left in the rain. Revision paints him up as it thinks he should have looked, paints the stage as it would have liked the stage to appear. The erosion has swept away his friends and his colleagues and his family, and he seems a solitary figure. We are enchanted by solitaries. We imagine them heroic.

Charlemagne stands in isolation in the imagination of popular history, emerging like a mythical figure from the mists of the “Dark Ages”. I’m guessing he wouldn’t recognise himself in any of the popular portraiture. He was hardly a solitary, and he hardly saw his times as chaotic or primitive. The kingdom he ruled had stood strong for three hundred years, always expanding. He lived in a world of precedent and tradition. He was his father’s boy.

Great-Man stories are always leaky. They are exciting and engaging, and I think they can be useful in the narration of history, but they don’t capture the sweeping showers of truth very efficiently. The irony of celebrating Charlemagne the way we do is that we are, in the main, celebrating his father, Pepin the Short. Charles accomplished a lot; he was a great leader. But the creative elements, the moulds that were set for the Middle Ages, were largely set by his father.

It was Pepin who took the throne for the “Carolingians”, as his line came to be called, named after his son, Charles. Pepin made manifest what had been fact for generations, that his family had ruled the Merovingian kingdom. He deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, and he did it with the quiet blessing of the Greek pope, Zacharias. Pepin united the north and south of Francia, subduing Aquitaine and seizing Septimania from the Muslims. He was responsible for installing Tassilo III as a vassal on the ducal throne in Bavaria. Charles’s dispute with Tassilo would eventually lead to the incorporation of Bavaria directly into the empire. Pepin was fond of reforming the Frankish church, and he supported the church’s evangelism in Saxony. Pepin forged an alliance with the papacy, perhaps the most enduring of his achievements in the romantic imagination of the Middle Ages.

Travelogue 1144 – 8 September
Baptising Saxons

Charlemagne picked up the family business with gusto. He pursued war strategies upon every frontier, expanding into Spain, Italy and Germany. In Germany, this translated into a long series of conflicts and negotiations with the Bavarians and with the Saxons. He ruled for almost fifty years, and the subjugation of those peoples was a project for almost his entire reign.

What might often be forgotten is that Charles was fighting pagans on both eastern and western fronts. We know the Spanish ‘Saracens’ were Muslim, but it might have been overlooked in high school history that neither the Saxons nor the Avars were Christian.

Context is always important in understanding history. When we recall Charlemagne as the first “Holy Roman Emperor” (and the title can be argued,) it’s easy to imagine him as a heroic leader taking the helm of a homogenous and unified Christendom. We imagine it because it was a convenient simplification and prejudice for later histories. The further distant the period, the less we care for detail.

But in fact (and here I indulge in my own cheap simplifications,) Europe was wilder and more heterogeneous than we are comfortable in admitting. Charles was far more focussed on tidying up affairs on his borders than on the big themes of history that we like to associate with him. He was more an agent in the expansion of Christianity in Europe than a glorious symbol of the already-consolidated Christian continent. It’s almost comical how many times he returned, not only to pacify the Saxons, but to force conversion and baptisms. But this mission would bear only a passing resemblance to the mission of later Europeans colonizers. The two eras would have seen their converts, their own religion, and the relation of church to state all very differently.

There’s enough evidence to believe in Charles’s sincere religious faith, but it is equally clear that he understood the political capital invested in the church. The bishops were internal allies. The pope was an external ally. A Christianized Saxony would have Saxon bishops he could summon. Charles was very fond of ecumenical councils and doctrinal capitularies.

Travelogue 1143 – 2 September
Just Another Rival

Charlemagne’s grandfather was Charles Martel. “Martel” was a sort of cognomen given him later, signifying “The Hammer”. His life story is an account of ceaseless aggression, making it a kind of history of the Franks written small. The Franks seldom rested from war, from the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West until the kingdom’s territorial peak under Charlemagne, a period of more than three hundred years. The expansion started under the mysterious, long-haired Merovingians and continued through the leadership of their majordomos, who eventually became the Carolingians. Martel himself moved from war to war, battle to battle, with every year of his life devoted to some campaign. We know about him because he was so successful at it.

His father’s wife tried to sideline him early on, pushing Pepin of Herstal to pass Charles over in favour of Pepin’s grandson, Theudoald. The poor boy didn’t last long. He was eight years old when he became majordomo. The Neustrians rebelled, and the Austrasians broke Martel out of his prison and gave him command. Etcetera.

Martel’s claim to fame these many centuries later – in large part thanks to the eighteenth-century historian, Edward Gibbon, – is the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers), in which he defeated a Muslim army under Abd Al-Rahman. This battle stopped Muslim expansion into Aquitaine, if only because Abd Al-Rahman, who was killed in battle, had proven to be irreplaceable.

This victory earned Martel a reputation as “Saviour of Europe” … but only centuries later, when the concept of Christian Europe had developed well beyond anything Martel himself would have recognised. Martel was deep into his own territorial strategies and ambitions, and he cast his own hungry eye on Aquitaine. The Muslims were not the existential threat that later Christian nationalists perceived, but just one more rival, much like the others.

Travelogue 1142 – 29 August
Long Time Ago

Charlemagne, or “Charles the Great”, was only the second king in his line. His father had had himself declared King of the Franks a few years after Charles was born. But his family had been running at least one of the Frankish kingdoms for more than three generations already, acting as majordomo to the Merovingian kings who had ruled for two and a half centuries.

It’s helpful to remind myself of the spans of time occupied by the early Middle Ages. They easily telescope from our vantage because there is so little surviving detail. Two and a half centuries is the amount of time the American Republic has survived so far.

It doesn’t seem possible to say when the Merovingian line was established. They were the kings of one small contingent of Franks, the Salian Franks, living some happy place like Brabant when Roman rule collapsed. It’s likely that Merovech, the source of the name ‘Merovingian’ allied himself with the last Roman general trying to maintain order. He wouldn’t even have been the first of his line, just the first with a profile in history.

It was Clovis, probably the grandson of Merovech, who created what would become France, taking advantage of the vacuum left by the Romans, fighting his way to the top of the Frankish heap, uniting all Franks into one kingdom that begins to be recognizable to moderns familiar with the map of Europe. He converted to Christianity and converted the kingdom. His name, Clovis, was an early form of Louis. So many patterns for French history were set so early, almost three hundred years before Charlemagne became Emperor. Again, that’s a chunk of time that would swallow up U.S. history whole, Washington to Biden. Fun fact: it's likely the language Clovis spoke was much closer to modern Dutch than to modern French.

Travelogue 1141 – 19 August
Lubber

The waves were high during our last visit to the beach. The girls waded in intrepidly. They needed no warm-up time; they were immediately splashing and diving and soaked with sea water. Joy was completely at the helm on their beach day. Their father, on the other hand, required a long time to enter the water. Past the knees, every centimetre was hard-won. Cold water translated into pain. There was no mediating sensation, like “refreshing” or “bracing”. No, it just hurt. All the way up the back and shoulders. But the water was relatively warm, and it was too windy to hang out on the beach, anyway. The blowing sands stung my legs.

Eventually, I was all the way in, out past where the girls could go, in the roar-and-silence of deeper waters. This is a nice meditative moment I get to experience a few times a year, bobbing among the waves in summer, just long enough that the family doesn’t miss me.

Strangely, it’s the troubled seas that draw me out. I am pulled by the bobbing motion, overcoming my fear of the sharp cold. I drift out beyond the feel of sand underneath my feet, and I watch the waves and the ships on the horizon. I look up at the clouds. I glance at the shore, and at the long pier half a kilometre off my shoulder. It’s comforting.

In the lobby of the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, a video loops on a big screen, films recorded on ships in the high seas during storms. We watch the waves crashing on the decks. The camera’s perspective drifts away from the ship, and out into the raw motion of the waves, huge, threatening, violent. The waves rise, they loom, white ribs of foam forming in the rushing wall of water. There is no stable POV, as the camera tilts with the motion of the sea. It is dizzying and frightening.

I live by the North Sea. I swim in the North Sea. But it’s a stranger. It has a reputation as a stormy sea, temperamental and dangerous. But I haven’t fathomed it. Finally, I’m just a landlubber, try as I have to always live by the sea. As fascinated as I am, I have never had the opportunity to see through the eyes of a seafarer. All those generations the Dutch plied the seas, thousands of people living out much of the lives on water, and the rest of us have so little idea what it felt like.

Travelogue 1140 – 13 August
The Philosophy of Binnenste Buiten

Last night we took the girls to see “Inside Out 2”. We all know the story: the emotions are made into personalities who man the control panel behind the eyes. The idea sounds miserable, but it is masterfully executed. It’s touching and funny. The girls loved it.

Little Ren had been begging to see it. I’m not sure how it got lodged into her mind, but she would not let it go. We happened to find ourselves standing outside a theatre after a visit to the beach. Mama and I checked with each other, and we shrugged, why not? Once I had understood the themes being developed in the film, that puberty had entered the control room in the sequel, I worried that we had made a bad call. I watched Baby Jos in particular, the older girl of the two. But she seemed to simply have fun with the story.

I myself was challenged by the film. It doesn’t take much to excite my imagination. I’m on old sentimentalist. The film created a bigger stage set than the control room of the mind. It painted an internal landscape for the emotions. In the story, the childhood emotions were exiled, and they had to fight their way back to HQ through a terrain bubbling with ideas and memories and moods. The mental earth trembled with the violent changes of adolescence. All that was amusing, but it made me reflect again on the complexity of the human organism.

Being someone on the other side of the lifetime equation, closer to the end than the beginning, I wonder at human complexity in a different way than a child or young adult might. I remember the inspiration I felt when I was young, discovering the vast terrain both inside and outside myself. When I was young, I was confident I could solve all the mysteries out there. Now the scale of things raises questions; like, what was all that about? Such a grand project is the human being, it must mean something more than what I happened to notice along the way. Now, the mysteries have moved from the ethers into my house. They’re arranged on my desk. They tease like ink blots that mean something different every day.

Travelogue 1139 – 12 August
The Olympics

It is hard to believe we watched the entire women’s marathon from start to finish. The coverage was that good, and Paris was that enjoyable a background. We did lose the girls in spells, lost them to their games. The games they played were often spinoffs on the sport motif of the past few weeks. But they always came back, rooting for the Ethiopians and rooting for the Dutch.

The Dutch woman won, edging out the last Ethiopian competitor. Literally. She elbowed Assefa out of the way with one or two hundred metres to the finish line. It was an exciting race.

We had watched Sifan win her bronze in the five-thousand. We had watched her win her bronze in the ten-thousand. She has been amazingly strong.

We have watched a lot of the Olympics, mostly gymnastics and track and field. And we did have to watch the women’s final in hockey. The Netherlands won, and we cheered.

It is just the right moment. The girls are old enough to be involved in sports now; they are innocent enough to simply enjoy the show. I have found all of it very enjoyable. I know how cynically some people approach the spectacle and the hype. Their visceral reaction to it looks like fear. I can understand: if everyone is a type of athlete, I am a marathoner. I am an introvert. The noise can be overwhelming.

When Sifan runs the marathon, she finds her own space. She has a faraway look. She talks to herself after she crosses the finish line. She looks to stifle a yawn during an awards ceremony. She pointedly says, “I don’t care” when a commentator asked her how she feels when a co-medallist is threatened with disqualification.

There is something wonderful about sport, wonderfully human. No matter how people try to politicize it, monetize it, psychoanalyse it, or make philosophy of it, something essential slips away. It defies both the impulse to glorify and the impulse to dismiss it.

Travelogue 1138 – 14 July
Flying Ant Day

Last week we experienced Flying Ant Day. The temperatures had finally risen enough to feel like summer. The air was dense with humidity. And then they appeared, the double-sized ants, crawling like stumbling drunks across the pavements of the city. They had wings, but they never used them, submitting themselves to the perils of land exploration. Behaving quite unlike our everyday ants, they spent the day in uncoordinated riot, released upon the world without direction, and scattering every which way. By mid-afternoon, most had perished under heel and tire.

Baby Jos had a hard time with all the carnage. She stepped very carefully, slowing us considerably in our errands. She cried to see the massacre, and protested when we were not mindful of the ants underfoot.

In response, as solace, as philosophy, Little Ren issued her summary and conclusion, and quite a nice aphorism, after all: “Life is nice, and sometimes you can squish life.”

I’ve been reading a lot of history. It’s an indulgence, now that I have recovered my mind from the rigours of teaching and correcting, to sit and read. I read like I have centuries of history to catch up on. The result is a sensation something like Flying Ant Day, surveying the succession of wars and the waves of slaughter. Generations divide and turn on their neighbours, needing only the slightest pretext, squishing life with all the hesitation and mindfulness of rushing pedestrians traversing a field of struggling ants.

Of course, Americans seem hellbent on joining time’s grim pageant. This morning, the news reached Europe of an assassination attempt on Trump. It’s a sad thing to wake to. Are we really such helpless little creatures? Is squishing all we’re good for?

Travelogue 1137 – 7 July
Drama

“I’ll never have fun again,” said Baby Jos with tears in her eyes. Somehow we had missed another notice from school. The next day, water guns would be allowed at school.

The days had been hot and sunny for a string of miraculous days. The school year running out, the days left running short, the teachers had decided some play outside was well-earned. But we are rubbish at checking the myriad messages from school, and Baby Jos is terrible at calendars.

We had thrown last summer’s water guns out long ago as messy clutter. Baby Jos spent a frenzied twenty minutes digging for the lost guns. Forced to give up, she declared in tears that fun had become impossible.

Of course, it was easily solved. We stopped by a supermarket in the morning, and the world was put right again. Fun had been readmitted into the world.

I hope I do not sound like a sadist if I say I am enjoying the girls’ dramas. They are such pure products of childhood. And, happily, they are often quickly remedied.

Baby Jos brought home her first friendship drama recently. Two friends had quarrelled, and one friend had declared that she was renouncing the whole group of girls. Baby Jos was the bridge between the pariah and the rest, and she was anxious to resolve the dispute. Fortunately, Baby Jos was more puzzled than hurt by the episode. By the next day, it was resolved. It made for good family discussions.

We are into real childhood now. Little Ren is younger, and her dramas are simpler. The girls recently discovered a deck of playing cards at a café, and we taught the girls a simple card game, something I used to play in my childhood, something Menna and I used to play in Ethiopia to while away the time. The girls really took to this game, and particularly Little Ren, who had a lucky streak. It wasn’t lucky enough for her: she dissolved into tears any time she did not win a hand.

I grew up the youngest in my family, and I recognised these tears. I shushed Baby Jos when she tried to shame her little sister. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a child learning how to lose.

Imagine how much more pleasant all of our lives would be if a certain orange plutocrat had learned how learned how to lose when he was a child.

If there were gods, one or many, would they find similar nostalgic pleasure in the trials of humankind? I doubt that they could if they had never been children themselves. It is the tragic flaw in our experimentation with AI, I think. We program computers to accumulate data; we even try to program them to play. (Without a sense of the frivolous, how does one define play?)

The processing in AI remains cold and merciless. Human learning is accidental, even if it follows similar patterns. Every time a kid does something we recognise, it is original. And their interaction with others colours the learning. The child’s mind absorbs it all. Critically the child’s mind absorbs it with the nuance and shading that create character.